Newspeak.

 

       I have always thought that George Orwell was much underestimated and not read by enough people. His words have predicted where we are now, and what the future holds if we don't stand up and protect our individual freedoms. As he points out in all his works, truth is truth no matter the ideological line handed out by the powers that be. A freethinker is the enemy of ideology and dogma, and is the road we should always try to walk.

     The following is a short extract from an article in Acorn on George Orwell, it is well worth reading the complete article HERE:

Extract:

 

       Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense… If both the past and external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?” (24)
      Winston Smith’s struggle to keep a grip on objective reality, to know that two plus two makes four whatever the ideological demands of the Party, is a central theme of Orwell’s novel.
      The character tells himself: “Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre”. (25)
      The Big Brother system has invented a new language which controls people’s minds by making heretical ideas impossible to even formulate.
       One of the Party members developing Newspeak tells Smith: “You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day”. (26)
        He explains: “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it… By 2050 – earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed”. (27)
      In the face of this truth-denying dogmatism, Orwell insisted that any authentic radical should always remain free to reject the dominant official ideology: “He should never turn back from a train of thought because it may lead to a heresy, and he should not mind very much if his unorthodoxy is smelt out, as it probably will be”.
      While co-operating with others to some extent, a free-thinking radical had to fight the capitalist system “as an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerilla on the flank of a regular army”. (28)
      In Woodcock’s words, Orwell was “a good and angry man who sought for the truth because he knew that only in its air would freedom and justice survive”. (29)

Read the complete article HERE: 
      

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Donald Rooum.

         Some of you may already know this, others may not, so for that reason I believe it is worth posting, in tribute to one of us. A life dedicated to justice and peace. 

This from Anarchist News: 

 

      I HAVE just learned with sadness that Donald Rooum, above, whose work appeared periodically in print editions of the Freethinker over many decades, died in London on August 31.
       I was alerted to the fact that Rooum had died by another longtime Freethinker contributor, Professor John Radford, author of  Don’t You Believe It!: Sixty things everybody knows that actually AIN’T SO!, a book that Rooum illustrated.
Rooum’s career and colourful life was affectionately documented in a blog called Spitalsfield Life in 2012. The author wrote:

      In spite of the fearsome reputation acquired by Anarchists, Donald possesses a quiet nature, almost unassuming, and he has not been on a demonstration since 1963 when he was framed by the police for having a brick in his pocket. A brick which the police inadvertently – and famously – forgot to plant. It amounted to a national scandal at the time. Since then, Donald prefers to stay at home and seek his political influence indirectly by working on his long-running cartoon series, leaving it to younger Anarchists to take to the street.

      Rooum, who in 1963 was working as a cartoonist for Peace News, was arrested by a violent and racist London policeman, detective sergeant Harold Challoner. On July 11 of that year, Rooum was demonstrating outside Claridge’s Hotel against a visit to the UK of Queen Frederika of Greece. Challoner told Rooum:

You’re fucking nicked, my beauty. Boo the Queen, would you?.

       After hitting Rooum on the head, the copper went through Rooum’s possessions, claimed to find a half-brick and said:

   There you are, me old darling. Carrying an offensive weapon. You can get two years for that.

       Rooum, a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties who had read about forensic science, handed his clothes to his solicitor for testing. No brick dust or appropriate wear and tear were found and Rooum was acquitted, although other people Challenor arrested at the demonstration were still convicted on his evidence.
        By the time Challenor appeared at the Old Bailey in 1964, charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, he was deemed to be unfit to plead and was sent to Netherne mental hospital with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Three other detectives involved in the arrest of protesters – David Oakley, Frank Battes and Keith Goldsmith – were sentenced to three years in prison.
Rooum told Spitalsfield Life:

        When I was sixteen, I thought a free society would be easy to get. Now I don’t think things are going to be easy, but the civil rights movement has been good. There have been improvements. There’s no longer any law against homosexuality and no longer any corporal punishment in schools. There was an awful attitude that people who weren’t white were inferior. When I first came to London in 1944, I phoned up a boarding house and they asked me to come round in person, because there was a no coloureds policy.

       To me, Anarchism is an ethical stance, a point of view which regards coercion of any kind as wrong.

      Rooum edited the London-based anarchist paper, Freedom, for many years. He became lecturer in typography at the London College of Printing, took an Open University Degree in Life Sciences and was elected a member of the Institute of Biology at eighty.
Spitalsfield Life said:

      His endeavours have spanned the political, the literary, the artistic and the scientific, yet it is in the levity of cartoons that he has found his ideal medium.

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Religion, The Dangerous Accepted Insanity.

 

       For practically all of my adult life, I have had an extremely strong hatred of all religions. Even at school, I couldn't swallow all the bizarre stories from that much revered book, "The Bible". It all appeared to me to be some sort of outlandish fiction, a group of tales of bizarre fantasy. Though at school I didn't realise the damage that religion had done over the centuries and was continuing to do, to the minds and bodies of countless millions. 

       From time to time I revisit some of the things I have written, to see if I have changed my mind on that particular matter. In some I have, but the bitter hatred of religion remains, if anything, recent history has strengthened that hatred.

 

 

     The following was a response in 2013, to a comment I received from an article I had previously written of the subject of religion. It is still my unwavering opinion. 

