Showing posts with label
imagine a boot stamping on a human face.
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Showing posts with label
imagine a boot stamping on a human face.
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Eco-sustainable Planned-opolis....
I was going to compare and contrast competing Visions of the Future by pasting up the Suicide Booth scene from Futurama, but the only online clip I could find that hasn't been taken down by the copyright bots was in Czech
Mind you, whilst unintelligible, it does have a charm of its own
And one of these days I would like to sit down and compile a list of all the characteristics of the genre of propagandistic film-making that I will forever associate with the Blair years in the UK.
There's a shared look and sound to the style of films I have in mind and they are often associated with the kind of 'Common Purpose'-esque, public-private initiatives which piss me off something rotten - however mumsy the voice over
Whilst I appreciate that many loons out there like to describe this propaganda as 'communist' or 'marxist', they're wrong. It is the product of an unholy merger of corporate and state power, and that is fascism, well mostly
I appreciate that it's easier for people who don't see themselves as lefties to identify anything they perceive as evil as being 'Marxist' or 'communist' (and for lefties to identify anything evil as being 'fascist') but the situation is a little more complicated than simplistic use of poorly defined or understood terms like 'Marxism' is capable of describing
The fact that unaccountable foundations, pressure groups and think tanks, like the one that made the video at the top of this post, are funded by big corporations as well as government should be a bit of a fucking clue as to the nature of The Beast.
If your definition of communism encompasses activities that are promoted by and benefit large, privately owned corporations and billionaire individuals it might be worth your while contemplating the internal contradictions in that point of view. I can understand how people might argue that a bastardised form of communism might, like so many other 'isms', be co-opted as a tool of those private corporations and billionaires but are those corporations and billionaires themselves communist? What word would you, should you use to describe them?
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A few days ago I was engaged in conversation with a non-conspiratorially minded chum who works in UK property sales
Times are definitely a changing as, for the first time, he acknowledge to me that, yes, the UK possibly was headed towards a period of severe economic hardship for the massses. He was, however, confident that the UK government 'has got clever people working behind the scenes who can see what's coming and the government probably has already started spending money on starting up some industries that will help pay us out of the mess the country's in'
My response was that there is absolutely no sign of that whatsoever and that whatever industry we could think of getting into, the Asian economies can think of getting into with a much lower cost base.
Even if they consented to enduring the same standard of living as the Chinese or Indians, the wages of British workers cannot be slashed to be competitive with Chinese or Indian labour because UK property costs are so much higher. Property costs that the British have to meet directly in rent or mortgages and indirectly through the rentier element concealed within the price of essential goods and services
However, as I explained to my chum, I have seen copious evidence that the British, and other Western, establishments are preparing for the possiblity of some kind of economic collapse. They haven't invested much in the way of productive manufacturing industry but they have spent shed loads on tooling-up their police forces
But that, my chum argued, was necessary because of the threat of terrorism...
Evidently, he's still in need of a little more conspirasizing
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I've been pulled up a couple of times in this blog for suggesting that British police have become more like para-militaries in recent years. The people who've pulled me up have have referred to the pitched battles, complete with cavalry, during the miners strike and the treatment meted out to people like Blair Peach and Stephen Waldorf as being evidence that the police have always been a bit 'tasty' when it comes to dealing with people who get in their way
And, yes, these commentators have a point but, with all respect, have you taken a look at the British police recently...
Even former senior coppers and yes, though I still can't quite believe it, Max 'Have you read my book about how great the SS were' Hastings have recently written articles suggesting that having machine-gun toting police who can execute people with impunity is probably not the way for supposedly civilised societies to go...
Sir Max Hastings - sole liberator of the Falkland Islands and born-again bleeding heart pinko fag subversive
But even these (presumably) principled voices against the militarisation of our police compromise their argument by agreeing that, because of the threat of terrorism, there is a place for some British policemen to be kitted out with the kind of weaponry and mentality that wouldn't be out of place in a 1970s junta, but only sometimes
Now, to me, it's plain as day that the Terror threat is being at least bigged-up, and possibly at least partially instigated, by the numerous interest groups that benefit from a society collectively crapping its pants
But that's actually a moot point
Even if I believed that the Terror threat was 100% genuine and as really, really scary as our Overlords keep telling us it is, we should still reject the surveillence state and militarised police on the time-honoured bases that those who surrender liberty for a little temporary safety really do deserve neither, that freedom has a price and that if we change our society in response to terrorism the terrorists have achieved their objectives
You will hear none of these arguments being promoted by British politicians, journalists or officially sanctioned (low) pressure groups like Liberty
The gun fashionably displayed by the group of licenced potential killers in this photo is a variant of the iconic Heckler & Koch MP5...
The MP5 can chuck out bullets at rates of up to 500-600 rounds a minute. It's black, it's scary looking and it can kill a lot of people very quickly. It's the kind of high-quality weapon that gives serious gun nuts a roaring chubby just thinking about it.
MP5s, and a smattering of the higher velocity H&K G36, are now a common sight in London in the hands of Metropolitan police officers. If you're ever at one of London's airports take a look up sometime and you'll see police officers at the mezzanine levels strutting around with their MP5s, presumably ready to cut loose from elevated positions of fire at the drop of a hat.
If you think about it for a moment that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Even if the quality of domestic terrorist was to take a quantum leap up from the kind of sad losers who make bombs out of flour and set fire to their underpants to the kind of terrorists who actually have access to guns, are the police really going to open fire with machine guns in crowded airport terminals? And, even if so, why do those armed police have to be there right in front of our fucking faces all the time?
