Archives de Simpolitique

1) The premises of the war
A) The Falklands

Called Islas Malvinas in Spanish like " Les Iles Malouines " in French , they bared several names depending on who passed by. Small archipelago off the coast of Argentina between 51°S and 53°S upon the Patagonian shelf that is itself part of the American tectonic plaque , it endures a strong cold climate influenced by the Roaring Forties , with everlasting humidity and temperatures that never get above 20°C . Almost all of the population lives on the Eastern Side . Almost two thirds of its 2 840 inhabitants (according to a 2012 estimation) are living in its de facto capital city of Port Stanley .

Around 1760 : a settlement that lasted only 5 years, leaving a leaden plaque

continuous Spanish presence from 1767 to 1811
+ an erratic presence of Argentina from 1826 to 1833
1833 : Argentinean Commander Pinedo is evicted

B) Argentina's problems

Argentina was plunged into a deep economical crisis that plagued the Argentinean economy.
At the time it was mainly based upon resources and as such was highly dependent upon the stock exchange rates , and even more upon the USA , which were among its best allies .
Its GDP reached its highest point since 1960 in 1980, with a GDP per capita of 5312.95 $US and from there it began to fall : 4933.87 in 1981 , and 4616.41 in 1982 .
It has to be said that during those days Argentina was ruled by a military dictatorship, the perfect example of what means a JUNTA : a group of powerful generals took power in a coup d'état in March 1976 and promised a new " ideological war " to the people in order to " save Argentina " , in what has been called the National Reorganisation Process . In fact , this process was mostly the destruction of the democratic and communist opposition through torture , forced disappearances , economical discrimination and absurd policies (While the unemployment rate was of only 4,2 % in 1975, poverty grew faster during the 7 years of the junta than anytime before) with a rude censorship .
Coincidentally, one of the most powerful executioner of the junta , Jorge Oliveira , became the defense attorney of the former SS-member Erich Priebke ...


C) Margaret Thatcher's own problems

2) The war itself

2 April 1982 - Invasion
26 April 1982 - The re-capture of South Georgia
1 May 1982 - The RAF Black Buck Vulcan raids
1 May 1982 - The first fleet and daylight air actions
2 May 1982 - Movements of the Argentinian Navy from 27 April to 2 May
2 May 1982 - Air and naval actions between 2nd May and 16th May
14 May 1982 - The SAS raid on the airfield at Pebble Island
21 May 1982 - D Day - The British Task Force lands at San Carlos
28 May 1982 - Goose Green - The first major land victory
21 May to 11 June 1982 - Actions, losses and movements on land and sea
11/12 June 1982 - Two Sisters
11/12 June 1982 - Mount Longdon
11/12 June 1982 - Mount Harriet
13/14 June 1982 - Mount Tumbledown and Mount William
13/14 June 1982 - Wireless Ridge
14 June 1982 - The Surrender - The conflict ends

On 19 March , Argentina began to occupy South Georgia Islands , according to the British , when two Argentinean civilians raised Argentina's national flag on South Georgia . This act has been carried on by scrap metal merchants that incidentally, were helped in that way by Argentine marines , but it is a very strong symbol , and as such was interpreted by the British authorities as a provocation .
The Argentinean military commanders used a legal trade deal between an Argentinean businessman and a British company as a protection for an operation intended to deliberately provoking a territorial dispute that would give the opportunity for the junta to proclaim Argentina's sovereignty upon those islands . The operation worked well per se , but Argentine was forced to retreat .
The UK responded on 26 March by authorizing the HMS Superb to leave Gibraltar, followed two HMS Splendid and Spartan submarines on 29 March , with the latter two openly sailing to South Georgia .
This event has been important because it proved the capacity of the Argentinean armies to intervene far away from its territory, even further away from the Falklands . On the first of April, 1982, the supreme authority of the Falklands , the Governor Rex Hunt received a telegram from the FCO at 3:30 PM , warning him that the British military and diplomatic system has " reliable evidences " that suggest a potential Argentinean invasion and ask him to prepare the island .
Rex Hunt has taken this signal very seriously, and during the night the British soldiers took every possible precautions , under the military command of Major Mike Norman of the Royal Marines .
According to a Falklands Islander, Mrs Rachel Aspogard , quoted by the BBC : " the Falkland Islands Defense troops were in the streets and quite nervous " , on the 1st of April in the evening .
There were no mistakes : beginning at 21:30 this evening, as previewed , Argentinean troops stormed in with around six hundred soldiers and in just a night, they took control of the most important hub of the Falklands , its economical and political capital-city, Port Stanley, and in fact only around 80 soldiers actually faced a violent opposition .
On the second of April at 8:30 AM , Port Stanley was open to the Argentinean armies : the supreme military authority of the island , Governor Rex Hunt, acknowledged his defeat at 9:30 AM , followed by a last telex discussion at around 16:30 from the Falkland Islands to London which confirmed that the enemy now rules Port Stanley.
At the end of the battle , there were three casualties , all for Argentina , that also lost an helicopter and an armored vehicle . There has been one soldier wounded on the British side .

The next day, the Argentinean armies crushed the British garrison on South Georgia and thus obtained full control over the habitable islands of the Falkland's region .
Also called the battle of Grytviken , the invasion of South Georgia had cost Argentina one Puma helicopter and a soldier, the wreck of the helicopter was still there and fairly preserved in the end of the nineties .


From that point , Argentina began to occupy the islands , in spite of vigorous protestations from the United Kingdom which had the support of France and the UN Council . The Argentinean armies disarmed the British soldiers and separate them : those of the British Isles were sent back to the UK while the Falklands natives were forced to stay at home .

In spite of or thanks to, depending on the point of view, of the strong military capacities of the UK it took the British about 23 days to react militarily. During this time , the British armies organized a vast task force , the biggest in those days since WW2 , with 28 000 soldiers and more than 100 ships .
This task force embodied the spirit of the modern post-WW2 wars , putting the emphasis on the aircraft carriers and using the rapid-reaction units on the forefront . The commander in chief of this task force was John 'Sandy' Woodward , and its GHQ were on the HMS Hermes and Invincible .
The idea of the commandment comity was to isolate the Falklands through a Total Exclusion Zone that is justified by the British government with the UN Resolution 502 , and then to " strike back " as a British newspaper said , with the RAF and the ground forces embarked on the ships .
But this mean was controversial and has been highly criticized , by the Argentinean government of course but also by the USSR . Indeed , the profoundly anticommunist government of Mrs. Thatcher wasn't much surprised by this opposition , but to be persistent in that way, in order to recover these islands put the UK in a tricky situation : it was launching a war against an ally of the US .


The first concrete British action is the bombing of the Islands on 1st May. Bombers and jet fighters respectively left Ascension Island , 3 thousand miles away from the Falklands , and the two British aircraft carriers on zone to conduct a large-scale operation aimed at ravaging the grass airstrips of Goose Green , 55 miles away from Port Stanley, and a gateway to the isles for Argentina .
One Harrier of the RAF has been damaged , but the operation is a total success : it has severely damaged the bond between the Argentinean garrison in Port Stanley and mainland Argentina because it rendered impossible for Argentinean aircrafts to land there , and the Argentinean air forces lost a lot of fuel and ammunitions .


On 2 May, exactly one month after the invasion of the Falklands , the British nuclear-powered HMS Conqueror, the Argentinean cruiser General Belgrano, named after a famous figure of Argentina's history, the second largest ship of the Argentinean navy at the time .
With 368 crewmembers killed , it is responsible on itself for around a half of all the Argentinean losses during this conflict , and it was because of that and of the symbolic aspect a terrible tragedy in Argentina , a severe stroke to the morale of the Argentinean people . All the newspaper in Argentina dedicated their frontpages to the ARA Belgrano, sparkling an outburst of hatred , distillated and encouraged by the junta .

