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I’m slightly concerned, truth be told.
We’ve had lately in the news stories about “Huntley’s Voodoo Rituals!”, “Immigrant Influx Threat” (casually ignoring that Germany has almost double our “influx) and the standard mix of banal sex-stories from soap actors and xenophobic propaganda to keep you sated and numb.
But we haven’t had a really good “YOU COULD DIE!!!” story for a couple months, which means we’re about overdue for one round about now. Especially with Xmas and the traditional “Goodwill towards all men” feeling that seasonally affects us into taking a moment from our most-money/largest-house/over-sized-SUV pursuits.
Charities report a seasonal rise in donations and volunteers in the lead up to Xmas and the holiday seasons.
And we can’t have our nation thinking about the world around them and actually being concerned about the state of things.
Nope, far better to remind us of the imminent deathbombplot being hatched by wild-eyed TERRORISTS in a darkened Kasbah near you.
You gotta have that aura of fear and suspicion, otherwise we might stop hording bottled water and canned goods for a moment and, rubbing our eyes as if awakening from a particularly B-movie-cheap nightmare, turn to each other and say “Hey hang on a minute, there is no huge worldwide plot to kill us in our beds and rapecrime our kids…we were lied to!”
And if we did that, we might stop ghoulishly working ourselves up into a frenzy of fear and hate and realise that our government exists to serve us, to represent our desires and emotions. Not to tell us how to live and how hard to work, how old we have to be before we can step off the treadmill – but to operate purely to serve us and in what’s best for us.
That’s what seems to confuse some people. Tony Blair doesn’t tell us what’s best for us because he’s all-knowledgeable and omnipotent.
He is Prime Minister because he won his party’s Copularity Pontest and we were sick of 10+ years of Tory repression.
Timing, that’s all it was. Fortuitous timing that has led us into a false war against a non-existent enemy for factually wrong reasons, with a gutless, bullied-by-the-USA smiling insincere arrogant coward refusenik as our elected leader.
Elected.
We chose him. He didn’t decide he was best and would take his turn.
And we can just as easily un-elect him. We, the people, have ultimate power.
But that’s where the smokescreen and diversions take hold the strongest – to make you feel helpless, stupid and powerless to do anything.
“Well what’s the point? We can’t do anything. It’s over with now, move on please, this is boring” is the usual weary mantra I’m faced with when I spout off yet again about the lies, manipulation and distortions that led the United Kingdom into a phony war against a country with no air-force, a pathetic army that put up zero resistance AGAIN, missiles you can’t aim that were supplied by us anyway, a handful of tanks and no infrastructure to speak of because we’ve been “strategically” bombing them since 1992, as well as sanctions that, in the words of Condaleeza Rice in 1999 “are preventing Iraq from obtaining any sort of weapons systems”.
Except you can do something.
Most people here won’t remember the Poll Tax riots that were integral to Thatcher’s downfall.
Council Tax was based on the property. If you lived in Band A, you paid X amount, Band B was Y amount and so on.
Thatcher introduced The Poll Tax, which taxed a household on the number of people living in that property.
So a house in a run-down area of Liverpool with 8 people living in, because the poorer strata of society tend towards larger families, paid more in tax than some immense property in London that had only 2 yuppies in.
And there was outrage, anger and fury. That ended in riots in London, shortly afterwards the Poll Tax was banished.
I refused to pay and was threatened with court action, I refused and it went to court. Along with hundreds of other cases. And was dismissed.
So you, Average Brit, do have power.
Immense power, it resides in each and every single one of you.
But this government, just as the last, is doing everything in it’s power to erode that, to make you servile and stupid, too meek to stand up and point at the podium shouting “I won’t accept that” and taking to the streets to change things.
Trade Unions are being dismantled from under your nose. And I never thought I would live to see that day when a Labour Government would threaten arbitration when faced with Industrial action during the Fireman’s Strike.
Labour against Unions?
New Labour = Same Old Horseshit.
Nothing changes, only the face in the window. The decisions, powerbase, whatever you want to call it remains the same whether it be Labour or Tory, as The Who sang “Meet the new boss, same as the old”.
Just keep us stupid, afraid and indoors watching pointless tv shows and peering through our curtains at anybody that doesn’t look like you or your nice white middle-class relatives.
Feeling helpless and impotent? That’s easy, you can vote on your favourite tv show to affect the outcome. See! You do have power!
They even had make a “Vote to Decide” show to get people interested in national buildings of important, because otherwise we just don’t care enough.
You can vote for who is to be the next Poptart shoved down your throat for 15 mins until the next one rolls along!
You can vote for some nobody to be evicted from a house, leaving one eventual winner to be featured weekly in HEY! Or WOW! Or FANTASTIC! Magazine, where a 5-page colour spread will bring you the intimate details of their mundane, desperate existence and give you the illusion that it matters.
Which is all well and good.
Until you realise that more people voted for a stuttering eunuch that did shoddy cover versions of songs you hated the first 5 times they were covered than voted for who was to lead the country and make decisions that affect your life.
I’ll let you read that again and let it sink in.
More people voted for a Karaoke Dancing Bear than in the by-elections.
And you wonder why I loathe idiot tv shows so much?
”It’s just a programme, let it go. It doesn’t hurt you, ignore it”
It does hurt me.
Because those self-same morons that watch that tripe are the ones that couldn’t be arsed to vote for issues that will affect my life/income/outcome.
And that makes me angry. The fact that 16 million people watch Coronation Street/Eastenders, yet the news has an average viewing figure of about 2 million.
That should indicate that something is very wrong here folks.
