Between Dignity And Poverty.

A small extract from an article by Chris Hedges:

       Immanuel Kant coined the term “radical evil.” It was the privileging of one’s own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends. But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term “radical evil,” saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the powerful, discarded as human refuse.
        We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the growing social inequity, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a cabal of global oligarchs. They are destroying our democratic institutions, turning elected office into a system of legalized bribery, stacking our courts with judges who invert constitutional rights so that unlimited corporate money invested in political campaigns is disguised as the right to petition the government or a form of free speech. Their seizure of power has vomited up demagogues and con artists including Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, each the distortion of a failed democracy. They are turning America’s poor communities into internal militarized colonies where police carry out lethal campaigns of terror and use the blunt instrument of mass incarceration as a tool of social control. They are waging endless wars in the Middle East and diverting half of all discretionary spending to a bloated military. They are placing the rights of the corporation above the rights of the citizen.

      Sometimes I read a phrase, a paragraph, a few words, and they sink in through the dark labyrinth of my ageing mind and out trickles a stream of words. the following is my latest such a trickling.

Between Dignity and Poverty

In this metropolis of wealth with its fountains of opulence
We are the excluded army that walks that tightrope
Between dignity and poverty.
The excluded, the marginalised, the forgotten,
Regulated by mercenaries, some with guns, others with pens.
They know not, we are their brothers and sisters.
Nor do they know,
Our strength is forged in the humiliation of the bread line
Our daily question, will there be bread,
Or will the pangs of hunger stay.
We exist in a system of numbers and balance sheets,
Our lives, dehumanised statistics,
Catalogued and filed by a blind accountant.
When asked to count our dead, do we count the living dead?
Will this tightrope be the inheritance to our children
Or shall our tortured journey lead us from anxiety to revolt
Will the anguish of our children feed our righteous anger
Causing us to tear asunder this fabricated web of injustice.

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Democracy, The World's Most Misused Word.

       Very often an arrest in this society is not just the loss of freedom for one person, it is a deliberate attack on the free flow of information. Especially information regarding the dealings of "our" representatives, a lot of which takes place behind closed doors. Decisions are made that dramatically affect all our lives, but we are not privy to those decision making processes. The government and the people are two entirely different entities, the government assumes the right to know everything about you, but you are not allowed to know all about the government. This arrangement is safeguarded by a vast array of secret service agencies, which work away diligently protecting the institution of the state, and the power and privileges of those who are in control. We, the ordinary people, will be fed misinformation, lies, trivia, propaganda, and overdoses of the culture of the celebrity, all bubble gum and candy floss to keep us happy and our thoughts away from what controls our lives, and in a lot of cases, our death. 

     Democracy is probably the most misused and most misunderstood word on our planet, our representatives will spout it as what we have, and what the state is trying to protect. However, democracy, if it ever has lived, is most certainly an alien land to the society we inhabit today, an anathema to the state.

      Those individuals who dare expose this subterfuge and duplicity, and to pass on to the public these inner dark dealings of the state are vilified, persecuted and in most case silenced. Lies and subterfuge are the daily tools of the secret agencies, and with the sophisticated surveillance techniques of the modern world, all of us are suspect, and can and are, monitored in our every day actions. The world of trivia and fantasy that swamps our lives is the state's propaganda wing issuing us with paracetamol to take away the pain, in an attempt to keep us happy and our thoughts away from the world we actually inhabit.

      Sorry George Orwell, we ignored you.

The following is an extract from an article by Chris Hedges:

         We have watched over the last decade as freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government abuses and lies have been obliterated by wholesale government surveillance and the criminalizing of the leaking and, with Julian’s persecution, publication of these secrets. The press has been largely emasculated in the United States. The repeated use of the Espionage Act, especially under the Obama administration, to charge and sentence whistleblowers has shut down our ability to shine a light into the inner workings of power and empire. Governmental officials with a conscience, knowing all of their communications are monitored, captured and stored by intelligence agencies, are too frightened to reach out to reporters. The last line of defense lies with those with the skills that allow them to burrow into the records of the security and surveillance state and with the courage to make them public, such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy Hammond, now serving a 10-year prison term in the United States for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The price of resistance is high not only for them, but for those such as Julian willing to publish this information. As Sarah Harrison has pointed out: “This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.”
       Even if Julian were odious, which he is not, even if he carried out a sexual offense, which he did not, even if he was a poor houseguest—a bizarre term for a man trapped in a small room for nearly seven years under house arrest—which he was not, it would make no difference. Julian is not being persecuted for his vices. He is being persecuted for his virtues.
        His arrest eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities carried by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments in the seizure of Julian two months ago from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power, no matter what their nationality, will be hunted down around the globe and seized, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where journalism is outlawed and replaced with propaganda, trivia, entertainment and indoctrination to make us hate those demonized by the state as our enemies.
     The arrest of Julian marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism and constant state surveillance, now far advanced in China, that will soon define our lives. The destruction of all protection of the rule of law, which is what we are witnessing, is essential to establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state.
       The BBC China correspondent Stephen McDonell was locked out of WeChat in China a few days ago after posting photos of the candlelight vigil in Hong Kong marking 30 years since student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were gunned down by Chinese soldiers in June 1989.
“Chinese friends started asking on WeChat what the event was?” he wrote. “Why were people gathering? Where was it? That such questions were coming from young professionals here shows the extent to which knowledge of Tiananmen 1989 has been made to disappear in China. I answered a few of them, rather cryptically, then suddenly I was locked out of WeChat.”
In order to get back on WeChat he had to agree that he was responsible for spreading “malicious rumors” and provide what is called a faceprint.
“I was instructed to hold my phone up—to ‘face front camera straight on’—looking directly at the image of a human head. Then told to ‘Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese.’ My voice was captured by the App at the same time it scanned my face.”
        Governmental abuse of WeChat, he wrote, “could deliver to the Communist Party a life map of pretty much everybody in this country, citizens and foreigners alike. Capturing the face and voice image of everyone who was suspended for mentioning the Tiananmen crackdown anniversary in recent days would be considered very useful for those who want to monitor anyone who might potentially cause problems.”
This is almost certainly our future, and it is a future that Julian has fought courageously to prevent.