The British , on the other side , saw this of course as an encouraging sign for the future .
The tabloid newspaper The Sun entitled its frontpage : GOTCHA , in large capital letters, the next day.
Yet it was a dramatic thing , looking back 30 years later, because it may have incited the British to feel too much secured in their victory, forgetting that although there was an undeniable advantage for the UK , Argentina still had a valuable army, the controversial frontpage of the Sun illustrates this overconfidence of the British population .

It was therefore only a matter of time before the British would endure a severe loss .
Human basic behaviour naturally tends toward jealousy and retaliations in the way that when someone suffers a harsh hit , s/he has the need to externalise this pain, ideally by bringing it into the assaulter side , and gregarious behaviors only amplify tremendously this tendency, multiplying it by the number of people encompassed in the same body.
Also the Argentinean governors at the time are a junta , an authoritarian and centralizing power.
To retain control of the population, it needs it, even more than in a liberal-democratic nation, to feel safer, stronger than the enemy. In the immediate aftermath of the sinking of the ARA Belgrano the junta thus had an imperious need of a victory, that would act as a compensation in the minds of the Argentinean people .
Britain was as such in the worst position possible , it was about to get hit , in just a few hours or days.
And indeed , only two days later, at about 10 in the morning, on May the fourth 1982 , the Argentinean Super Etendard 3-A-302 strikes the HMS Sheffield with an Exocet missile , blowing away a large part of the hull . The crew will fight for six days against the damages to save the ship until the unavoidable comes true : she sank East of the Falklands, while going to South Georgia .
Because of the missile and the subsequent fight against the fire, 20 crewmembers died and 24 others were severely injured . It is responsible in itself for about 8 % of all British KIA soldiers .


On 20 May, there have been peace negotiations organized by the UN , but it failed , partly because of the intransigency of Thatcher's representing committee . Bypassing the UN Council , the British army launched an attack less than a day after, and landed at San Carlos on East Falkland .

It then took seven days to the British troops to march down to Goose Green , fifty-five miles away from Port Stanley, where the fiercest land-battle of the war took place . The Argentinean troops were of a still unknown size


To keep the operation running, the British army asked the support of 43 merchant ships totalising more than two thousand crewmembers , costing 5 Million pounds a week .
3) The aftermath of the conflict
1) the fall of the Argentinean dictatorship

For both countries this war lead to radical political changes . In Argentina , the junta faced a dramatic situation : in the end , the war had cost Argentina around 650 soldiers , killed in action and :
• 1,657 wounded
• 11,313 PoWs
________________________________________
• 1 cruiser
• 1 submarine
• 4 cargo vessels
• 2 patrol boats
• 1 spy trawler
________________________________________
• 25 helicopters
• 35 fighters
• 2 bombers
• 4 cargo aircraft
• 25 COIN aircraft
• 9 armed trainers
for a total defeat : the occupation of Port Stanley, the longest resisting Argentinean hotspot , lasted only two months ; Argentina failed to annex the archipelagoes to its territory as its armies weren't able to give enough time to a real reattachment policy ; the whole liberal-democratic sphere was against Argentina and it even infuriated the US , which were then its best and closest ally.
Alienating its best ally was a crucial mistake .
Also the symbol was disastrous for the junta : even in the military domains these generals have been unable to succeed in getting a few almost uninhabited islets to the motherland !
How could military officers who failed in a war, lead successfully a nation in all its other aspects ?
The sanction has been cut-clear : one of the general served several years in jail for " chronic incompetence " ...

2) An outburst of popularity for Thatcher

On the British side , the victory is clear, and militarily undeniable :

• 255 killed
• 775 wounded
• 115 PoWs
________________________________________
• 2 destroyers
• 2 frigates
• 1 LSL ship
• 1 LCU craft
• 1 container ship
________________________________________
• 24 helicopters
• 10 fighters
• 1 bomber (interned in Brazil)
Plus three Falkland Islanders women who died from British friendly fire .

The loss ratio between Argentina and Britain is thus of about 3 Argentinean soldiers killed for one British soldier killed .

The rapid and large victory helped Thatcher in many ways : first it proved the efficiency of the British Army, in a time of moving war codes , around forty years after WW2 . For the first and still only time since the apparition of the nuclear submarines , the UK is still the sole country to have used it in a context of war, against an armed ship of another nation's Navy. It demonstrated again , nearly two decades after the Cuban Missiles Crisis , the efficiency of a blockade system based upon the coordination between the aircraft carriers and the submarines , and thus also between the Navy and the Air Forces . Reinforcing the status of the UK as a major military power, it paved the way for its implication in the two Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003 .

On the other hand , it was a very strong political symbol : the message to Argentina was clear, that these islands were parts of the British territory and that it is non-negotiable , putting , at least into the British minds , an end to the territorial dispute for the Falklands . The British people was to rest assured of its sovereignty, no matter how far its territory is , and this war had a powerful effect on the popular morale . It inflamed British neonationalism in all its aspects , the most controversial being the frontpage of the Sun titled " Gotcha " .

Margaret Thatcher was also helped in its political destiny, by this war. First her overpresence in the medias as military leader proved that although she was the first woman ever elected to this crucial office she was not of any weakness : she remained steadfast against one of the worst military dictatorship of the world , and led the British army to a global victory. As such one could consider that if she succeeded against Argentina , she would

3) Still an unsure destiny for the Falklands

In 2016 the British people offered a short but indisputable clear-cut victory in favour of the BREXiT.

Everyone has been puzzled by this decision that seemed to go against all logic and previsions .
The polls have quite erratic for the whole campaign , which in itself, was a sign of the immense tension it brought to the nation and no one could have foreseen the final results : 52L/48R .

The apparent and somehow blatant contradiction immediately raised suspicions : something must have been left apart in the calculations to end up with such a result .
And it turned out that while a lot of people justifiably were enraged by the Leave campaign most of them didn't pay attention as much as it should have been to the craftsman of the BREXiT :

Nigel Farage , and the UK Independence Party, or as it is more often called : UKIP.

But who keeps what ? This communication shall examine the roots of the earthquake .
It will shows that :

• 1) First, UKIP wasn't as powerful and coherent as it seems now, back then , because as a political party they have their own fair share of strengths but also of flaws , caused by the structure itself of this small and aggressive political formation
  
  2) Then that it had indeed a tremendous influence in the sense that it was the party that brought this issue to the masses and to the people and will as such probably have a longlasting halo of presence into the British minds and landscapes
  
  3) While by no means was the party the only contributor to the BREXiT victory, both in terms of ideology and in terms of voters as the Conservative Party remains the true source of that victory, with the UKIP coming as the architect of this movement

1) The UK Independence Party as a political formation

The party has its roots going back far in time : it was formally founded in 1993, just three years after Margaret Thatcher left her office and just one year after the Black Wednesday.
It was formed two years earlier as a rapid and small entity to bring a program defending euro-skepticism into the 1992 general election won by the Conservative Party of John Major.
Interestingly, according to an article of the BBC in October 2014, it has not chosen the term British in order to avoid any confusion , as it can easily be in people's minds , with the British National Party, a neonazi party that was then considered by the founders of UKIP as too toxic and far-right ...

The UKIP was a single-issue party, because of a practically non-existent concrete program apart from wanting the UK to leave the union and a much more dogmatic approach to the problem than the Conservative Party which always had among its ranks a history of opposing the E.U : those wanting to express all their hatred for the E.U were able to do so into the CP, thus a lot of people didn't see the utility of a party such as UKIP, for a very long time .
Moreover, from 1997 to 2010, the CP was in the opposition , therefore not having to confront itself with the realities of effectively commanding the whole ship, and could concentrate on criticism .