Alarm bells should be ringing somewhere in the Logic-Room of your brain, making you look around nervously like Shaun standing outside The Winchester when he realises he’s surrounded by zombies.
But it doesn’t.
We blindly charge forward actually believing the antics of a retard footballer and his ex-popstar wife matter in life, we consume the grisly details of child murder trials in newspapers, we happily watch Z-list “celebs” trying to breathe life into their gone-careers by voyeuristically watching (oh, and VOTING!!!, mustn’t forget that part) nothing more than performing seals balancing balls on their nose for fish.
The only time we seem to take an interest in “real life” is when the media decide it’s time for our periodic frighteners story, then we huddle with our families (that we usually acknowledge in passing between dinner and bedtime) and whisper “It’ll be ok won’t it?”, whilst getting turned on by being scared.
It’s the oldest thrill in the world, it’s why rollercoasters and horror movies are great.
Because we like being scared and coming out the other side into daylight, wiping our palms on our trousers and sighing with relief.
And the media is all too happy to provide us with those tingly fears and provide the Government with a means to keep us cowering inside and too scared to realise it’s a lie so we don’t question what they do.
Was anybody (with the exception of a couple of folks here) stupid enough to actually believe tanks at Heathrow were anything other than sheepdogs, herding us back into the pen?
Or how about those endless “intelligence warnings about possible strikes” when we started mooing a bit too loudly in the run-up to the decision to invade a country that never once in history acted aggressively towards us?
Why did they suddenly stop once the “shock and awe” was underway and we all rushed home to watch grainy, green night-light shots of fireworks and pretty explosions? Surely, or maybe it’s just me here, surely the threat of attack would increase once we started bombing a country notorious for it’s self-believe and pride?
Yet…wow…not a single solitary incident…I’m shocked.
But also confused, I’m getting mixed signals here.
Blair told us that Iraq and Eviltyranthitlermadmană was a massive, immediate, severe threat with weapons capable of being deployed within 45 mins (sorry Campbell, but your odious lies aside, that’s what we were told. David Kelly died trying to prove that point). We were led to believe there were hundreds of fanatical Muslim terrorist sleeper-cells waiting to death us.
Except? Oh, nope wait a minute whilst I check…nope, nothing happened at all anywhere.
If you don’t count the tons of ordinance dropped and thousands of civilians killed, but I’m talking about nothing happening here to us nice Whities.
But I saw on the news central London being closed off for “practice drills” with people dressed in not-at-all-frightening-looking chemical attack suits carrying white folks out on stretchers.
I remember The Daily Mail with a massive skull & crossbones front page with “RICIN TERROR ALERT”.
I remember mini politburo broadcasts with a friendly voiceover soothingly telling us that we would be receiving a leaflet telling us what to do in the occurrence of a terrorist attack but “not to worry” (mixed signals here again for this civilian).
Yet this all stopped cold the moment a grinning Bush appeared on the flightdeck of a heroically patriotic aircraft carrier telling us, last May, that “We won”.
So did all these murdering fanatical Arabs suddenly not want to kill us now we had invaded a sovereign nation without provocation and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent folk we had come to liberate?
Yep.
Phew! Thank christ for democracy!
It all just went away overnight, these steely-eyed darkies no longer wished to slit our throats and move in next door.
Hooray for Operation Free Iraq.
Now, instead of a HAL-voiced assurance that “it would be ok” from our Government warning of terrorist deathkorankillplots?
We can watch poorly acted dramas about terrorism, with heroic Westerners narrowly avoiding evil Muslim plots (The Grid? A non-sensational blurring of reality there).
Isn’t is reassuring to know instead of having to stack bottles of mineral water (not French though, they didn’t back the “war” remember?) and make bombshelters from tins of canned ham, we can order our cheese-crust filled, extra cheese pizza and watch soap operas again!!!
Unless, of course, you happen to kidnapped and beheaded. Or a soldier blown up by “rebels”. Or an Iraqi civilian with no fresh water even now, or the possibility the males in your family will be sent to prison where they can possibly be sexually assaulted and photographed by your Liberators.
Or one of the 100+ Iraqis killed & injured last week by a bomb in a marketplace (shame no whites were injured or beheaded, might have warranted a story on the news instead of a rolling banner giving the bare facts).
So with people still having the audacity to be questioning the reasons for invading Iraq, (we wont talk about$ 1.2 billion contracts awarded to Halliburton for the rebuilding of a country we destroyed for no reason at all, whilst native Iraqi contracts are capped at $150,000), being rude enough to still be asking why Blair is sending Black Watch to assist the Americans whilst also talking about disbanding the regiment, whilst having the sheer gall to ask why the fact that the CIA backed report states in clear, legalese jargon that there never were WMD in existence in any state has merited zero coverage in the papers?
I’m thinking any day soon we’ll be warned of a new, imminent and serious dangerkillbombterror plot/narrowly foiled attack that will strengthen our resolve and wish “our boys” luck in a war they never asked for, to secure a land where the residents hate them for invading without provocation.
Because the more skittish the herd gets, the more pacifying needs to be handed out in order to feed us, burp us and send us back for our nap whilst the grownups do big important things.
We’ve had lately in the news stories about “Huntley’s Voodoo Rituals!”, “Immigrant Influx Threat” (casually ignoring that Germany has almost double our “influx) and the standard mix of banal sex-stories from soap actors and xenophobic propaganda to keep you sated and numb.
But we haven’t had a really good “YOU COULD DIE!!!” story for a couple months, which means we’re about overdue for one round about now. Especially with Xmas and the traditional “Goodwill towards all men” feeling that seasonally affects us into taking a moment from our most-money/largest-house/over-sized-SUV pursuits.
