Meanwhile, back in 1945 at the close of the War, the victorious Americans invited their new subjects to New Hampshire. In the Bretton Woods, the new boss set down the terms for two new institutions – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. All the players were there in person for this one.
This one meeting, more than any other, has set the framework for economic policy over the following 75 years – you can borrow money but there must be a fire sale of public assets to hasten privatization, and there must be public spending cuts.
We are currently only in the position of imagining how those terms might have been different if we had been allowed to participate. If even one honest person had been able to influence that meeting.
Cue thirsty Hollywood purveyors of fantasy for an easily digestible storyline…
He beat their security, and entered the Court, a nuclear suitcase wired to his pace-maker. He said “If my heart stops, yours do too. And this sound trigger will detonate the device at the decibel level of my own scream”.
The Elite gathering knew enough about the exercise of Power to fall silent and remain calm. To attempt to drive the man’s will aside would provoke noisy disturbance. Goodbye New Hampshire. Goodbye World Power Brokers. The idea was that millions of other people should die to expand empires on the usual centuries-old tradition. Other people.
A TV and a phone were brought. He said he’d slept for five years and now he’d swallowed enough amphetamines to keep him awake for 6 months. He called on the Networks to tell the Police to stand down and to tell the world’s populations to step forward, disband the Armies, occupy the TV studios, and take the world back into their own hands.
For six months he watched the TV to see the transformation, and the people came to the Bretton Woods to tell him that the world was free from the power of greed and the world shared in absolute freedom on the only condition that it did not remove the absolute freedom of others. He walked free from the Bretton Woods.
But that was only a dream, another story to make reality recede. Back in ugly, unromantic reality our Inaction Movie tells a different story – we are all still trapped in the Bretton Woods. Our future has been very different from the version won by our favourite fictional action hero.
Over the next seventy five years our nightmare of near extinction has continued to unfold. We return to hungry Hollywood, and our own insatiable appetite for fantasy as a substitute for progress, to have a look at what happens next.
At the end of the Third World War, the Chinese and the Americans exchanged nuclear catastrophes. Within two generations, the fall-out combined with new strains of rampant viruses created two new degraded human species. The Woke and the Riz fully understood the nature of power and the lessons of history. Unlike the Goths and the Vandals who sacked Rome, they did not spare the Church or any other Institution. In the Fourth World War, this time they took no prisoners. The remnants of the Institutions were rendered into the useless rubble that most suspected they had always been. In the wasteland they were finally free and remembered Haiti in 1804, the former slaves in a new world born in ruins. Toussaint Louverture walked in their dreams.
Their ancestors the Humans had considered themselves smart with their technology, but in fact they had been cowardly – afraid to face the truth of their existence. Their debased, mutated but smarter descendants finally knew their history enough to realise the power of their numbers and act all together. But they wondered what it must have been like for their ancestors to walk in human form free of suppurating nuclear sores and hazmat suits.
Free from dreams of future despair, let us take the practical step to banish the countless nightmare celluloid futures envisioned by our esteemed film directors.