To Who Pretend to Think
Thinking woman
Open Letter to Thinking Beings
Thinking beings
When world grows so elaborately absurd that satire becomes mere transcription of fact, consider European Camping Group. A name that summons images of bonfires, laughter and star-lighted fellowship, but refers to a consortium of shell companies and private-equity buccaneers whose natural habitat is no forest but a spreadsheet.
One almost envies the economy of their deceit. A modest tent pitched in France shelters an entire architecture of Luxembourgish subsidiaries, English letter-boxes, and Abu-Dhabi investors, all joined in common purpose: to convert the open air into a revenue stream, and to treat every pine tree as a pending dividend. The poor, meanwhile, are invited to rent back their own horizon at market rate.
It is said that the modern age has abolished piracy. True, no brigand now flies the skull and crossbones; yet our financiers have found subtler flags. Their ships are incorporated, their cannon disguised as Excel formulas, their booty declared as “shareholder value.” They plunder not from galleons but from communities—municipal land, seaside air, and the frail hope that leisure might still belong to ordinary people.
In these operations, morality is as mobile as the homes they sell: wheeled in for display, wheeled out for profit. A family is persuaded to purchase a “quasi-residential” unit—half a dwelling, half a promise—and, when the season changes, finds itself evicted by a paragraph it never read. The land, once a campsite, becomes a condensed suburb of plastic chalets, each amortised with the precision of a metronome and the empathy of a cash register.
The masters of this enterprise—those distant accountants of pleasure—speak in the universal dialect of avoidance. Taxes? Avoided. Responsibility? Deferred. Scrutiny? Outsourced. Yet they adorn themselves with the rhetoric of progress, as though to deforest a coastline were a form of sustainable development and to extract rent from misery were a branch of social innovation.
And, as if to complete the farce, the continent debates veils. Legislators rise to declare that the human face must henceforth be visible in public. Admirable! But might we extend the principle to our corporations? Let the balance sheets unveil themselves! Let every beneficial owner lift his veil of anonymity! If the face of a woman is a matter of state, surely the face of money deserves no less attention.
For the truth is that these veils—whether of cloth or of corporate opacity—serve the same ancient purpose: to conceal power. One hides the features of the powerless; the other hides the fingerprints of the powerful. Between them stands the citizen, taxed on his income yet priced out of his own coastline, invited to applaud both as triumphs of civilisation.
It is time, therefore, to call things by their names. A group that drains profit from the commons while sheltering in Luxembourg is not a “European Camping Group” but an Extraction Consortium for the Gullible. Its tents are numbered in billions, its fires stoked by accountants, its song the rustle of banknotes through offshore foliage.
Let those who still believe in decency, transparency, and the unpurchased dignity of a holiday by the sea, raise their voices—not to condemn pleasure, but to rescue it from those who sell it by the cubic metre. The open air belongs to all; the horizon pays no dividend.
And if, by some miracle of bureaucracy, these words reach the ears of those who govern, let them remember: every veil torn from a woman’s face reveals a human being; every veil torn from a corporation reveals a system. The former deserves compassion, the latter justice.
- (retired human, occasionally breathing free air)