However, it began to shift in 2006, when Nigel Farage , an MP since 1999, took the UKIP leadership.
We're then 4 years after the historical surge of Jean-Marie Le Pen and one year after the failed referendum on the E.U in France and Nigel Farage began to campaign as a less single-issue oriented in the sense that it started to campaign on topics that touched more the British people .
It began to address the problem of rising poverty, fears about multiculturalism in a country severely traumatised by the terrorist attacks right in the core of the capital-city, in its bus transportation network while the railways network itself suffered from the privatisation decided by John Major, but accomplished by the Labour-government ... and so on ...

And it worked : in 2009, the party won 13 seats in the European Parliament , in which it could prosper because of the proportional system that favorise it instead of the centripetal system in use in the UK that is the First Past The Post system . But the next year, in 2010, new breakthrough : although no seats were won the party secured more than 3 percents of the total popular vote and this gave a landslide victory to Nigel Farage in the subsequent internal leadership election !
The first Cameron term as Prime Minister saw the unstoppable surge of the party, increasing its share of the popular vote at each election and securing the title in 2014 of " major political party ", given to it by the Office of Communications which supervise the elections .

And this is why, in the meanwhile , the Conservative Party began to be afraid of them !
Because in order to govern , the CP had to form a coalition with the Liberal-Democrats , which helped to consolidate an economically neoliberal agenda which was the priority of the Tories but forced them to push their social stances a bit more on the left , comically missing the point that the British people was making in those days with increasing right-wing stances on Europe , migration and society.
So who rushed to the scene to occupy the place on the right-wing of the political spectrum that they have left empty in order to concentrate on the economy ? The UK Independence Party, which much like the Tories a few years before don't have to care about the consequences of what they're saying since they are not in charge of the country.


And this brings us to the flaws of this party. Paradoxically, its best option is also its worst : its very own leader, to begin with, who's noted for his very abrasive and "foxy" personality.
Nigel Farage has been temporarily out of the leadership from August 2009 to 2010, and there have always been behind the façade of a unanimous agreement about the program a staunch fight between the leaders of the UKIP, and particularly around himself, because he's someone who's extremely divisive in the sense that it's impossible to have a quiet argument about him : you either hate or adore him without any place for common sense and calm , much in the way of Margaret Thatcher.

2) UKIP and The bipolar campaign of the Leave

Therefore , his divise personality and rhetoric proved to be toxic , a kind of a poisoned gift , for the rest of the Leave campaign which in the light of unfavourable polls at first tried desperately to affirm that the Leave campaign as a whole was not the UKIP, with mitigated results .
It has rapidly been necessary to split the campaign in two groups :

• - UKIP's Leave.EU, which organized a super-agressive grassroots campaign, speaking directly to the rural and impoverished voters like it has done for the past years with undisputable success, but then shifting even further into blatant propaganda based on lies and emotions , carpet-bombing the territory and the Internet with shocking and efficient visual promises about immigration and corruption
  
  - And all the rest of the British political landscape which was favourable to the Leave option chose to campaign with the Vote Leave association , somehow a bit " hors-sol ", appealing more to facts although with its fair share of blatant lies , and to the urban , petit-bourgeois voters in parallel of the most powerful economical and political networks

The paradox was that this division might have been what helped the Leave to win , but also not to get THAT many voices by preventing it from being overwhelming and thus just barely crossing the line of majority, in the end which somehow gives reason to Nigel Farage , who was the first one in favor of a complementary duo inside the Leave campaign : in admitting this he may have saved his own cause even though he hoped the two associations would merge .
It all ended in a marriage of reason which was explicitly denied to be one by one side while vividly wanted by the other, while overall saving both parties against their wishes ...
This quasi-schizophrenic state of affairs probably inspired the quip of Carnswell , the only UKIP MP !
Saying " UKIP would do to the Eurosceptic cause what kryptonite did to Superman ”...

It's thus no wonder that the association which obtained in April 2016 the rights to public funding and airtime was the second one because it could have mean , if the two were to merge , that the scaremongering tactics of the UKIP brand would be broadcasted everywhere on behalf of the whole campaign including the Labour and Conservative members which was absolutely out of question .

The UK Independence Party and its armed hand in this referendum led an amazingly aggressive campaign in this race since it felt (with reason) that this kind of opportunity will probably not pass by until a very long time since it relied only on the incomprehensible incoherence of David Cameron in his most bizarre tactical moves : no one would probably make the mistake again , and thus there was an imperative of winning this referendum no matter what would be necessary.
It hadn't stepped back against any mean , scandal or provocation = everything in the news has been turned into an additional argument for its campaign :

• - The negotiations with Turkey, on its potential future membership in the EU, while no one else said it was under scrutiny, and on the contrary everyone in the EU insisted it definitely wasn't.
  - The brutal series of rapes in Köln on the New Year's Eve, implicitly relaying vulgar, lewd and racist comments about black and/or Muslim men
  - The egregious terrorist attack of Orlando, publishing a poster about it LESS than 2 DAYS !
  After the attack while many things were still unknown and/or blurry, and the bodies of the victims were still warm and while this affair has even less to do with the migrants since the murderer was himself born in the United States
  - A poster showing migrants with the title "Breaking Point", while obviously dismissing the horror that it proved to be very reminiscent of Nazi propaganda posters , just one week before the vote
  - Even using the murder, in the street and in broad light , of an innocent Labour MP, while it was the first time in decades that an MP was murdered , who happened to be working to help the migrants and got killed by a man shouting UKIP's own slogans !

Yet the Conservative Party, and the Vote Leave association soon were forced to confront reality.
This aggressive campaign , in a country ripped apart by the everlasting effects of the Great Recession and the ghost of July 2005 waken up again by the terrorist attacks in France and Germany, works .
It works because the UKIP and Leave.EU persuaded the British people that both the cause of this current nightmare and the future menace were coming from the outside : and who, in principle, comes indeed from the outside ? The migrants . What is the main religion of these people ? Islam .
The same ideology, according to the far-right , than the one flagshiped by the local terrorists who committed the mass murders of London and Paris . The only solution being therefore to cut the UK away from the rest of the world and that begins with the E.U which they say prevents it from exercising the " control ", deared by Nigel Farage and subsequently Boris Johnson , over its borders while it is evident that it's the absolute opposite since it's precisely the E.U that allowed the UK to be the most restrictive country ever onto its borders among all the members of the Union .
It works because it relies on the primary instincts and logic of any human mind that even a fifth grader could work it out himself, thus enabling the UKIP's propaganda to reach any and every - body.

It works so well that even though the Remain camp stays ahead in the polls for a long time, into the progression of the Leave camp it soon becomes clear that it's Leave.EU that is conquering the minds of the voters on the ground and not the Vote Leave !
Considering it was the outcome of the referendum that was the most important thing and seeing the polls that it was at risk of fading away, the Vote Leave chose to renounce to its spiritual integrity and to incorporate into its speech the themes driving the Leave.EU campaign in an urgent move and tentative to grab back the votes of those who would adhere to its principles but wouldn't vote for it because of the presence of Nigel Farage in it : and this is where Boris Johnson made himself unavoidable in the sense that it gave credibility, and honorability, to a movement otherwise seen as toxic from the base to the top. When taking the same slogan , practically campaigning in coherence it somehow gives "cachet" to the UKIP, and the circumvolutions of David Cameron when refusing to debate with Boris Johnson don't hide and rather highlight the spiritual collusion between the most right-wing aisle of the CP and the UKIP.

Therefore , the eventual success in the ballot of the Leave camp was not because of UKIP's involvement but because the mainstream conservatives and eurosceptics in general both made its ideas the flagship and pushed away the person of Nigel Farage .
The UK Independence Party, and Leave.EU, somehow successfully made themselves unavoidable in making themselves must-be-avoided , because it had put themselves in the position of a resistant against all elites including those of the Leave camp itself, typically confirming what has been their argument since the creation of the movement like all other populist parties .

