Once upon a time if you wanted to bomb the crap out of someone you used to have to use something like this...
The Avro Lancaster. An iconic aircraft viewed with respect and affection by the British people who lived through World War 2. Which, given the huge number of people who died in them and were killed by them, is a pretty strong endorsement for the effectiveness of wartime propaganada
Britain built 7,500 Lancasters at a cost of something like £50,000 each (£1,600,000 in today's money).
About 3,300 of these planes and their crews of seven highly trained men were shot down during the war. Total RAF Bomber Command losses of all types of aircraft was 8,500 planes and 57,000 crew
Which was fab news for the industrialists who sold the aircraft and the bankers who created the money to buy them but, still, not as profitable as it could have been.
Back in those days, building and operating fleets of bombers required masses of skilled labour that needed training and paying
All of which reduced the bottom line severely
Nowadays, thanks to improved technology, if you want to bomb the crap out of someone you can use something like this...
and one of these...
...coming in at a higher unit cost than an Avro Lancaster, a much lower labour component and the operators pay to train themselves whilst they're still children
It would be lovely to think that all those labour savings mean that people who would otherwise be fabricating and operating machinery of mass death would consequently be employed fabricating and operating other, less unpleasant things
Unfortunately, our current System does not require their skills anywhere else either
For something like 100-150 years that System required an educated, skilled workforce to tend machinery and manage empire. Thanks to advances in technology, most of that educated, skilled workforce is now surplus to requirements and the System would like Us to, thanks for everything, go away now
And before We go away, that System would like to hoover up whatever crumbs of capital We managed to collectively accumulate over those last 100-150 years
All of which should be bleeding obvious but a lot of people just don't seem to get it and insist on believing that news like this...
...is somehow an unfortunate consequence of the harsh economic times we live in and not part of a Systematic eradication of a class of people that is now surplus to requirements
It would seem that, by some completely unguided, stochastic process, our colleges and universities are being transformed from institutions which produce educated people capable of productive work and critical thinking into factories which produce dumbed-down debt bitches primed for a lifetime of shitty, service sector jobs and neo-serfdom
Which is just what our establishment needs and wants
What a marvelous coincidence
At which point one could argue till the cows come home whether this marvelous coincidence is...
a) the result of deliberate planning by a shadowy cabal of finance capitalists conspiring away on a little island somewhere
or
b) the natural consequence of finance capitalists acting in their class interest without much in the way of deliberate collusion
But to be honest, as with most of these debates about whether or not a conspiracy is at work, when you are on the receiving end the motivations of the people fucking you are largely academic
Your first priority should be to relieve your tormentors of the means by which they are fucking you
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Michael Parenti - the quintessential pinko commie subversive
As an antidote to all that bullcrap from the BBC I've been linking to recently, here's me re-linking to a couple of talks by Michael Parenti which I consider to be absolutely essential listening for any budding Conspiraloons out there...
- The JFK Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State - Part 1 - Part 2
Parenti is essential listening because his ideas break out from the narrow confines of what currently constitutes 'permissable' political discourse
Parenti is a very robust and articulate spokesperson for those of us who believe that...
- there is such a thing as an elitist class
- there is such a thing as an elitist class interest
- that elitist interest is pursued with sometimes deliberate, sometimes covert, intent
It goes without saying that those of us who hold the above parapolitical beliefs are currently dismissed as lunatic, whackjob conspiracy theorists
...very often by newspapers and television stations that are owned or controlled by that non-existent elitist class which has no vested elitist class interest and which pursues its non-existent interests completely in the open with total respect for all human life.
Sad to say, I'm unaware of any heavyweight British academics of Parenti's quality. Come to think of it, there aren't many North American ones either. Peter Dale Scott comes to mind
None of the above constitues an unqualified endorsement of Parenti. He advocates some views and solutions I personally disagree with but his analysis of the socio-economic structure of our current system is bang on the money imho
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And whilst bigging up pinko commie subversives it's also worth mentioning a particular meme that's been doing the rounds on the conspirasphere since the current economic crisis entered a more overt stage...
That is the idea that, through the banking bailouts, the British and US governments are imposing Communism on their people via the back door
Hmmmmmmmmm, I'll just scratch my chin pensively for a second or two there
Maybe if the British and US governments were nationalising profitable businesses and putting them completely under state control then, yes, that could be a form of Communism
But what is actually happening is that the British and US governments are handing over stonking amounts of public cash, cash that will take generations to tax back off people, to the bankers in exchange for absolutely fuck all, and certainly no publicly-accountable control
That's as good an expression of Corporate Fascism*, not Communism, as you're ever likely to see
What's going on here is an awful lot of middle-class conservatives can see that they're getting buttfucked but cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that it's the very system they've endorsed all these years that is being harnessed to do the buttfucking
ergo, it must be communist in some way
yeah, right
hmmm, much cognitive dissonance
We didn't have genuinely free markets before the current crash got under way and they are not being replaced by communism. We lived under a oligarchical kleptocracy before the crash and we still live under a oligarchical kleptocracy after. The New World Order is the just the same as the Old One. It's just a tad more overt these days, that's all
I'd be the first person to acknowledge that populist concepts such as socialism, or environmentalism, or even religion get hijacked and subverted to suit elitist, totalitarian ends but that doesn't mean that ideals such as enviromental awareness, a desire for social justice or the natural human tendency for spirituality are intrinsically evil; even if some right evil bastards take control of them sometimes
There is, unfortunately, plenty of scope to get downhearted and depressed about the apparent power of the interests that would screw us all over and the flaws in the infilitrated movements which claim to oppose them but, fuck it, it's how we respond to the challenges in Life which define and shape who we are.
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* = of course, according to some right wing loons, Fascism doesn't actually exist and all Bad Things that have been attributed to Fascism in the past are, in truth, Socialist. Take this comment recently seen on The Antagonist's blog for example...
"Talking of 'fascism' (a term you throw around with the abandon of a child with a toy) do a little research, comrade, and you'll discover that both Mussolini and Hitler were socialists. Not to mention Stalin, Mao and all the other squalid little regimes around the world that have caused the world so much suffering. They've probably notched up a good 250 million murders at least between them. Talk about state oppression!"
Yup, neither Mussolini nor Hitler were fascists. An outstanding expose of Real™ History
here's another fucking commie to add to the list.
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