Two men looking pleased with themselves.
I have thought hard before deciding to post this. It probably won't win me many new friends......
Part One
Coldplay are an unusual band, being one of the few relatively contemporary groups whose music is immediately recognisable to me. I almost like them - or so I thought.
A few weeks ago, I noticed a programme based on their 2012 World Tour. I casually turned on, thinking it might be worth a peek. I had only been watching for a few minutes, however, when an acute sense of irritation began to descend on me. It was partly the needless jumping and prancing about on stage, plus the obsession with daubing luminous paint over everything. But the main feeling of unease came from elsewhere. It slowly dawned on me. This all reminded me of a Hitler Youth rally.
Surely I was wrong. After all, this is a right on, save-the-rainforest band, with some good melodies and lots of nice fans. But the dynamic was unmistakeable. Thirty thousand arms waving in mindless unison at the beck and call of the great leaders on the stage. 'Feeling happy?' 'Yes' the reply from thirty thousand voices. 'I can't hear you.' 'YE-E-E-S!' The usual stuff. The crowds and the heroes did their bit in Paris. Then we went to Glastonbury, where it was just the same. I switched off and went to bed.
In the end, it's not personal views and opinions, personal takes on life, that matter so much. It's the type, the quality (I hesitate to use the word 'level') of consciousness that is primary. And the quality of consciousness here on show was immediately recognisable - the same as that accessed and exploited by Adolf Hitler.
It reminded me of an episode related in Jay Stevens's superlative book 'Storming Heaven', involving Ken 'One-Flew-Over-the-Cuckoo's-Nest' Kesey. More than Tim Leary ever did, Kesey promoted the LSD-for-everyone-with-lashings-of-rock-music motif. Late in 1965, he attended a Beatles concert in San Francisco. The Beatles were the thing: less than two years later, in one of those stupid moments that fatally overcame him from time to time, Leary pronounced them 'the four evangelists'. Anticipating an overwhelmingly inspirational experience, Kesey was instead shocked to find thousands of teenyboppers screaming their heads off in a completely mindless kind of way. Kesey's own adventures focussed on releasing the group mind, homo gestalt, a linked-up consciousness, but not of this type. For him, the event brought to mind cancer; this was the negative side of homo gestalt, for sure. Soon afterwards, Ken was invited to speak at an enormous anti-Vietnam war protest. The group, the crowd, reminded him of his Beatles epiphany. Expecting a stirring, indignant invective, the organisers of the rally were undoubtedly shocked when, instead, Kesey pulled out a harmonica and sang 'Home on the Range'. 'I'm Me!.... that's the cry of the ego, and that's the cry of this rally...... Yep, you're playing their game.'
Part Two
It is slightly over a year since Labour MP for Glasgow South Tom Harris was forced to resign as the party's media adviser for his spoof video comparing Adolf Hitler with Alex Salmond. As is the case in many such instances, he had a point.....
Firstly, we must rid ourselves of the assumption that we don't have nasty politicians in our modern western democratic societies. Nasty people, we are led to believe, come from faraway places - Venezuela, Iran, North Korea - and from times gone by - Attila the Hun, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin. Our own Blairs, Camerons and Salmonds, Obamas and Merkels might be mischievous, even a little naughty perhaps, but downright nasty? No, no, no.
This is actually a very clever propaganda manipulation. True, their strategies may be less overt, more subtle: it is generally recognised nowadays that sticking people in concentration camps and down salt mines is not a successful ploy. People begin to complain and start wars against you. In the modern era a more softly-softly approach normally works better.
So there is no suggestion that Mr Salmond wishes to round up all the English people in Glasgow and do unspeakable things to them. Nevertheless, the type, the quality, of consciousness is once more immediately recognisable.
Foremost is the matter of ideology. Whether it is the superiority of the Aryan race or the plight of the subjugated Scots, everything issues from the dark place of ideology. Be it fascism, communism, free market capitalism, nationalism, scientific rationalism or whatever, ideology is very convenient. Everything is now interpreted through a particular filter. You no longer have to think. Ideology is inevitably one of the most dangerous things around because you no longer need to look at what is really going on. It blinds you to reality.
In relation to Alex Salmond and his 'independence of the oppressed' hype (which, despite protestations to the contrary, is the gist), I confronted some unsavoury aspects in the post 'Faces of Glenfinnan', May 18th 2011. I looked briefly at how the abused easily becomes the abuser, how victim and perpetrator are locked into a mutually dependent and reinforcing dynamic (this theme is explored more thoroughly in John Lash's 'Not in His Image'). Circumstantial evidence suggests that Salmond's notions of 'Scotland' and 'the Scots' are abstractions. He doesn't appear to care about individual human beings north of the Border any more than does a typical politician in Westminster. He doesn't want Scotland for its individual inhabitants: he simply wants a bigger bite of the poison pie of the dark cabal, that's all.
In some respects, Salmond's programme is a curious throwback in time. Independence: a strange distraction from the real issues in urgent times, a relic of the late 1950s and 1960s, when a whole bunch of African nations clamoured for freedom from oppressive imperial powers. The result has probably been a disaster for the majority of Africans, for whom 'independence' has simply meant new (and sometimes even more ruthless) oppressors with a different skin colour. In similar vein, Mr and Mrs MacPherson of Dundee are naive in the extreme if they think independence Salmond-style would mean their having a greater say in their own affairs. Not at all. The only thing to change would be the accents of those bossing them around.
In truth, the Salmond programme may be closer to Stalin than it is to Hitler. A stark example concerns the invasion into rural areas of the windfarms. Greater pressure, it is reported, will be brought to bear by national government upon local councils in 2013 to approve windfarm proposals. This is because the Scottish government has to meet its self-imposed-upon-a-whim-and-a-soundbite targets for renewable energy. So what is being said is that the concerns and wishes of Scottish people locally need to be brushed aside for the 'greater good' of the national programme (which, in this case, largely involves multinational companies based in mainland Europe). This is what I mean by Scotland being an abstract concept. The wishes of the individual folk of places like eastern Sutherland and Caithness, who are being saturation-bombed by these environmentally-unfriendly monstrosities, are irrelevant. 'We know what is best for you. We have our targets. However, in order for us to provide you with what is best for you, some of you will have to do without some things you may like.'
This is the other curious throwback. More than once I have heard Salmond use the worrying phrase 'industrialisation of the Highlands'. Once more, his notion of industrialisation for the greater good is reminiscent of Josef Stalin's rapid industrialisation of Soviet Russia in the 1930s and 1940s, when innumerable villages and huge swathes of countryside were replaced by factories, life in huge apartment blocks, and the rest. This in itself makes a fascinating study. Salmond's idea of industrialisation is an antiquated relic involving, it would seem, heavy industry and little else. Windfarms, for sure, are just that - a remarkably crude 'solution' for a 21st century problem. Stick huge structures of metal and plastic on top of a hill and hope that the wind blows. It seems to me that Salmond and his cronies are fully paid-up members to an outdated vision of reality. In more esoteric terms, I have rarely come across a group of people as fully committed to third density existence in its grosser and more vulgar aspects. Dangerous people indeed.