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk  

Corporatised Totalitarianism.

       What a wonderful Grammy award acceptance speech by the New Zealand singer song writer Lorde. It is not often that we hear such truths spoken in the midst of expensive suits, dickie-bow ties, thousand pound dresses, and champagne. Perhaps she can put her speech into song form, and try to blast it to No.1

This from Snoopman News:

     Thank you soo much everyone for making this song explode because this world is mental. (Laughter). Planet Earth is run by psychopaths that hide behind slick marketing, ‘freedom’ propaganda and ‘economic growth’ rhetoric,[1] while they construct a global system of corporatized totalitarianism.
     As American journalist Chris Hedges has identified, a corporate totalitarian core thrives inside a fictitious democratic shell.[2] This core yields an ‘inverted’ totalitarian state that few recognize because it does not look like the Orwellian world of Nineteen Eighty-four.[3]

     This corporate totalitarian core is spreading outward from America. Planet Earth is being rapidly militarized by the world’s major and significant states, including their police forces.[4] Meanwhile, state surveillance is becoming universal[5] and torture is outsourced to gulags.[6]

Read the full speech HERE:

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Get Out With Your Flints!!

       I have always said, "we never know the spark that will start the fire". If there is enough fire tinder around any tiny spark could start an uncontrollable blaze. As far as our society is concerned we are knee deep in combustible fire tinder. Increasing poverty, declining social services, high unemployment, thousands being forced to work for nothing, thousands having their benefits sanctioned. Every section of our communities are being attacked, the unemployed by means of workfare and benefit sanctions, the disabled at the hands of ATOS doing the governments bidding, the employed by wage freezes/cuts, zero hours contracts, massive increases in energy bills and then the bedroom tax. A few months ago, Brazil exploded when bus fares were increased a few pesetas, it wasn't the bus fares, it was the fact that the people of Brazil were, like us, knee deep in fire tinder, they were being pushed ever deeper into deprivation in the midst of blatant greed and corruption, the bus fare increase was the spark. When we suffer this type of attack and push to deprivation, in a country where the number of millionaires is increasing, where lavish extravaganzas are flaunted in front of our ever increasing poverty, where blatant greed and corruption, stride pompously through the corridors of power, the spark is inevitable. A country where there is a vast unbridgeable chasm between the ordinary people and the wealth of that country, where there is a complete disconnect between those who hold the power and the ordinary people, cannot and should not hold together. 

 

      Perhaps all we can do at the moment is keep working with those flints.

This from TruthDig: 

  Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

On The Matter Of Overthrowing The System.

 

     On this matter of overthrowing the present system, put recently by Russell Grant, (and millions of ordinary people), a couple of quotes from Chris Hedges points in the same direction:

     If we do not immediately engage in this battle we are finished, as climate scientists have made clear. I will defy corporate power in small and large ways. I will invest my energy now solely in acts of resistance, in civil disobedience and in defiance.

     Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The sooner we realise that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will realise that these elites must be overthrown.

     An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognise that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

IT CAN BE OUR WORLD.

      This must be the first time in history that the struggles of the ordinary people across the globe have been happening in an awareness of the other's struggle. It is no longer isolated struggles in a disconnected world, it is now seen as one struggle against a world wide corporate monster that runs rampant, raping and plundering the planet. There may be different shades in the struggle, independence, human rights, etc. but the dominant struggle is the end of this system that enslaves millions, creates poverty, wars and deprivation, all in the name of profit for a small bunch of parasites.

       Of course the struggle is not new, but the conditions open to us today are new. We can communicate and organise almost on an instantaneous manner right across the planet. If the people so desire they can shut down a city centre, under today's conditions there is nothing that says they can't shut down a continent. The problem is, what next? We have to prepare for that moment when we take control and the corporate monster gasps it last breath and becomes a bad memory in the human psyche. There will be many problems and many false roads, and no guarantees, it will be a new script, still to be written.  

       The following is an extract from an interesting article from TruthDig:

         Our dying corporate class, corrupt, engorged on obscene profits and indifferent to human suffering, is the guarantee that the mass movement will expand and flourish. No one knows when. No one knows how. The future movement may not resemble Occupy. It may not even bear the name Occupy. But it will come. I have seen this before. And we should use this time to prepare, to educate ourselves about the best ways to fight back, to learn from our mistakes, as many Occupiers are doing in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and other cities. There are dark and turbulent days ahead. There are powerful and frightening forces of hate, backed by corporate money, that will seek to hijack public rage and frustration to create a culture of fear. It is not certain we will win. But it is certain this is not over.

Read the full article HERE:

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