Charities report a seasonal rise in donations and volunteers in the lead up to Xmas and the holiday seasons.
And we can’t have our nation thinking about the world around them and actually being concerned about the state of things.
Nope, far better to remind us of the imminent deathbombplot being hatched by wild-eyed TERRORISTS in a darkened Kasbah near you.
You gotta have that aura of fear and suspicion, otherwise we might stop hording bottled water and canned goods for a moment and, rubbing our eyes as if awakening from a particularly B-movie-cheap nightmare, turn to each other and say “Hey hang on a minute, there is no huge worldwide plot to kill us in our beds and rapecrime our kids…we were lied to!”
And if we did that, we might stop ghoulishly working ourselves up into a frenzy of fear and hate and realise that our government exists to serve us, to represent our desires and emotions. Not to tell us how to live and how hard to work, how old we have to be before we can step off the treadmill – but to operate purely to serve us and in what’s best for us.
That’s what seems to confuse some people. Tony Blair doesn’t tell us what’s best for us because he’s all-knowledgeable and omnipotent.
He is Prime Minister because he won his party’s Copularity Pontest and we were sick of 10+ years of Tory repression.
Timing, that’s all it was. Fortuitous timing that has led us into a false war against a non-existent enemy for factually wrong reasons, with a gutless, bullied-by-the-USA smiling insincere arrogant coward refusenik as our elected leader.
Elected.
We chose him. He didn’t decide he was best and would take his turn.
And we can just as easily un-elect him. We, the people, have ultimate power.
But that’s where the smokescreen and diversions take hold the strongest – to make you feel helpless, stupid and powerless to do anything.
“Well what’s the point? We can’t do anything. It’s over with now, move on please, this is boring” is the usual weary mantra I’m faced with when I spout off yet again about the lies, manipulation and distortions that led the United Kingdom into a phony war against a country with no air-force, a pathetic army that put up zero resistance AGAIN, missiles you can’t aim that were supplied by us anyway, a handful of tanks and no infrastructure to speak of because we’ve been “strategically” bombing them since 1992, as well as sanctions that, in the words of Condaleeza Rice in 1999 “are preventing Iraq from obtaining any sort of weapons systems”.
Except you can do something.
Most people here won’t remember the Poll Tax riots that were integral to Thatcher’s downfall.
Council Tax was based on the property. If you lived in Band A, you paid X amount, Band B was Y amount and so on.
Thatcher introduced The Poll Tax, which taxed a household on the number of people living in that property.
So a house in a run-down area of Liverpool with 8 people living in, because the poorer strata of society tend towards larger families, paid more in tax than some immense property in London that had only 2 yuppies in.
And there was outrage, anger and fury. That ended in riots in London, shortly afterwards the Poll Tax was banished.
I refused to pay and was threatened with court action, I refused and it went to court. Along with hundreds of other cases. And was dismissed.
So you, Average Brit, do have power.
Immense power, it resides in each and every single one of you.
But this government, just as the last, is doing everything in it’s power to erode that, to make you servile and stupid, too meek to stand up and point at the podium shouting “I won’t accept that” and taking to the streets to change things.
Trade Unions are being dismantled from under your nose. And I never thought I would live to see that day when a Labour Government would threaten arbitration when faced with Industrial action during the Fireman’s Strike.
Labour against Unions?
New Labour = Same Old Horseshit.
Nothing changes, only the face in the window. The decisions, powerbase, whatever you want to call it remains the same whether it be Labour or Tory, as The Who sang “Meet the new boss, same as the old”.
Just keep us stupid, afraid and indoors watching pointless tv shows and peering through our curtains at anybody that doesn’t look like you or your nice white middle-class relatives.
Feeling helpless and impotent? That’s easy, you can vote on your favourite tv show to affect the outcome. See! You do have power!
They even had make a “Vote to Decide” show to get people interested in national buildings of important, because otherwise we just don’t care enough.
You can vote for who is to be the next Poptart shoved down your throat for 15 mins until the next one rolls along!
You can vote for some nobody to be evicted from a house, leaving one eventual winner to be featured weekly in HEY! Or WOW! Or FANTASTIC! Magazine, where a 5-page colour spread will bring you the intimate details of their mundane, desperate existence and give you the illusion that it matters.
Which is all well and good.
Until you realise that more people voted for a stuttering eunuch that did shoddy cover versions of songs you hated the first 5 times they were covered than voted for who was to lead the country and make decisions that affect your life.
I’ll let you read that again and let it sink in.
More people voted for a Karaoke Dancing Bear than in the by-elections.
And you wonder why I loathe idiot tv shows so much?
”It’s just a programme, let it go. It doesn’t hurt you, ignore it”
It does hurt me.
Because those self-same morons that watch that tripe are the ones that couldn’t be arsed to vote for issues that will affect my life/income/outcome.
And that makes me angry. The fact that 16 million people watch Coronation Street/Eastenders, yet the news has an average viewing figure of about 2 million.
That should indicate that something is very wrong here folks.
Alarm bells should be ringing somewhere in the Logic-Room of your brain, making you look around nervously like Shaun standing outside The Winchester when he realises he’s surrounded by zombies.
But it doesn’t.
We blindly charge forward actually believing the antics of a retard footballer and his ex-popstar wife matter in life, we consume the grisly details of child murder trials in newspapers, we happily watch Z-list “celebs” trying to breathe life into their gone-careers by voyeuristically watching (oh, and VOTING!!!, mustn’t forget that part) nothing more than performing seals balancing balls on their nose for fish.
The only time we seem to take an interest in “real life” is when the media decide it’s time for our periodic frighteners story, then we huddle with our families (that we usually acknowledge in passing between dinner and bedtime) and whisper “It’ll be ok won’t it?”, whilst getting turned on by being scared.