The answer, I fear, is the same reason why the government sent light tanks to Heathrow before the invasion of Iraq. That weaponry is not there to scare potential (and, remember, allegedly suicidal) terrorists. It's there to scare us
The reason why I mention all of this now is because of this recent snippet from the State Broadcasting Company...
Police in training for 'Mumbai-style' gun attack in UK
...suspects were planning to copy the 2008 attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai*, where 10 gunmen went on a three-day rampage, killing 166 people and injuring more than 300, the sources said.
In response police armed response units are being given more powerful weapons.
Our correspondent said the UK authorities had been planning for such an attack ever since Mumbai* happened.
"David Cameron has taken a personal interest in the problem ever since his first threat assessment given to him when he took office in May.
"Now police armed response units are getting their firepower and their stocks of ammunition increased to deal with multiple terrorists armed with automatic weapons," he said.
More powerful than MP5s and G36s?!
What the fuck are they planning to start dishing out?
A few days ago I posted this clip as being a possible model for the introductory titles to any new TV series about the Metropolitan Police...
It was an attempt at weak humour
And it's weaker by the day
* = You remember the Mumbai attack, that's the one that included operatives with connections with US intelligence that the Indians are getting pissy about. A back-story that has been lavishly covered by the British State Broadcasting Company. Or, there again, maybe not.
And don't forget to read the hard-hitting, insightful and totally objective analysis from the SBC's totally unspooky Frank Gardner to the right of the article about UK police being armed with gatling guns or whatever the fuck it is they're getting. Frank's analyses are worth the State Propaganda Tax on their own.
A little Friday afternoon fun for the increasingly paramilitary British police and their Magic Wellness Sticks*, whilst they wait for some proper civil disorder and things to really kick off...* =
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Meanwhile, back in the UK, non conspiraloon acquaintances of mine who over the years have endured my predictions of financial and social Armageddon with long-suffering, and occasionally amused patience, have lately taken to conceding that yes I may have been onto something. A little over-the-top maybe but there was a kernel of prescience hidden in my, and a relatively small number of like-minded souls’, OTT ramblings
Fuck it, even the David Ickes and Alex Jones of this world have had to modify their speil to acknowledge the pre-eminent role that manipulation of finance capital plays in the world’s ills (an observation that was singularly absent earlier in their careers)
The Bank of England - just swarming with neo-liberal, pan-dimensional, alien space lizards ...apparently
The growing awareness that something is very wrong with the world of money is now mirrored in the Official Narrative of what the future holds for the UK and other similarly fucked-up countries
Without so much as an apology for all the horseshit they've been shovelling for the last decade, the mainstream UK media have quietly binned the 'No More Boom and Bust' Official Narrative and replaced it with the ‘Austerity’ Official Narrative
As far as I can glean from reading the UK press and chatting with people in the UK, Austerity is supposedly going to take the form of some kind of wifi-enabled rerun of the 1970s. Fuck it, some of the older folks even get nostalgic about the prospect and talk of a Golden Age when people made do, all mucked in together and were better off for it
Hmmm, music and cinema were definitely better back then
1970s 2.0 will, however, not play out quite the same way in the UK for one or two small reasons...
- One billion more competing workers from India and the Far East
- Computers
- No North Sea oil
- No coal
- Bugger all in the way of productive industry
- No organised labour worth its name to keep ordinary people's wages up with inflation when all that money printing really kicks in in earnest
- A lot less social cohesion
...for starters
Things could easily get very nasty indeed, for a generation or more
Unless, that is, people get together and seriously overhaul the way they go about their lives
(On the positive side, the UK is still a world-leading producer of weapons, mercenaries, unnecessary, arguably harmful, drugs, Ponzi schemes and money laundering. So, fingers crossed, if by some chance there happen to be a few really tasty wars, global pandemics and colossal financial frauds in the near future the outlook for UK plc isn't entirely bleak)
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Now, as it happens, I have been and continue to be optimistic about the UK’s, and other countries', long term future. The only fly in the ointment is that I believed and continue to believe that life is going to get really, really unpleasant in the UK, and other countries, in the short to medium term
Whilst chatting about this stuff with a chum the other day, she shared with me a favourite Engels quote...
'The state, therefore, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies which have managed without it, which had no notion of the state or state power. At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes has not only ceased to be a necessity, but become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they once arose. The state inevitably falls with them. The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong - into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe.'
Personally, I think that vision of the future needs updating a little to reflect the huge advances in technology that have been made since Engels' time.
Some anarchists would argue, as I referenced in my previous post, that you can view the countries of the world as a collection of human farms and the citizens of those countries as livestock...
and, if you pursue that analogy, it's an interesting exercise to ask yourself what do farmers do with their beasts of burden when they get their hands on tractors and other machinery?
Do the farmers let those animals graze and frolic in a quiet field somewhere or do they send them off for glue?
For that Engels' style vision of the future to work a lot of people are going to have to make, and demand, useful products that cannot be mass produced. There's a premium attached to labour-intensive produce, for sure, but if the benefits of mass production were more fairly shared people could afford it and would be happier and healthier for it
Now would be a very good time indeed for people to start digging a veggie patch and learning a honest, genuinely productive craft
...and not borrowing money to spank on tat, that would help as well
Though I'm not sure that I can see the State just sitting idly by if hordes of the newly unemployed start growing and making their own stuff and swapping it without any reference to paper money
Where’s the margin in that?.