Hi,    Loathe to go over the same old ground John but I find this kind of post at best very unhelpful and at worst extremely hurtful. I don't deny that for many people religion is a very bad experience but for many it is a positive thing. I'm not expecting you to agree. I just find it difficult to ignore this kind of post when it goes so much against my own experiences x

My response is as follows: 

Hi,

     nobody can deny the personal experience that you get from religion and nobody can deny you your opinion, likewise me. My opinion is based on historical evidence that stretches back through the centuries and across the planet. Through the ages religion has a track record of persecuting those who dare to be different, even today religion is fighting a rearguard battle against gays, lesbians, birth control, and abortion, we have the “morality police” in Iran arresting and beating those whose dress code and behaviour doesn't fit their norm, and in that land of the free America, some family planning clinics have to have armed guards to protect their clients from violence and abuse from the faithful.

     As you run your finger across a map of the world lingering at points of extreme violence, you invariably find there is a religious split and no religion is exempt from the bloodshed. Even those nice, respect for all life, Buddhists, at this moment in time are marauding through Burma killing Muslims and burning their property. Not so long ago in the Balkans, the Catholic Croatians brutally “cleansed” their new country of Muslims and the Orthodox Christians did likewise in Serbia and so it goes on. All of them quite prepared to kill in the name of their peace loving god.

     Let's not forget what the Jews are doing today, to the Muslim Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank.

      The scandals of physical and sexual abuse of children in the care of the Catholic Church, is not an new phenomenon it has been part and parcel of that institution for as far back as you wish to go. According to Sarah Ruden in her book, Paul Among the People: in the first chapter of Paul's Letter to the Romans, the Apostle severely criticized pedophiles as well as homosexuals for their unnatural, cruel, and rebellious acts against God and humanity. The date and name slip my mind at the moment but I believe it was in the 17 century the Pope of that day called for all those priests who sexually abuse young children, to be driven from the Church. In 1871, in Australia, a young nun, Mary Mackillop, witnessed a pedophile priest molesting a boy. When she reported it to the Catholic hierarchy, they threw her out of the convent and excommunicated her.

     All the good deeds that are done on this planet can be done by ordinary people without the need of all powerful Gods, who invariably cause divisions. Hierarchy and tradition stifle freedom of thought and action. Over the years I have written quite a few articles on on religion, all of them critical, and at the age of 79 I have in no way changed my opinion, I still see religion as one of the main causes of division and violence on this planet. Yes there are other institutions that have savaged humanity, that in no way mitigates the damage done by religion, it merely lumps them together.

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The Most Effective Cops Don't Wear Uniforms.

         The most effective cop doesn’t wear a uniform, the most effective cop is in your head. Today the population, to a great extent, has been domesticated, where individuals have animals to do their bidding, so the state has citizens to do its bidding. We have been domesticated from birth by the education system, the pattern is planted, obey the teacher, obey the authority, abide by the rules and you will go through the system unmolested, abide by the law and you be fine. The mould has been set and is firm and strong, go to school, carry that obedience through to your work place, respect authority, don’t rock the boat, just conform. Of course when the few don’t, and those who haven’t succumbed to the conditioning, start to think for themselves, then that’s when the more brutal conditioning comes in, the appearance of the uniform, the baton, the tear gas, the controlled cages, etc.. This whole system of conditioned domestication relies on fear, there has to be that shadow hanging over you, there has to be that dark place waiting for you if you disobey, that’s the duty of the systems minders, the cops, the judicial system and its isolated cages. It is extremely difficult to act as a freethinking individual when you are conditioned from birth, when your value structure has a foundation of respect for authority. Respect should never be an obligation, it should be something that is earned by verifiable evidence. There is no other purpose for the police than to protect the wealth and power of those in authority, to keep the system running as it is, unequal, unjust, and exploitative. Yes there may be spin-off, they may catch a rapist, or a paedophile, but that is incidental to their real purpose. In all probability the catching of a rapists will be done with less violence that breaking up a peaceful protest about an injustice in society.
       If we want to be a society of freethinking individuals, we have to get rid of the cops in our heads, expel them, we have to see the real purpose of the uniformed cops, only then will we able to challenge the injustices of this greed driven system of corruption, only then will we be able to create that better world for all, only then can we be our own person.

 

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

 

Robots.

Robots.

With spin doctors now in full flight

we've entered a new era, a brand new age,

no need to think just follow the plan

experts will guide you through the difficult stage,

soon dear consumer, you'll see the light.

Let fashion gurus dictate you style

the colour the length where to be seen

the music you buy the games you play

who to worship from the silver screen

the latest icon, just for a while.

The media teaches us all we need know

of scandal and sport, crime and sex

who slept with who and where,

who kiss and tell just for the cheques,

depicting society as a smutty peep-show.

Mindless telly invades your home

banal boring bromide, clichéd crap

trifling trite trivia and petty pulp

sport, sex and violence always on tap,

churning your brain to a frothy foam.

Programmers with programmes you must pursue

specialists have advice you must take,

freethinking at all costs must be avoided

spontaneity is obviously a mistake

our Leader's voice the only view.

Each of us, a programmed dual-purpose robot

some to serve, some to produce,

all to function as constant consumers

our first, our last, our only use

in this cabal of cambist's insidious plot.

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