It’s the oldest thrill in the world, it’s why rollercoasters and horror movies are great.
Because we like being scared and coming out the other side into daylight, wiping our palms on our trousers and sighing with relief.
And the media is all too happy to provide us with those tingly fears and provide the Government with a means to keep us cowering inside and too scared to realise it’s a lie so we don’t question what they do.
Was anybody (with the exception of a couple of folks here) stupid enough to actually believe tanks at Heathrow were anything other than sheepdogs, herding us back into the pen?
Or how about those endless “intelligence warnings about possible strikes” when we started mooing a bit too loudly in the run-up to the decision to invade a country that never once in history acted aggressively towards us?
Why did they suddenly stop once the “shock and awe” was underway and we all rushed home to watch grainy, green night-light shots of fireworks and pretty explosions? Surely, or maybe it’s just me here, surely the threat of attack would increase once we started bombing a country notorious for it’s self-believe and pride?
Yet…wow…not a single solitary incident…I’m shocked.
But also confused, I’m getting mixed signals here.
Blair told us that Iraq and Eviltyranthitlermadmană was a massive, immediate, severe threat with weapons capable of being deployed within 45 mins (sorry Campbell, but your odious lies aside, that’s what we were told. David Kelly died trying to prove that point). We were led to believe there were hundreds of fanatical Muslim terrorist sleeper-cells waiting to death us.
Except? Oh, nope wait a minute whilst I check…nope, nothing happened at all anywhere.
If you don’t count the tons of ordinance dropped and thousands of civilians killed, but I’m talking about nothing happening here to us nice Whities.
But I saw on the news central London being closed off for “practice drills” with people dressed in not-at-all-frightening-looking chemical attack suits carrying white folks out on stretchers.
I remember The Daily Mail with a massive skull & crossbones front page with “RICIN TERROR ALERT”.
I remember mini politburo broadcasts with a friendly voiceover soothingly telling us that we would be receiving a leaflet telling us what to do in the occurrence of a terrorist attack but “not to worry” (mixed signals here again for this civilian).
Yet this all stopped cold the moment a grinning Bush appeared on the flightdeck of a heroically patriotic aircraft carrier telling us, last May, that “We won”.
So did all these murdering fanatical Arabs suddenly not want to kill us now we had invaded a sovereign nation without provocation and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent folk we had come to liberate?
Yep.
Phew! Thank christ for democracy!
It all just went away overnight, these steely-eyed darkies no longer wished to slit our throats and move in next door.
Hooray for Operation Free Iraq.
Now, instead of a HAL-voiced assurance that “it would be ok” from our Government warning of terrorist deathkorankillplots?
We can watch poorly acted dramas about terrorism, with heroic Westerners narrowly avoiding evil Muslim plots (The Grid? A non-sensational blurring of reality there).
Isn’t is reassuring to know instead of having to stack bottles of mineral water (not French though, they didn’t back the “war” remember?) and make bombshelters from tins of canned ham, we can order our cheese-crust filled, extra cheese pizza and watch soap operas again!!!
Unless, of course, you happen to kidnapped and beheaded. Or a soldier blown up by “rebels”. Or an Iraqi civilian with no fresh water even now, or the possibility the males in your family will be sent to prison where they can possibly be sexually assaulted and photographed by your Liberators.
Or one of the 100+ Iraqis killed & injured last week by a bomb in a marketplace (shame no whites were injured or beheaded, might have warranted a story on the news instead of a rolling banner giving the bare facts).
So with people still having the audacity to be questioning the reasons for invading Iraq, (we wont talk about$ 1.2 billion contracts awarded to Halliburton for the rebuilding of a country we destroyed for no reason at all, whilst native Iraqi contracts are capped at $150,000), being rude enough to still be asking why Blair is sending Black Watch to assist the Americans whilst also talking about disbanding the regiment, whilst having the sheer gall to ask why the fact that the CIA backed report states in clear, legalese jargon that there never were WMD in existence in any state has merited zero coverage in the papers?
I’m thinking any day soon we’ll be warned of a new, imminent and serious dangerkillbombterror plot/narrowly foiled attack that will strengthen our resolve and wish “our boys” luck in a war they never asked for, to secure a land where the residents hate them for invading without provocation.
Because the more skittish the herd gets, the more pacifying needs to be handed out in order to feed us, burp us and send us back for our nap whilst the grownups do big important things.
Page:
lalakersrule wrote:
> I'm still hiding in the closet to save myself from SARS, the thing
> that was going to wipe out all of mankind. Has that gone away yet? My
> rations are running low here
Heh. I can't help but agree with what Borat said, i feel that i should care about the points you are raising goaty, but i dont really, i suppose like everyone else im more concerned about issues which affect me directly rather than what's going on in iraq.
> I'm still hiding in the closet to save myself from SARS, the thing
> that was going to wipe out all of mankind. Has that gone away yet? My
> rations are running low here
Heh. I can't help but agree with what Borat said, i feel that i should care about the points you are raising goaty, but i dont really, i suppose like everyone else im more concerned about issues which affect me directly rather than what's going on in iraq.
I'm selling dust-masks, Ł2 for a pair with the British flag on? Any takers?
I'm still hiding in the closet to save myself from SARS, the thing that was going to wipe out all of mankind. Has that gone away yet? My rations are running low here
Read every word of that, just in case you think you're talking to a few bricks and what not, modesty aside.
I keep in good contact with the news, but what worries me really, is how the news generally does tend to tell of 'what we should find interesting'.