3) The links between both electorates

The night between Thursday and Friday has truly been chaotic and full of surprises .
A consensus was absolute among the pollsters : that nothing was certain ... Yet it was true that there seemed to be after the death of Joe Cox an apparent momentum in favour of the Remain , even more after this murder helped things and people to calm down and realise the sheer horror of the Leave.EU campaign but unfortunately it may be said , à posteriori , that there was a substrate of and for an even more powerful momentum in favour of the BREXiT since the result was short but clear.

The first results were positive : the Remain soon won a small and easy but symbolic victory, with the results in the small territory of Gibraltar, which voted overwhelmingly, about 96 % in its favour.
The leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage even made a first acceptance speech by 11 PM in which he acknowledged his defeat and the victory of the Remain . It's difficult to say what exactly crossed his mind but he is in no way a stupid man : he's on the contrary someone who's highly intelligent and perfectly knows how to play with the medias ! Therefore we can suppose that if he made that speech it must be because by 11 PM , the results were strongly suggesting a clear-cut victory in favour of the Remain and yet , as the hours passed by, hope started to shift camp !
And the revelation of the final results came at around 7:20 AM =

• Leave : 17,410,742 = 51.89%
  Remain : 16,141,241 = 48.11%
  Valid votes : 33,551,983 = 99.92%
  Invalid/blank votes : 25,359 = 0.08%
  Total votes : 33,577,342 = 100.00%
  Turnout : 46,500,001 = 72.21%

So when looking at the results , one may think that UKIP has been a decisive asset for the Leave !
Well , not really. In fact , when looking at a poll made by Lord Ashcroft describing the composition of the Leave electorate it is quite clear that it reflects fairly well the global population of the UK with three large groups which are the Conservatives with a huge minority and a large margin followed by the UKIP that makes up a quarter of the electorate and the Labour, with a fifth of it and fourth bloc made of the rest of the small political parties of the United Kingdom . However, it is true that there is an amazing twist between the share of UKIP in the Parliament where it has only one MP, and its share among the Leave voters suggesting a much larger influence than what can be seen first-hand .

Meanwhile , other polls all make the same portrait of the average Brexit voter :
A rural and impoverished uneducated man in his fifties living in an overwhelmingly white area .
Unsurprisingly, quite the same target of the UKIP own campaign in the general election .

Moreover, the nationality of the voter, in its local sense , seemed to have been decisive .
A poll made by the same agency reveals that the more the voter feels English rather than British the more s/he was susceptible to vote in favour of the Leave which correlates the already well established fact that the average UKIP voter in general and local elections is predominantly English .

Conclusion

It can thus be said that in the end , the UKIP truly has been decisive and is the final architect of this victory but still is not a majority, and certainly could not be the only one .
A BREXiT without the UKIP would be as certain to fail as a BREXiT only with it .
The future is going to be dark for a long time for the British people : it now has to deal with a rising open far-right , inflation to come following the already done brutal devaluation of the British Pound .
Moreover, even supposing that Scotland and Northern Irland won't dare to reach the end of the logic with a full independance and an anschluss with Eire , there will nonetheless be strong and latent resistance from those two nations and they certainly are going to negociate to keep some special rights and links with the E.U, thus complicating even more the UK-EU separation .
Theresa May, without saying she will need to wear the UKIP mask and boots , will seriously need to steel her own heart because the decade to come will be harsh , that's for sure .

Analysis

I chose this communication for many reasons , the main one is that it was made by a teacher that I know personnally which helped me to identify myself to the speaker. Knowing her patterns of speech and the grounds of her work helped me to be receptive to the message spoken in itself, in being already prepared to it since I've been knowing her for two years .
I also chose it because it was on the subject of the far-right , which is a topic I know well also .
I've been studying right-wing groups from all other the world , from the uyoku dantai in Japan to the white supremacists of the AWB in South Africa and of the Klan in the USA so I already knew what was the matter in this conference and in this speech in particular.
Finally, I think that this presentation adopts a chrono-logical path that is easier to follow and to adapt into a coherent synthesis because it is simple and intuitive .

[center]JudY BradY[/center]

[quote]I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A Wife. And, not altogether incidentally, I am a mother.
Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from a recent divorce.
He had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife.
He is looking for another wife.
As I thought about him while I was ironing one evening, it suddenly occurred to me that I, too, would like to have a wife.
Why do I want a wife?
I would like to go back to school so that I can become economically independent, support myself, and, if need be, support those dependent upon me. I want a wife who will work and 8 send me to school. And while I am going to school I want a wife to take care of my children.
I want a wife to keep track of the children’s doctor and dentist appointments. And to keep track of mine, too. I want a wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. I want a wife who will wash the children’s clothes and keep them mended. I want a wife who is a good nurturing attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling, makes sure that they have an adequate social life with their peers, takes them to the park, the zoo, etc. I want a wife who takes care of the children when they are sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the children need special care, because, of course, I cannot miss classes at school. My wife must arrange to lose time at work and not lose the job. It may mean a small cut in my wife’s income from time to time, but I guess I can tolerate that. Needless to say, my wife will arrange and pay for the care of the children while my wife is working. I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife who will keep my house clean. A wife who will pick up after my children, a wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it. I want a wife who cooks the meals, a wife who is a good cook. I want a wife who will plan the menus, do the necessary grocery shopping, prepare the meals, serve them pleasantly, and then do the cleaning up while I do my studying. I want a wife who will care for me when I am sick and sympathize with my pain and loss of time from school.
I want a wife to go along when our family takes a vacation so that someone can continue to care for me and my children when I need a rest and change of scene.
I want a wife who will not bother me with rambling complaints about a wife’s duties.
But I want a wife who will listen to me when I feel the need to explain a rather difficult point I have come across in my course of studies.
And I want a wife who will type my papers for me when I have written them.
I want a wife who will take care of the details of my social life. When my wife and I are invited out by my friends, I want a wife who will take care of the babysitting arrangements. When I meet people at school that I like and want to entertain, I want a wife who will have the house clean, will prepare a special meal, serve it to me and my friends, and not interrupt when I talk about things that interest me and my friends. I want a wife who will have arranged that the children are fed and ready for bed before my guests arrive so that the children do not bother us. I want a wife who takes care of the needs of my guests so that they feel comfortable, who makes sure that they have an ashtray, that they are passed the hors-d’oeuvres, that they are offered a second helping of the food, that their wine glasses are replenished when necessary, that their coffee is served to them as they like it.
And I want a wife who knows that sometimes I need a night out by myself.
I want a wife who is sensitive to my sexual needs, a wife who makes love passionately and eagerly when I feel like it, a wife who makes sure that I am satisfied. And, of course, I want a wife who will not demand sexual attention when I am not in the mood for it. I want a wife who assumes the complete responsibility for birth control, because I do not want more children. I want a wife who will remain sexually faithful to me so that I do not have to clutter up my intellectual life with jealousies. And I want a wife who understands that my sexual needs may entail more than strict adherence to monogamy. I must, after all, be able to relate to people as fully as possible.
If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wife I already have, I want the liberty to replace my present wife with another one. Naturally, I will expect a fresh new life; my wife will take the children and be solely responsible for them so that I am left free.
When I am through with school and have a job, I want my wife to quit working and remain at home so that my wife can more fully and completely take care of a wife’s duties.[/quote]


In this essay, Brady is embracing feminism and tackles the inequalities between men and women in society in general and in a couple in particular.


The bulk of the whole paper is an avalanche of short and simple sentences about what she wants and why, from line 8, where the word want occurs for the first time apart from the main question all the way down to the end and into the repetition of the conclusion .
As such its driving force is in sheer numbers : the word want is repeated 33 times into the whole article and mainly into the growing ascension from the main question to the conclusion which comes as a confirming repetition of it .
The subtlety comes from the fact that at no point does the author states she wants to be the husband while accumulating its desires : she only describes the logical progression from one point to another, and in the meanwhile she describes the birth and death of a relationship.


