Friday 3rd of May 2024
Home » Blogs » John Richardson's blog

the mask of anarchy .....

the mask of anarchy .....

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number.

Shake your chains to earth like dew.

Which in sleep has fallen on you.

Ye are many - they are few.

These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don't think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spread sheet.

Born of the "never again" spirit of 1945, social democracy in Britain has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1 trillion of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described "financiers" as the nation's "great example" and his personal "inspiration".

This is not to say Parliamentary politics is meaningless. They have one meaning now: the replacement of democracy by a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born. The old myths of British rectitude, imperial in origin, provided false comfort while the Blair gang, assisted by venal MPs, finished Thatcher's work and built the foundation of the present "coalition". This is led by a former PR man for an asset stripper and by a bagman who will inherit his knighthood and the tax-avoided fortune of his father, the 17th Baronet of Ballentaylor. David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder.

Today, they are claiming 21st century Britain and imposing their vicious, antique ideology, albeit served as economic snake oil. Their designs have nothing to do with a "deficit crisis". A deficit of 10 per cent is not remotely a crisis. When Britain was officially bankrupt at the end of the second world war, the government built its greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service and the great arts edifices of London's South Bank.

There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a "public spending review". The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that's beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a "shock doctrine" as applied to Pinochet's Chile and Yeltsin's Russia.

In Britain, there is no need for tanks in the streets. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms it is said to hold dear, bourgeois Britain has allowed parliament to create a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. Powers of arrest and detention have never been greater. The police have the impunity to kill; asylum seekers can be "restrained" to death on commercial flights and should fellow passengers object, anti-terrorism laws will deal with them. Abroad, British militarism colludes with torturers and death squads.

The Party Game Is Over. Stand And Fight

the quiet revolution

Yes John,

John Pilger is right.

We've been conned and of all things we know it and knew it. We love our comfortable slippers too much... The salvation of banks with largess of stimulus — especially in the US and in Europe — was indecent, as IF the money was going to "trickle down" to the little fellow down in the street... But the rescue and our moral outrage at bankers bonuses gave the illusion of something being done in our best interest to avoid a full-blown revolution. Only in Australia was the government "decent enough" to offer a cash liferaft to the little fellow and gave the banks zip but a garantee of savings. Living in the "age of Deceit", (see there) the media massages our brains to accept the unacceptable — by the media force-feeding "entertainment" and pre-digested "news" down our gullet. We're like geese fed for our fat livers. In all countries the media is an anesthetic/drug that streamlines our wants and mulches our dreams...

But these days, social unrest is "difficult as we know it can hurt". Especially our comfort. We could hurt, even kill, innocent people and ourselves in the process, while the rich are rich enough to fly away in their private jets to come back when the dust has settle over the corpse of this illusion of democracy — to rummage through the debris and collect the good glittering left-overs for their private lairs.

The only way to beat this ugly beast would be to organise a quiet revolution...

Everyone, in the "working class" needs to be "prepared... We starts to store enough food and warm clothes for at least six month, and get tents, candles, solar generators, windmills — and knowledge. Everyone makes sure one has a large trolley (shopping trolleys are basically useless) per person to carry everything "by hand" — all this while still working and paying mortgages as if nothing was ever brewing.

And then on the same day — say the twenty-first of June 2012 — everyone stops working. Everyone removes their cash from banks... All that money is either buried or burnt.

No more movement of cash.

NO mortgage is paid, NO single loan is repaid. Everthing STOPS. No paper is read, No TV is watched. No transport, nothing. Everything goes quiet. Electricity supply is disrupted. Survellance cameras do not work.

The police and then the army is sent to evict people from their homes and all morgagees are evicted except the owners who do not pay their rates anymore. Owners can provide shelter. Some of us squat. No one pays anything... Everyone is self-sufficient for six months. Those who are not entirely prepared can be helped by sharing with others, but slackers and leeches are not welcome.

The system melts slowly, The profiteers cannot profit.

But we are too fragmented in our ideals. We all have prejudices, religious beliefs and huge amount of greed and envy in our hearts. We have to excise these from ourselves. That would be the hardest thing to do and the powers in charge would make sure we failed in this quest. They would sow bickering and discord easily by making offer of poisoned sweets to the weakest amongst us.

The only thing that could unite us would be the concept of "protection of the planet". Reduce our foot-prints. Manage our now low resources better... and since our consumption would be more "down to earth", we would have far less wastes to deal with. Recycle the crap. Monoculture intensive farms would be taken over and replaced with meadows and "multi-farming" without any insecticides, pesticides, herbicides nor fertilizers. Trees would be allowed to re-grow in forests.

NO money. No barter. Just sharing the basics without going through the gouging system.

Just fully accept the intent to stop destroying the earth.

Sure we would be at the mercy of other ruthless bastard nation. But we'd made sure this would be a truly international movement.

That's why the powerful are trying hard to tell us there is nothing to worry about "global warming" or "loss of biodiversity" as they tell us these are "natural cycles if they really happen which they're not". Yes, the threats are not real — only lies by idealist scientists who want to take over the world and destroy the good old carbon industry...

Fight the cotton wool, baby. Fight the TV induced torpor. Fight our own greed. Our heart does not bleed enough for the earth. This would need madness and courage. And courage is often the madness of going in the wrong direction to achieve something far better. Something deserving.

We need to be angry though — so angry — that we do not go into a rage, but rise to an arrested calm of sharing enlightenment.

Then, we'd be truly human.