It'd be nice to think the reason people don't watch the news because they don't want to have their intelligence insulted by a fear sided representation of planet Earth, because they know for a fact that it's much more balanced than the way it's portrayed. But I guess we're all just afraid of fear as per usual. And besides, it's best to know what's going on, even if it is so damn one-sided.
Very nice read all the same.
I keep in good contact with the news, but what worries me really, is how the news generally does tend to tell of 'what we should find interesting'.
It'd be nice to think the reason people don't watch the news because they don't want to have their intelligence insulted by a fear sided representation of planet Earth, because they know for a fact that it's much more balanced than the way it's portrayed. But I guess we're all just afraid of fear as per usual. And besides, it's best to know what's going on, even if it is so damn one-sided.
Very nice read all the same.
You're right, I think I think too much.
Let's drink beer and watch a film with Vin Diesel in!!!!!!
If we hurry, we can probably watch something about cars on Channel 5!!!!
Let's drink beer and watch a film with Vin Diesel in!!!!!!
If we hurry, we can probably watch something about cars on Channel 5!!!!
*nods*
dubblepost
I think you're thinking too hard about it all Goatface, now take this flaming torch, grab yourself a pitchfork and pull yourself on that great good versus evil bandwagon.
You're not one of them are you?
You're not one of them are you?
I’m slightly concerned, truth be told.
We’ve had lately in the news stories about “Huntley’s Voodoo Rituals!”, “Immigrant Influx Threat” (casually ignoring that Germany has almost double our “influx) and the standard mix of banal sex-stories from soap actors and xenophobic propaganda to keep you sated and numb.
But we haven’t had a really good “YOU COULD DIE!!!” story for a couple months, which means we’re about overdue for one round about now. Especially with Xmas and the traditional “Goodwill towards all men” feeling that seasonally affects us into taking a moment from our most-money/largest-house/over-sized-SUV pursuits.
Charities report a seasonal rise in donations and volunteers in the lead up to Xmas and the holiday seasons.
And we can’t have our nation thinking about the world around them and actually being concerned about the state of things.
Nope, far better to remind us of the imminent deathbombplot being hatched by wild-eyed TERRORISTS in a darkened Kasbah near you.
You gotta have that aura of fear and suspicion, otherwise we might stop hording bottled water and canned goods for a moment and, rubbing our eyes as if awakening from a particularly B-movie-cheap nightmare, turn to each other and say “Hey hang on a minute, there is no huge worldwide plot to kill us in our beds and rapecrime our kids…we were lied to!”
And if we did that, we might stop ghoulishly working ourselves up into a frenzy of fear and hate and realise that our government exists to serve us, to represent our desires and emotions. Not to tell us how to live and how hard to work, how old we have to be before we can step off the treadmill – but to operate purely to serve us and in what’s best for us.
That’s what seems to confuse some people. Tony Blair doesn’t tell us what’s best for us because he’s all-knowledgeable and omnipotent.
He is Prime Minister because he won his party’s Copularity Pontest and we were sick of 10+ years of Tory repression.
Timing, that’s all it was. Fortuitous timing that has led us into a false war against a non-existent enemy for factually wrong reasons, with a gutless, bullied-by-the-USA smiling insincere arrogant coward refusenik as our elected leader.
Elected.
We chose him. He didn’t decide he was best and would take his turn.
And we can just as easily un-elect him. We, the people, have ultimate power.
But that’s where the smokescreen and diversions take hold the strongest – to make you feel helpless, stupid and powerless to do anything.
“Well what’s the point? We can’t do anything. It’s over with now, move on please, this is boring” is the usual weary mantra I’m faced with when I spout off yet again about the lies, manipulation and distortions that led the United Kingdom into a phony war against a country with no air-force, a pathetic army that put up zero resistance AGAIN, missiles you can’t aim that were supplied by us anyway, a handful of tanks and no infrastructure to speak of because we’ve been “strategically” bombing them since 1992, as well as sanctions that, in the words of Condaleeza Rice in 1999 “are preventing Iraq from obtaining any sort of weapons systems”.
Except you can do something.
Most people here won’t remember the Poll Tax riots that were integral to Thatcher’s downfall.
Council Tax was based on the property. If you lived in Band A, you paid X amount, Band B was Y amount and so on.
Thatcher introduced The Poll Tax, which taxed a household on the number of people living in that property.
So a house in a run-down area of Liverpool with 8 people living in, because the poorer strata of society tend towards larger families, paid more in tax than some immense property in London that had only 2 yuppies in.
And there was outrage, anger and fury. That ended in riots in London, shortly afterwards the Poll Tax was banished.
I refused to pay and was threatened with court action, I refused and it went to court. Along with hundreds of other cases. And was dismissed.
So you, Average Brit, do have power.
Immense power, it resides in each and every single one of you.
But this government, just as the last, is doing everything in it’s power to erode that, to make you servile and stupid, too meek to stand up and point at the podium shouting “I won’t accept that” and taking to the streets to change things.
Trade Unions are being dismantled from under your nose. And I never thought I would live to see that day when a Labour Government would threaten arbitration when faced with Industrial action during the Fireman’s Strike.
Labour against Unions?
New Labour = Same Old Horseshit.
Nothing changes, only the face in the window. The decisions, powerbase, whatever you want to call it remains the same whether it be Labour or Tory, as The Who sang “Meet the new boss, same as the old”.
Just keep us stupid, afraid and indoors watching pointless tv shows and peering through our curtains at anybody that doesn’t look like you or your nice white middle-class relatives.
Feeling helpless and impotent? That’s easy, you can vote on your favourite tv show to affect the outcome. See! You do have power!
They even had make a “Vote to Decide” show to get people interested in national buildings of important, because otherwise we just don’t care enough.