Its birth is that she wants to go to school to be economically independent ; read : she's not .
Economical independence mostly means to earn enough money to make a living and most of the workforce including women are not self-employed or business owners . Therefore they mainly rely on an average and regular pay, given to them by the owner of the said business .
In 1980, according to the Federal Census Bureau, women's median yearly earnings relative to men's were of 60,2 % , thus resulting in the fact that women were on average poorer than men regarding only their pays in spite of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, passed 8 years before . Since this particular essay dates back to 1971 , it is probable that the situation back then was no better, and most probably worse if one consider that this parameter is among those who only improved throughout the ages .
Therefore the author was indeed probably poorer than most men, and we might assume she was falling under the category of economical dependence .
But this is what is precisely lacking into the workpiece : there are no figures , no graphs nor raw data to prove her point : I found it retroactively, and it happens to be plausible but how can someone who does not live in her times , place , life and has no other source than her can know that ? The author must therefore be considered as such : potentially unreliable unless proven otherwise .
Moreover, she doesn't use any kind of Ethos : the only other person mentioned into the whole text is a man who the narrator say he's her friend and divorced .
We have nothing more about his identity and is not mentioned afterward .
It can thus be said that it difficultly stands as anything apart from being the trigger of her reflexion and certainly not as an Ethos argument since we don't even know his job, and even less his morality...
While the last sentence of the text begins with the phrase " My God ", it should not be counted as an Ethos argument since there is no further mention of it and per se seems more like an emphasis than like any kind of religious fiber.

Therefore the whole text relies solely on Pathos : the emotional appeal it has to the reader.
And here comes back the accumulation that we have mentioned earlier, what I am personally calling " the bulldozer effect ". The idea that this accumulation works like a wheel into the sand : the more you pass onto the same line the deeper it gets and the more likely it is to become the only route : it then becomes tradition and tradition becomes the law.
By repeating the word " want " over and over again , it is somehow conforting the idea that this desire has always been there , that it is unavoidable , that even more than something wanted it is something needed and here is the trick : since it is an unavoidable need you have to fulfill it , expressed in the transition from the words " would like " on line 7 to the word " want " on the line afterward : the first was a supposition , the second is reality.
And from here , upon this base , unfurls the whole text : it became the only reality there is .
Since it is the only reality there is , the want is a need that is a have : she has it naturally.


Yet there is a flaw in the whole thing : it needs the reader to assume it is the natural order.
A stable relationship like the one described in the text almost always begin with sexual needs , upon which comes a balance of powers according to which the persons choose or not to engage in the said relationship, after assessing its prices and benefits in some form of a tacit bargaining process .
Marriage , which describes the partners as husband and wife , is only the legalised and "real" materialisation of this bargaining process .
But here comes the strength of the text : on the contrary, in the argumentation , Judy Brady takes the exact opposite : The sexual needs are only tackled in the second half of the text, far after much more important social functions ! It is thus reasonable for the unaware reader to assume it takes place after marriage when both partners are defined , while she clearly said at the beginning of the whole text she was a woman and thus unmistakably a woman .
The whole function of this argumentation is here : to make you forget it altogether.
She is substituting the common reality with her own, she is shifting subrepticely from the wife viewpoint to the husband one so that by the time the reader finished the text any woman who's now in the husband reality can see the women's as a whole .
The reality of any individual is a bubble : you cannot see it as a whole if you're in it since it completely surrounds you like an echo chamber.
With this text any woman can see her "own" bubble , and comes to the constatation that she has 33 functions while several rights are explicitly outright denied to her, as protective warrants (yes/no but...) for the argumentation of the narrator, in a way that could bring the suggestion that they are all denied = it is exactly the definition of slavery.

In the next segment I shall present you I will blow up a speech of Donald Trump, made on the campaign trail and show you the fundamental inconsistency that perspire throughout it .
Donald Trump is emblematic of the problem of populism in the sense that it's unfiltered : it certainly isn't politically correct but it isn't realistic neither, and here are his flaws = a total denial of the truth .
Normally, when you're running for the POTUS, you should be held accountable to the highest standard of truth and feasibility. Strangely Donald Trump isn't !
He is solely relying on pathos , not on ethos since he doesn't want to be associated with anyone from the Establishment he condemns nor on logos since most of his data are erroneous .
A careful analysis of any of his speech can demonstrate that his speeches are only strong in the sense that they call the emotions of the listener, and not because of a philosophically solid structure .
It is therefore easy to deconstruct as soon as the basis of his discourse : fear, is debunked .

1) The UK Independence Party as a political formation

According to two authors the movement of Euroscepticism is divided into two main branches :
a hard one and a soft one , and while both of them tend to rely on self-centered arguments to criticise the European Project of a union , the distinction between the two is that the first that is sometimes called "Europhobic" makes a cornerstone of its manifesto to reject any body and anybody trying to supersede the national level while the second which is sometimes branded as "Euroscepticism" in its original meaning, would tend toward a critic of the institutions and of the policies of the EU, and not of the idea itself of a federation .

This contestation of a superior and foreign power always existed , from the beginning of the EEC before the EU, with the poujadist movement in France that flourished in the early days of the EEC : he was among the first to criticise the European Defense Community, the French National Assembly and to theorise a global fight between the "ordinary", "small", "defenseless" people and the entities that push toward centralisation , globalisation through exterior taxes and norms , citing Wall Street in the fifties and he even set the tone for future populist movements : if you want to change the system you must infiltrate it . That's why he presented a list to the first direct European elections !
He has been quoted by several newspapers as strikingly similar to Margaret Thatcher, and also but most of all : Nigel Farage , who from 2005 onward led a small single-issue party : UKIP.

The party has its roots going far back in time : it was formally founded in 1993, just three years after Margaret Thatcher left her office and just one year after the Black Wednesday, by dissidents of another political formation that was formed two years earlier by an economist as a rapid and small entity to bring a program defending euroskepticism into the 1992 general election won by the Conservative Party of John Major.

Interestingly, according to an article of the BBC in October 2014, it has not chosen the term British in order to avoid any confusion , as it can easily be in people's minds , with the British National Party, a neonazi party that was then considered by the founders of UKIP as too toxic and far-right ...

The UKIP was a single-issue party, because of a practically non-existent concrete program apart from wanting the UK to leave the union and a much more dogmatic approach to the problem than the Conservative Party which always had among its ranks a history of opposing the E.U : those wanting to express all their hatred for the E.U were able to do so into the CP, thus a lot of people didn't see the utility of a party such as UKIP, for a very long time .

And since from 1997 to 2010, the CP was in the opposition , therefore not having to confront itself with the realities of effectively commanding the whole ship, it could concentrate on criticism against the Labor Party, "sucking" the airtime and the political space of UKIP, and because both the Conservatives and UKIP have originally a strikingly similar platform for almost everything apart from the European topic it was much more difficult to capitalise on the "paper-thin" theory...

In fact , UKIP has been faced with a dilemma : if it wanted to "stay true" to its original purpose which was to get Britain to leave the European Union, it had to grab more votes, thus addressing the British people with issues and a discourse that both interest them and that no one bears in the current political spectrum , but by doing so it has to both polish its image and change its platform .



This was what the new leader, Nigel Farage , had to deal with after his election to the head of the party in 2006.
We're then 4 years after the historical surge of Jean-Marie Le Pen who was a staunch admirer of Pierre Poujade and one year after the failure (for the first time !) of a referendum on the E.U Constitution in France which was then circumvallated by the French government , three days before another rejection in the Netherlands .

But the UKIP of 2006 had something that the Anti-Federalist League of 1991 had not : the new world order, the new Labour, and the theory of Samuel Huntington called "The Clash of Civilisations", which was published in 1996 in his eponymous book . All three are necessary for the transformation of the party, and its understanding.

