There was a time when battles were fought between groups of men wearing uniforms. While the clothing was in some cases sold to both sides by one and the same company, the uniforms were deliberately different; usually the colors contrasted, so that the soldiers, and as often as not they were mercenaries on the one side could see who it was they needed to kill, on the other side. This form of warfare runs like a red thread through western history from the American War of Independence, through Waterloo, to the Vietnam War. It assumed there was a clear “them” and an even more clear “us”. And things only got complicated if someone put on their outer uniform inside out and thus became a turncoat.
Post-mortem
for Alain
Chronologically and as regards popularity, first came post-modernism. Which is apposite, for it heralded a whole splat of ‘post’-movements that saw or see themselves as representative of contemporary society, which is, after all, the affluent society. Ever since the 1970s, that society has been typified by the shift out of the traditional mode of production that revolved around heavy industry, into what many have called a “post-industrial” economy. That was the first ‘post’ and it marked a social transition, as henceforth the service sector started to play an ever larger role – and industrial production was something done elsewhere. The term ‘post-industrial’ society is a bit of a misnomer, as here the ‘post’ actually means that post has to be sent to other parts of the world with the data for the industrial production there, for example in China.