You can vote for who is to be the next Poptart shoved down your throat for 15 mins until the next one rolls along!
You can vote for some nobody to be evicted from a house, leaving one eventual winner to be featured weekly in HEY! Or WOW! Or FANTASTIC! Magazine, where a 5-page colour spread will bring you the intimate details of their mundane, desperate existence and give you the illusion that it matters.
Which is all well and good.
Until you realise that more people voted for a stuttering eunuch that did shoddy cover versions of songs you hated the first 5 times they were covered than voted for who was to lead the country and make decisions that affect your life.
I’ll let you read that again and let it sink in.
More people voted for a Karaoke Dancing Bear than in the by-elections.
And you wonder why I loathe idiot tv shows so much?
”It’s just a programme, let it go. It doesn’t hurt you, ignore it”
It does hurt me.
Because those self-same morons that watch that tripe are the ones that couldn’t be arsed to vote for issues that will affect my life/income/outcome.
And that makes me angry. The fact that 16 million people watch Coronation Street/Eastenders, yet the news has an average viewing figure of about 2 million.
That should indicate that something is very wrong here folks.
Alarm bells should be ringing somewhere in the Logic-Room of your brain, making you look around nervously like Shaun standing outside The Winchester when he realises he’s surrounded by zombies.
But it doesn’t.
We blindly charge forward actually believing the antics of a retard footballer and his ex-popstar wife matter in life, we consume the grisly details of child murder trials in newspapers, we happily watch Z-list “celebs” trying to breathe life into their gone-careers by voyeuristically watching (oh, and VOTING!!!, mustn’t forget that part) nothing more than performing seals balancing balls on their nose for fish.
The only time we seem to take an interest in “real life” is when the media decide it’s time for our periodic frighteners story, then we huddle with our families (that we usually acknowledge in passing between dinner and bedtime) and whisper “It’ll be ok won’t it?”, whilst getting turned on by being scared.
It’s the oldest thrill in the world, it’s why rollercoasters and horror movies are great.
Because we like being scared and coming out the other side into daylight, wiping our palms on our trousers and sighing with relief.
And the media is all too happy to provide us with those tingly fears and provide the Government with a means to keep us cowering inside and too scared to realise it’s a lie so we don’t question what they do.
Was anybody (with the exception of a couple of folks here) stupid enough to actually believe tanks at Heathrow were anything other than sheepdogs, herding us back into the pen?
Or how about those endless “intelligence warnings about possible strikes” when we started mooing a bit too loudly in the run-up to the decision to invade a country that never once in history acted aggressively towards us?
Why did they suddenly stop once the “shock and awe” was underway and we all rushed home to watch grainy, green night-light shots of fireworks and pretty explosions? Surely, or maybe it’s just me here, surely the threat of attack would increase once we started bombing a country notorious for it’s self-believe and pride?
Yet…wow…not a single solitary incident…I’m shocked.
But also confused, I’m getting mixed signals here.
Blair told us that Iraq and Eviltyranthitlermadmană was a massive, immediate, severe threat with weapons capable of being deployed within 45 mins (sorry Campbell, but your odious lies aside, that’s what we were told. David Kelly died trying to prove that point). We were led to believe there were hundreds of fanatical Muslim terrorist sleeper-cells waiting to death us.
Except? Oh, nope wait a minute whilst I check…nope, nothing happened at all anywhere.
If you don’t count the tons of ordinance dropped and thousands of civilians killed, but I’m talking about nothing happening here to us nice Whities.
But I saw on the news central London being closed off for “practice drills” with people dressed in not-at-all-frightening-looking chemical attack suits carrying white folks out on stretchers.
I remember The Daily Mail with a massive skull & crossbones front page with “RICIN TERROR ALERT”.
I remember mini politburo broadcasts with a friendly voiceover soothingly telling us that we would be receiving a leaflet telling us what to do in the occurrence of a terrorist attack but “not to worry” (mixed signals here again for this civilian).
Yet this all stopped cold the moment a grinning Bush appeared on the flightdeck of a heroically patriotic aircraft carrier telling us, last May, that “We won”.
So did all these murdering fanatical Arabs suddenly not want to kill us now we had invaded a sovereign nation without provocation and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent folk we had come to liberate?
Yep.
Phew! Thank christ for democracy!
It all just went away overnight, these steely-eyed darkies no longer wished to slit our throats and move in next door.
Hooray for Operation Free Iraq.
Now, instead of a HAL-voiced assurance that “it would be ok” from our Government warning of terrorist deathkorankillplots?
We can watch poorly acted dramas about terrorism, with heroic Westerners narrowly avoiding evil Muslim plots (The Grid? A non-sensational blurring of reality there).
Isn’t is reassuring to know instead of having to stack bottles of mineral water (not French though, they didn’t back the “war” remember?) and make bombshelters from tins of canned ham, we can order our cheese-crust filled, extra cheese pizza and watch soap operas again!!!
Unless, of course, you happen to kidnapped and beheaded. Or a soldier blown up by “rebels”. Or an Iraqi civilian with no fresh water even now, or the possibility the males in your family will be sent to prison where they can possibly be sexually assaulted and photographed by your Liberators.
Or one of the 100+ Iraqis killed & injured last week by a bomb in a marketplace (shame no whites were injured or beheaded, might have warranted a story on the news instead of a rolling banner giving the bare facts).
So with people still having the audacity to be questioning the reasons for invading Iraq, (we wont talk about$ 1.2 billion contracts awarded to Halliburton for the rebuilding of a country we destroyed for no reason at all, whilst native Iraqi contracts are capped at $150,000), being rude enough to still be asking why Blair is sending Black Watch to assist the Americans whilst also talking about disbanding the regiment, whilst having the sheer gall to ask why the fact that the CIA backed report states in clear, legalese jargon that there never were WMD in existence in any state has merited zero coverage in the papers?