In 2006, the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore , therefore limiting, at least in surface , the classical argument of the red pulp, while the US-aligned bloc still exist : the world will thus not so much be defined in terms of ideology, but in terms of culture . And according to this theory, the two leading cultural spheres are the Western one and the Islamic one , engaged in a competition : the two are consequently sentenced to clash . Plus his theory concord with the fact that when his map of the cultural spheres and the map of the conflicts are superposed it stands out that the war zones are the interfaces between the blocs ...

But Nigel Farage , in choir with all right-wing populist movements in Europe , condemns the EU as the maker of "deborderisation", advancing the "borderline" from the Mediterranean Sea to Calais : if the United Kingdom wants to "secure" its lifestyle it henceforth needs to withdraw from the EU, in order to be able to impose its own rule on the British borders .

Hence the key role that the Labour Party played in this partition : it traditionally was the party of the workers and the lowlands and was traditionally Eurosceptic, but not really Europhobic.

It allowed those who feared the EU, but from a worker's point of view, to have a voice , to be heard.

Tony Blair, with its "New Labour", dislocated the usual lines by engaging the party simultaneously in favor, both in acts and paroles , of the European Project and the (upper-)middle class : suddenly, the ones who in 1991 could vote both for the party defending the poorest and Euroscepticism were left alone in the dark without anyone to rely on . This anger grew, throughout the following decades and exploded after the crisis of 2008 blew the whole thing up, marking the surge of UKIP.

Nigel Farage began to campaign as a less single-issue oriented in the sense that it started to campaign on topics that touched more the British people .

It began to address the problem of rising poverty, fears about multiculturalism in a country severely traumatised by the terrorist attacks right in the core of the capital-city, in its bus transportation network while the railways network itself suffered from the privatisation decided by John Major, but accomplished by the Labour-government ... and so on ...


And it worked : in 2009, the party won 13 seats in the European Parliament , in which it could prosper because of the proportional system that favorise it instead of the centripetal system in use in the UK that is the First Past The Post system . But the next year, in 2010, new breakthrough : although no seats were won the party secured more than 3 percents of the total popular vote and this gave a landslide victory to Nigel Farage in the subsequent internal leadership election !
The first Cameron term as Prime Minister saw the unstoppable surge of the party, increasing its share of the popular vote at each election and securing the title in 2014 of " major political party ", given to it by the Office of Communications which supervise the elections .

And this is why, in the meanwhile , the Conservative Party began to be afraid of them !
Because in order to govern , the CP had to form a coalition with the Liberal-Democrats , which helped to consolidate an economically neoliberal agenda which was the priority of the Tories but forced them to push their social stances a bit more on the left , comically missing the point that the British people was making in those days with increasing right-wing stances on Europe , migration and society.
So who rushed to the scene to occupy the place on the right-wing of the political spectrum that they have left empty in order to concentrate on the economy ? The UK Independence Party, which much like the Tories a few years before don't have to care about the consequences of what they're saying since they are not in charge of the country.


And this brings us to the flaws of this party. Paradoxically, its best option is also its worst : its very own leader, to begin with, who's noted for his very abrasive and "foxy" personality.
Nigel Farage has been temporarily out of the leadership from August 2009 to 2010, and there have always been behind the façade of a unanimous agreement about the program a staunch fight between the leaders of the UKIP, and particularly around himself, because he's someone who's extremely divisive in the sense that it's impossible to have a quiet argument about him : you either hate or adore him without any place for common sense and calm , much in the way of Margaret Thatcher.

For the sake of this presentation I have chosen to make an analysis of the movie The Wall, which was published in France on Bastille Day, in 1982 but more precisely, the penultimate song of the movie that is called The Trial which has been written by Roger Waters and Bob Ezrin and produced by them with James Guthrie and David Gilmour.

The song is like most of Pink Floyd's song : highly unusual . It has no refrain but rather a desperate mantra that only comes in the end and unlike most of the movie it has no live-action sequences arranged with it but rather a completely deranged sequence of animation made by Gerald Scarfe who later contributed to the movie Hercules in 1997.

Still it can be divided into several parts and subparts :
1) The Justice
A) The Prosecutor
B) The Judge
C) The crowd ?
2) The testimonies
A) The schoolmaster
B) His wife
C) His mother
3) The defense



The first person to which we are introduced is indeed the Prosecutor, who will conduct the act of accusation against the protagonist who's in the position of the defendant .
He's not blatantly masculine even though he's voiced by Roger Waters , who is in fact also voicing the whole cast , because of several subtleties : first he has very large hips with a very round almost spherical belly, while he has very long and thin legs with stiletto heels shoes to his/her ? feet .
And secondly, he's wearing make-up on his face ! Some may object that it is happening in public on a scene under heavy stage lightning instruments so it would be normal for him to wear lipstick in order to be more visible on the stage : Many actors in those conditions do wear make-up in order to appear more presentable and I even have done it myself, a few years ago, but that doesn't justify such a heavy make-up in the video clip !
All of this contribute to make him an absolutely grotesque character, as much as this word can still apply to the world of the clip where it is everywhere in many ways , but anyway...
He is in fact probably more a master of ceremony, rather than a "real" Prosecutor, which is left even more in doubt since he refers in his introduction to the Judge to the Crown in a way that leaves it open to debate the question to know whether or not he's referring to himself.
Moreover, still in that same part , I never been able to distinguish the exact word in this line .
The word sounds halfway between "Crown" and "Crowd", which are only one letter apart !
And even the sound itself, is rather close since in both case it stops the flow of coming out air.
I cannot say it really is "Crowd", because the show is namely localised in Britain which supports the idea of the "Crown" as being the Queen of England in its form of a judicial entity, and in every source for the lyrics I have found it is always written as "the Crown". But at least it makes an interesting thing to say, and that could open the field of possible interpretations ...
And even then , at least if it is the Crown it is clear : all of this cruelty is done for an unfair woman !


Meanwhile we are being confronted to a judge who's the polar opposite of what a real judge should be to begin with because at first he's not even human ! It's even confirmed by all three witnesses and the prosecutor who call him "Worm Your Honor"... And then he's totally biased in favor of the accusation and he even allows a witness to come to him and ask for a favor, which is to be allowed to leave her ex-wife with him five minutes which would effectively come as a death sentence .
We don't see nor hear him refusing , but just the fact he allows her to come by his side shows both how much of a tragic farce this trial is and how partial and fictional the judge is .









And then they are of course the witnesses that the Prosecutor is calling : Two of them are in fact women which is why I will demonstrate that they all had a negative influence on the defendant .
The first the only male of the three : the schoolmaster. His position is rather revealing, because as the scientific studies on memory have proved , since he's shown in the beginning, he will be the first to be forgotten and the last thing the jury and the judge will hear would be testimonies of women .
He therefore is treated as minimal by the justice system . Even his testimony isn't credible :
Throughout the process he is shown as puppet . He is like this right from the beginning, when he's dropped on the stage as a puppet in the hands of a woman who's pulling the strings from the above . Even these strings are blatantly visible for the audience ! It is thus openly admitted which reinforces my initial point about the credibility of this whole trial .

For the sake of this presentation I have chosen to make an analysis of the movie The Wall, which was published in France on Bastille Day, in 1982 but more precisely, the penultimate song of the movie that is called The Trial which has been written by Roger Waters and Bob Ezrin and produced by them with James Guthrie and David Gilmour.

The song is like most of Pink Floyd's song : highly unusual . It has no refrain but rather a desperate mantra that only comes in the end and unlike most of the movie it has no live-action sequences arranged with it but rather a completely deranged sequence of animation made by Gerald Scarfe who later contributed to the movie Hercules in 1997.

Still it can be divided into several parts and subparts :
1) The Justice
A) The Prosecutor
B) The Judge
C) The crowd ?
2) The testimonies
A) The schoolmaster
B) His wife
C) His mother
3) The defense



The first person to which we are introduced is indeed the Prosecutor, who will conduct the act of accusation against the protagonist who's in the position of the defendant .
He's not blatantly masculine even though he's voiced by Roger Waters , who is in fact also voicing the whole cast , because of several subtleties : first he has very large hips with a very round almost spherical belly, while he has very long and thin legs with stiletto heels shoes to his/her ? feet .
And secondly, he's wearing make-up on his face ! Some may object that it is happening in public on a scene under heavy stage lightning instruments so it would be normal for him to wear lipstick in order to be more visible on the stage : Many actors in those conditions do wear make-up in order to appear more presentable and I even have done it myself, a few years ago, but that doesn't justify such a heavy make-up in the video clip !
All of this contribute to make him an absolutely grotesque character, as much as this word can still apply to the world of the clip where it is everywhere in many ways , but anyway...
He is in fact probably more a master of ceremony, rather than a "real" Prosecutor, which is left even more in doubt since he refers in his introduction to the Judge to the Crown in a way that leaves it open to debate the question to know whether or not he's referring to himself.
Moreover, still in that same part , I never been able to distinguish the exact word in this line .
The word sounds halfway between "Crown" and "Crowd", which are only one letter apart !
And even the sound itself, is rather close since in both case it stops the flow of coming out air.
I cannot say it really is "Crowd", because the show is namely localised in Britain which supports the idea of the "Crown" as being the Queen of England in its form of a judicial entity, and in every source for the lyrics I have found it is always written as "the Crown". But at least it makes an interesting thing to say, and that could open the field of possible interpretations ...
And even then , at least if it is the Crown it is clear : all of this cruelty is done for an unfair woman !


Meanwhile we are being confronted to a judge who's the polar opposite of what a real judge should be to begin with because at first he's not even human ! It's even confirmed by all three witnesses and the prosecutor who call him "Worm Your Honor"... And then he's totally biased in favor of the accusation and he even allows a witness to come to him and ask for a favor, which is to be allowed to leave her ex-wife with him five minutes which would effectively come as a death sentence .
We don't see nor hear him refusing , but just the fact he allows her to come by his side shows both how much of a tragic farce this trial is and how partial and fictional the judge is .
When the deposition of all testimonies is complete the judge suddenly grows out of the tip of the worm into a human behind of which we can see the buttocks and the testicles but strangely no penis while the anus serves as the mouth : he's literally talking shit , he's puking from his asshole .
The fact he has no penis but has his anus constantly wide open since it's his mouth which by the way has lipstick on it is part of the total nonsense that this whole sequence is and reinforces the idea of the "unmasculinity" of the Judge .








And then they are of course the witnesses that the Prosecutor is calling : Two of them are in fact women which is why I will demonstrate that they all had a negative influence on the defendant .
The first the only male of the three : the schoolmaster. His position is rather revealing, because as the scientific studies on memory have proved , since he's shown in the beginning, he will be the first to be forgotten and the last thing the jury and the judge will hear would be testimonies of women .
He therefore is treated as minimal by the justice system . Even his testimony isn't credible :
Throughout the process he is shown as puppet . He is like this right from the beginning, when he's dropped on the stage as a puppet in the hands of a woman who's pulling the strings from the above . Even these strings are blatantly visible for the audience ! It is thus openly admitted which reinforces my initial point about the credibility of this whole trial .
His rant is also ridiculous and shows how disconnected he is from reality. He says he always knew it will badly end but still he claims he had no ways in it !
Also when he says the line : " I could have flayed him into shape " he is seen as a hammer who's looking at how things are going when he pushes children into




After the teacher comes the vilest of all three witnesses : the ex-wife of the protagonist .
Unlike his mother, and much like his teacher, she offers no remorse whatsoever, for what she's done and immediately harass him under degrading derogatory terms : you little shit .
She hopes "they will throw away the key", making it clear she wants him to be jailed for life :
It stands for her possessive personality, in which she would prefer to see him like this rather than going to see other women which is blatantly what she reproaches to him since she says later on :
" You should have talked to me more often than you did ". Here she's typically casting herself in a very stereotypical feminine role which is to counsel men to reassure them because if he should have done so then it means she should listen to him that is to say that this role for women as a confident is somehow a duty for her, and women in general . She's therefore not contradicting the patriarchal system at all but on the contrary, she willfully assume this traditional function !

Her representation as a monstrous hybrid between a scorpion and a mantis is also tale telling :
The mantis is an insect which is mostly known for the fact that the female is eating alive her male partner, immediately after copulation , in about a third of the cases in Nature and even more often in captivity, and this behaviour has become a symbol in our Western culture of the stereotypical violent acts displayed by women who in our legalist tradition are not thought to be able of outright murder.
There has long been a common thought that women can only do "crimes of passion", because since they are fragile and nonviolent entities per definition the rare occasions on which they kill can only be short , passionate moments where they must have been with a very valid reason to display such an aggressive and womanly deviant behaviour.

Also the scorpion is a very powerful representation . It is a very sturdy, resilient and subtle insect of which the most famous characteristic is its stinger, and any and all scorpions possess venom even though only 25 species are known to have venoms powerful enough to kill humans .
The analogy between this biological system and human masculine sexuality is obvious :
the stinger could symbolize the human penis (the incarnation in reality of the phallic power) while the venom may symbolize the sperm rushing out of it . Interestingly, the human sperm is known to be carrying sexual diseases so in a way, it literally can be a venom ... But the venom it suggests might also be the influence of the wife onto the protagonist and most notably her speech : it is well known that "words can kill", and anti-Semitic speeches for example have been said to be toxic and a form of venom that spread through the body of society.
In her rant she criticize his very independence of thinking : "You had to go your own way" = she doesn't even recognize he could have the ability to decide for himself.
And then she berates in a personal digression asking him "Have you broken any homes up lately?".
She identify him as a womanizer, and brand him guilty of felonies he might not even have done at all to begin with and somehow, it tells him that without her, he's a criminal : he thus needs her to protect him from himself, from doing wrong unto other people .
All in all , for her, he really is just a ball of textiles : he goes from a cotton puppet to a bloody piece of fur, without ever expressing any emotion and not even defending himself, since the testimony of his wife glides into the one of his mother.


But probably the most crushing character, the most dangerous , is his mother herself.
Her testimony is an unbearable complaint against her own son which shows she's not showing any compassion toward him right from the beginning : for her, he's just a baby, of which the definition is that it's an incomplete human entity, unable to decide nor to do anything itself, for itself, and therefore need the full attention of an adult to make every decision , someone whom the baby needs for its very own survival . In this idea that he's nothing without a woman it joins the testimony of his wife and it is thus no wonder, that the two women among the witnesses to the trial are joined in a single uninterrupted block ...

Related to the analysis I've done of the videoclip and lyrics of the song The Trial, written by the bassist and lyricist of the group Roger Waters and Bob Ezrin , coproduced by both of them with help from David Gilmour and James Guthrie , I have decided to make another distinct masculinist analysis of another song from the same album and videoclip taken from the same film , to try and see the logical links between the two of them .

To do this I shall work chronologically, so I will begin with the song Mother.
From its music to the lyrics it is the full creation of the bassist and lyricist Roger Waters .
It has been published by Pink Floyd Music Publishers Ltd for Harvest and Columbia in late November and early December 1979, in the UK then in the US, respectively.
Interestingly, the song doesn't concentrate much onto the mother, but on the wife of the protagonist and yet intertwines the visual passages of both characters with ongoing lyrics that are specifically and only about the first one as if blending both of them into a single entity, or more exactly, as if the wife was just the logical continuation of the mother.
Roger Waters 1st Half

In the beginning of the song, we can see that adult Pink is sick (sick of all that ?) : he sniffs and blows his nose in a tissue while trying to reach for his wife on the telephone before hanging up, which may be seen as him giving up in his fight to reach her since he immediately and literally take off the line to rub his eyes with and twitch it round and around. It is rather symbolic to see that to this whole scene answers a short cut scene of him with his wife naked while kissing : in both cases the two inseparable parts of a whole joins back together. Also it is while he rips out the telephone line that the first line of the lyrics is sung by Roger Waters : "Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb".
This line is ambiguous since it can be taken in the apparent meaning : we know that the whole story from his birth to the present times at the time take place from 1943 to 1979. It can then represents both the 2nd World War, in which his father died , and the classic fears of these days about a global nuclear third world war atween the two superpowers , the USA and USSR. The word "they" reinforces the idea of globality, since it is neutral and unprecised , and so can refers to both of them .
This warful context is reinforced by the drums that comes next in the rhythmic section of the music .
The next chain of events shows blatantly this fusion atween the wife and the mother :
After trying to phone his wife unsuccessfully, he then grabs the pillow by his right side to put his body around it like a circle while the music arises with a beating heart . It then cuts to show Pink as young boy who gets comfortable in his mother bed while she's sleeping BY HIS RIGHT SIDE , just like the pillow seconds before !