I’m thinking any day soon we’ll be warned of a new, imminent and serious dangerkillbombterror plot/narrowly foiled attack that will strengthen our resolve and wish “our boys” luck in a war they never asked for, to secure a land where the residents hate them for invading without provocation.
Because the more skittish the herd gets, the more pacifying needs to be handed out in order to feed us, burp us and send us back for our nap whilst the grownups do big important things.
We’ve had lately in the news stories about “Huntley’s Voodoo Rituals!”, “Immigrant Influx Threat” (casually ignoring that Germany has almost double our “influx) and the standard mix of banal sex-stories from soap actors and xenophobic propaganda to keep you sated and numb.
But we haven’t had a really good “YOU COULD DIE!!!” story for a couple months, which means we’re about overdue for one round about now. Especially with Xmas and the traditional “Goodwill towards all men” feeling that seasonally affects us into taking a moment from our most-money/largest-house/over-sized-SUV pursuits.
Charities report a seasonal rise in donations and volunteers in the lead up to Xmas and the holiday seasons.
And we can’t have our nation thinking about the world around them and actually being concerned about the state of things.
Nope, far better to remind us of the imminent deathbombplot being hatched by wild-eyed TERRORISTS in a darkened Kasbah near you.
You gotta have that aura of fear and suspicion, otherwise we might stop hording bottled water and canned goods for a moment and, rubbing our eyes as if awakening from a particularly B-movie-cheap nightmare, turn to each other and say “Hey hang on a minute, there is no huge worldwide plot to kill us in our beds and rapecrime our kids…we were lied to!”
And if we did that, we might stop ghoulishly working ourselves up into a frenzy of fear and hate and realise that our government exists to serve us, to represent our desires and emotions. Not to tell us how to live and how hard to work, how old we have to be before we can step off the treadmill – but to operate purely to serve us and in what’s best for us.
That’s what seems to confuse some people. Tony Blair doesn’t tell us what’s best for us because he’s all-knowledgeable and omnipotent.
He is Prime Minister because he won his party’s Copularity Pontest and we were sick of 10+ years of Tory repression.
Timing, that’s all it was. Fortuitous timing that has led us into a false war against a non-existent enemy for factually wrong reasons, with a gutless, bullied-by-the-USA smiling insincere arrogant coward refusenik as our elected leader.
Elected.
We chose him. He didn’t decide he was best and would take his turn.
And we can just as easily un-elect him. We, the people, have ultimate power.
But that’s where the smokescreen and diversions take hold the strongest – to make you feel helpless, stupid and powerless to do anything.
“Well what’s the point? We can’t do anything. It’s over with now, move on please, this is boring” is the usual weary mantra I’m faced with when I spout off yet again about the lies, manipulation and distortions that led the United Kingdom into a phony war against a country with no air-force, a pathetic army that put up zero resistance AGAIN, missiles you can’t aim that were supplied by us anyway, a handful of tanks and no infrastructure to speak of because we’ve been “strategically” bombing them since 1992, as well as sanctions that, in the words of Condaleeza Rice in 1999 “are preventing Iraq from obtaining any sort of weapons systems”.
Except you can do something.
Most people here won’t remember the Poll Tax riots that were integral to Thatcher’s downfall.
Council Tax was based on the property. If you lived in Band A, you paid X amount, Band B was Y amount and so on.
Thatcher introduced The Poll Tax, which taxed a household on the number of people living in that property.
So a house in a run-down area of Liverpool with 8 people living in, because the poorer strata of society tend towards larger families, paid more in tax than some immense property in London that had only 2 yuppies in.
And there was outrage, anger and fury. That ended in riots in London, shortly afterwards the Poll Tax was banished.
I refused to pay and was threatened with court action, I refused and it went to court. Along with hundreds of other cases. And was dismissed.
So you, Average Brit, do have power.
Immense power, it resides in each and every single one of you.
But this government, just as the last, is doing everything in it’s power to erode that, to make you servile and stupid, too meek to stand up and point at the podium shouting “I won’t accept that” and taking to the streets to change things.
Trade Unions are being dismantled from under your nose. And I never thought I would live to see that day when a Labour Government would threaten arbitration when faced with Industrial action during the Fireman’s Strike.
Labour against Unions?
New Labour = Same Old Horseshit.
Nothing changes, only the face in the window. The decisions, powerbase, whatever you want to call it remains the same whether it be Labour or Tory, as The Who sang “Meet the new boss, same as the old”.
Just keep us stupid, afraid and indoors watching pointless tv shows and peering through our curtains at anybody that doesn’t look like you or your nice white middle-class relatives.
Feeling helpless and impotent? That’s easy, you can vote on your favourite tv show to affect the outcome. See! You do have power!
They even had make a “Vote to Decide” show to get people interested in national buildings of important, because otherwise we just don’t care enough.
You can vote for who is to be the next Poptart shoved down your throat for 15 mins until the next one rolls along!
You can vote for some nobody to be evicted from a house, leaving one eventual winner to be featured weekly in HEY! Or WOW! Or FANTASTIC! Magazine, where a 5-page colour spread will bring you the intimate details of their mundane, desperate existence and give you the illusion that it matters.
Which is all well and good.
Until you realise that more people voted for a stuttering eunuch that did shoddy cover versions of songs you hated the first 5 times they were covered than voted for who was to lead the country and make decisions that affect your life.
I’ll let you read that again and let it sink in.