Afterward we can see the little boy waiting on a chair in a typical school of the 50s in the UK.
A man then comes out of a room with another young boy, who seems to be sniffing and leaves the scene while this grown man points his finger at Pink and swift it to the room to order him , rather authoritatively, to enter in and when the door gets abruptly closed we can see written on a wooden plank and partly in the shade the word "Headmaster", suggesting the poor chap is going to be given a lesson and quite a hard time ... And it is during this scene that the singer who embodies the protagonist of the story is asking to his mother :
"Do you think they'll try to break my balls ?"
Of course it is the natural sentiment of oppression that any teen , including myself, felt while waiting for the Headmaster to call you in the office but it is a clear reference to the sexual body parts of the testicles and the primal fear of being stricken "down there". This castration could also be taken metaphorically, but the paradox here is that the singer says "they", suggesting an exterior factor while in fact it's the very one person to which the question is addressed that is castrating him !
Which adds to a masculinist interpretation of women being in fact cruel towards men .

It then cuts to a new diptych : we can see the young protagonist reading on his desk surrounded with pencils and books , probably studying, maybe as a punishment after the visit to the headmaster, but we don't have any clues about it ... It appears that a young lady is undressing in the house beside the one in which Pink lives in with his mother, and It's a very attractive young red-haired woman !
Immediately, Pink switches off his desk-light , lights himself a cigarette and take out binoculars !
Seen standing, smoking, watching the scene with binoculars could almost suggests a general watching the battlefield from afar, just like he is watching her from across the fence inbetween the two houses with, by the end, even some kind of a mischievous happy grin on his face !
Just when Roger Waters sing the line : "Mother should I run for President ?", and in many countries including France and the USA the President is the chief-commander of the armed forces ...
It is also a bit frightening to see that at no point the woman in question seems to be aware of all this :
It might as well literally be an act of stalking ! But after all, as John Lyly said in one of his novel published in 1579 => " the rules of fair play don't apply in love and war"...
This fear of not being manly enough is even clearer in the line "Will they put me on the firing line ?" =
It shows his uncertainty because he openly make the question, while in general philosophy there is a common proverb which commands that when obvious it's self-explanatory, so what is said is actually what needs precisions and thus is open to contestation so that when the narrator A is asking this, it in fact proves he's not sure to be able to do his job should he ends up on the "firing line" !
And again, that is a reasonable primal fear, since his father died in combat during the war.
It's absolutely justifiable that he doesn't want to go to war, for this fear to literally be in his veins !
However, not even talking about fear, if he's not sure then he's naturally bound to be a liability for his supposed crew, which means he'd be both useless and dangerous . There would henceforth be a necessity for the hierarchy to uproot him to avoid accidents and the uncertainty to spread : "they" would indeed effectively "try to break his balls"...
It is also quite emblematic that everytimes when he sings the song live, the audience systematically answer to the question "Mother should I trust the government ?" with a resounding "NO !", which is also written on the wall in the latest concert versions . The word government in his very first meaning as the council of the counselors to the chief executive may be understood as an allegory for all the relatives and friends of the protagonist , but this henceforth reinforces the theory that this behaviour of the mother is enforcing his isolation, her trying to cut him away from everything except her, which is the typical method of narcissistic psychopaths and cult gurus .
It really consecrates the main fact : that in the whole song and more generally the whole album the whole issue is about trust , the level of confidence .

David Gilmour First Part

And when he sees the shadows on the walls of his bedroom, he's logically terrified and then runs downstairs to sneak into his mother's bedroom and gets comfy on her right side : we thus understand that the scene before actually takes place after, in that particular moment in history.
But yet again we fall into some Stockholm Syndrome here : he's trying to escape his nightmares by settling right into the nest of "the beast" which puts all of her fears into him and then make his worst nightmares come true !
However, seconds later the same movement is done again but this time when Pink rushes into his mother's bedroom there's a horrifying cadaver, a disgustingly decaying dark body, on the right side of his mother, before jumping to the scene of his wedding ceremony as an adult .
We can see it in many ways but one possible guess may be that it is the father : we know, from the rest of the movie that he died in Anzio during the last world war. It would also be logical to see the husband with his wife which could give a beautiful message to the scene : the couple is united even through the death of the husband ! But it's difficult to really say so, since it's not him but a gruesome and monstrous ghastly figure like an awful rotten mummy...


And this comparison with a rotten mummy is very interesting ! Because here is a second guess :
What if that putrefied loathsome thing, was actually himself, in some kind of a revealing mirror, and that it was actually the other way round in the way that the real ghost here is in fact the other one ?
Because after all if the dad is dead during the war, it's a murder. And as we say, all is fair in both war and love and we know that he somehow needs the beating heart of his mommy a bit too much ...
So maybe he actually blames the war for the death of his father, but perhaps it was his birth that killed him in the sense that his mother, probably like many others , lost a great deal of youthful lust and redirect all her emotional caring toward the baby, which is precisely the way the second narrator in the lyrics of the song calls the one who sings for Pink !
"She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing" => Sounds like a bird in cage , like a bird to which someone would have ripped the wings apart , like a bird which can call for partners, but cannot join them in the outside world because of the "walls" of its cage : the worst cruelty ever.
It also sounds like a chastity device ...

Roger Waters 2nd Half

His second part is four lines long, that all begin with a direct address to his "Mother".

David Gilmour 2nd Half

The second Gilmour stanza is overall really cruel in the way it sets standards for the protagonist while we know full well from the frames in the present that everything for that matter has been a failure .
She first begin with "Don't you cry", which you can almost rather interpret as "Don't you dare to cry" in the way she tells him this in a quite sugar-coated yet authoritarian tone : it's a clear call to his masculinity according to which he's supposed to be immune to this "girlish" behaviour.
But the charge against femininity, quite paradoxical coming from a mother, is only beginning :
Right after that she said she's "gonna check out all of your girlfriends for you" which is offensive to both sexes considering that it means that girls have to be checked, therefore "proving" that they are inherently a suspect carrier of problems, and that at the same time that men can't do this job themselves which would mean they're weak !
She confirms that by saying the line after she "won't let anyone dirty get through", with the wall formerly explicitly formulated being here implied . Anyone and not anything : we thus can be talking about both physical and moral cleanliness
We might also say that if Mother wanted to keep him "healthy and clean" it's a clear cut failure !
He's shown in the same segment being sick at bed while a kid and then trying hashish and smoking cigarettes when he's an adult in his forties !

By the end of the song, while Gilmour says : "ooh baby", we can see the protagonist curled up like in a fetal position onto his bed while holding the phone handset . And when that same singer, a few seconds later, says "You'll always be baby to me", he suddenly drops it , and completes his fetal position while moving left and right as if in a rocking chair. It seems like he cut himself off from the outside world to which he was linked with through the fixed telephone , the real world .
This phrase "ooh baby", the penultimate of the song, is also the one that opens the tirade of this same mother in the penultimate song of the whole album : The Trial .