More people voted for a Karaoke Dancing Bear than in the by-elections.
And you wonder why I loathe idiot tv shows so much?
”It’s just a programme, let it go. It doesn’t hurt you, ignore it”
It does hurt me.
Because those self-same morons that watch that tripe are the ones that couldn’t be arsed to vote for issues that will affect my life/income/outcome.
And that makes me angry. The fact that 16 million people watch Coronation Street/Eastenders, yet the news has an average viewing figure of about 2 million.
That should indicate that something is very wrong here folks.
Alarm bells should be ringing somewhere in the Logic-Room of your brain, making you look around nervously like Shaun standing outside The Winchester when he realises he’s surrounded by zombies.
But it doesn’t.
We blindly charge forward actually believing the antics of a retard footballer and his ex-popstar wife matter in life, we consume the grisly details of child murder trials in newspapers, we happily watch Z-list “celebs” trying to breathe life into their gone-careers by voyeuristically watching (oh, and VOTING!!!, mustn’t forget that part) nothing more than performing seals balancing balls on their nose for fish.
The only time we seem to take an interest in “real life” is when the media decide it’s time for our periodic frighteners story, then we huddle with our families (that we usually acknowledge in passing between dinner and bedtime) and whisper “It’ll be ok won’t it?”, whilst getting turned on by being scared.
It’s the oldest thrill in the world, it’s why rollercoasters and horror movies are great.
Because we like being scared and coming out the other side into daylight, wiping our palms on our trousers and sighing with relief.
And the media is all too happy to provide us with those tingly fears and provide the Government with a means to keep us cowering inside and too scared to realise it’s a lie so we don’t question what they do.
Was anybody (with the exception of a couple of folks here) stupid enough to actually believe tanks at Heathrow were anything other than sheepdogs, herding us back into the pen?
Or how about those endless “intelligence warnings about possible strikes” when we started mooing a bit too loudly in the run-up to the decision to invade a country that never once in history acted aggressively towards us?
Why did they suddenly stop once the “shock and awe” was underway and we all rushed home to watch grainy, green night-light shots of fireworks and pretty explosions? Surely, or maybe it’s just me here, surely the threat of attack would increase once we started bombing a country notorious for it’s self-believe and pride?
Yet…wow…not a single solitary incident…I’m shocked.
But also confused, I’m getting mixed signals here.
Blair told us that Iraq and Eviltyranthitlermadmană was a massive, immediate, severe threat with weapons capable of being deployed within 45 mins (sorry Campbell, but your odious lies aside, that’s what we were told. David Kelly died trying to prove that point). We were led to believe there were hundreds of fanatical Muslim terrorist sleeper-cells waiting to death us.
Except? Oh, nope wait a minute whilst I check…nope, nothing happened at all anywhere.
If you don’t count the tons of ordinance dropped and thousands of civilians killed, but I’m talking about nothing happening here to us nice Whities.
But I saw on the news central London being closed off for “practice drills” with people dressed in not-at-all-frightening-looking chemical attack suits carrying white folks out on stretchers.
I remember The Daily Mail with a massive skull & crossbones front page with “RICIN TERROR ALERT”.
I remember mini politburo broadcasts with a friendly voiceover soothingly telling us that we would be receiving a leaflet telling us what to do in the occurrence of a terrorist attack but “not to worry” (mixed signals here again for this civilian).
Yet this all stopped cold the moment a grinning Bush appeared on the flightdeck of a heroically patriotic aircraft carrier telling us, last May, that “We won”.
So did all these murdering fanatical Arabs suddenly not want to kill us now we had invaded a sovereign nation without provocation and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent folk we had come to liberate?
Yep.
Phew! Thank christ for democracy!
It all just went away overnight, these steely-eyed darkies no longer wished to slit our throats and move in next door.
Hooray for Operation Free Iraq.
Now, instead of a HAL-voiced assurance that “it would be ok” from our Government warning of terrorist deathkorankillplots?
We can watch poorly acted dramas about terrorism, with heroic Westerners narrowly avoiding evil Muslim plots (The Grid? A non-sensational blurring of reality there).
Isn’t is reassuring to know instead of having to stack bottles of mineral water (not French though, they didn’t back the “war” remember?) and make bombshelters from tins of canned ham, we can order our cheese-crust filled, extra cheese pizza and watch soap operas again!!!
Unless, of course, you happen to kidnapped and beheaded. Or a soldier blown up by “rebels”. Or an Iraqi civilian with no fresh water even now, or the possibility the males in your family will be sent to prison where they can possibly be sexually assaulted and photographed by your Liberators.
Or one of the 100+ Iraqis killed & injured last week by a bomb in a marketplace (shame no whites were injured or beheaded, might have warranted a story on the news instead of a rolling banner giving the bare facts).
So with people still having the audacity to be questioning the reasons for invading Iraq, (we wont talk about$ 1.2 billion contracts awarded to Halliburton for the rebuilding of a country we destroyed for no reason at all, whilst native Iraqi contracts are capped at $150,000), being rude enough to still be asking why Blair is sending Black Watch to assist the Americans whilst also talking about disbanding the regiment, whilst having the sheer gall to ask why the fact that the CIA backed report states in clear, legalese jargon that there never were WMD in existence in any state has merited zero coverage in the papers?
I’m thinking any day soon we’ll be warned of a new, imminent and serious dangerkillbombterror plot/narrowly foiled attack that will strengthen our resolve and wish “our boys” luck in a war they never asked for, to secure a land where the residents hate them for invading without provocation.
Because the more skittish the herd gets, the more pacifying needs to be handed out in order to feed us, burp us and send us back for our nap whilst the grownups do big important things.
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