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Friday 30 January 2015

1984 'n all that....

Pale Green Vortex has always prided itself in its position (or non-position) of non-alignment. We live in troubled times, and words of wisdom will be readily welcomed whatever their source. Should Ed Miliband, David Cameron, or Nicola Sturgeon communicate words of intelligence, compassion, insight, and integrity, they will be happily embraced. We are, however, still waiting.

Labels and political -isms and -ologies are irrelevant to the style of this blog. Socialism, liberalism, communism; Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem; left-wing, right-wing. None of them work. If someone comes to me and says 'Hey, Mister Pale Green Vortex, some of your ideas seem a bit left-wing to me', I shall reply 'That's your personal take on it. Those are your own pigeon holes, which I do not personally accept. I simply say what seems at the moment to be getting nearer to the reality of things.'

Ideology is a worn-out, dangerous mask. Ideologies are products of insecurity, egos searching for an identity. I crave to know who I am, what I am, what I believe, and how it all fits together. So I go in search of my belief system. Then I can stop having to think for myself,  and I can relax. I have my own Bible of choice, which I can refer to for my views and opinions.

This desperate search for certainty in the shifting sands of being has to go, if we want to seriously get closer to the reality of things, both in terms of consciousness and of the 'outside world'. We don't need heavy sackful of beliefs to carry round with us, blinkering us to what is really going on. Any beliefs we do decide to hold, we can hold lightly, pragmatically.

So we're not playing this game of unreality, of one-size-fits-all. One aim of Pale Green Vortex is to tear asunder the constructed veils obscuring our direct vision of reality.

Bearing all this in mind, I include below a quotation from Tom Sunic (from nonalignedmedia.com), in which he succintly expresses some ideas similar to what have been occasionally put forward on Pale Green Vortex. Tom's father and sister were both sentenced to jail in the former communist Yugoslavia in 1984 (!) for communicating 'hostile propaganda'. Tom himself was granted political asylum in the USA. So he probably doesn't suffer from an anti-western bias! Nevertheless, he has been astounded at the curtailment of free speech in the west, through 'political correctness' and 'hate speech laws'. In this quote, he is talking about Canada; but he could be talking about many countries in western Europe, I feel. Including the UK.

'This is very scary stuff..... the privilege of living in the Communist Yugoslavia and the Communist Soviet Union was very simple: you could, even a person without a university degree, tell right away that this was a brutal system, that it punished people savagely..... and this was a privilege. Why? Because everybody could detect this system; it was physical, it was palpable, it was tangible. Even for a Joe Six-Pack in Communist Yugoslavia.....

Now the problem with the Canadian legislation and specifically the criminal code, or for that matter the criminal code in Germany, is that it is far better veiled in this Mickey Mouse - excuse my language - in this Mickey Mouse language full of euphemisms, full of coverage with human rights, tolerance, diversity, and you really have to be a master of the language first and a master of the psychology of the people who wrote those paragraphs in order to detect the omnipresence of this surveillance state.'

In actual fact, a lot of the time it's not even about law. The most successful form of policing is self-policing by society, and the relentless messages given out by the mainstream media.

Maybe you don't know what I'm talking about. Then you could usefully do a bit of homework. For starters, you could take the words 'racist' and 'sexist'. To be labelled a racist or sexist is one of the worst things in modern society; nobody wants it on their CV. Check out the way that these words are often used nowadays by certain sections of the media and the political/power classes. The use of these words has been severely distorted, away from the original laudable goals of providing unprejudiced, equal opportunities in life for folk regardless of their race or sex. They are more normally employed as tools of thought repression these days. You need to do your own thinking and homework, though, reader. I can't do it for you.

In the UK, I predict a concerted attack over the coming months on UKIP from certain sections of the media. Much of this will focus on trying to demonstrate that UKIP is awash with racists and sexists. Now, I have no doubt that there are plenty of slightly dodgy dudes among the UKIP people. But the whole thing is a sick joke, a piece of Orwellian thought control. Suddenly the racist UKIPpers are being pitted against the decent folk: Cameron's Tories, Miliband's Labour dudes, Clegg and his Lib Dems. To repeat, this is indeed a sick joke. These are largely people of little honour, who steadfastly come out with their own matchbox version of reality and shove it down people's throats until they will hopefully believe that is all there is to life. Disgusting people in the main, really, killers of dreams, purveyors of a crappy vision of life with a blatant disregard for truth, acting in wilful ignorance of what many people are concerned about.

Don't be deceived! Turn off your television if need be, tear up the newspapers, spend a maximum of ten minutes daily checking the 'headlines' on the internet. spend an equal amount of time with 'alternative media' - not that it's always any better than the Guardian, but at least to get a different perspective on things.

Kill an idea and it's gone. Make a viewpoint unacceptable enough and it will wither away - that's the hope, anyway. Empires and control freaks have been familiar with the tactic for centuries. The libraries at Carthage were burned, removing the accumulated wisdom, ideas and discoveries of the 'pagan' cultures forever. What did they know? We have no idea. A treasure of wisdom was lost. Similarly with the witch hunts and burnings in Europe. taking out those with special knowledge that was inconvenient to the ruling tyrants of the time. What angle on life did these non-Christians of Europe have? We don't really know. Take out the knowledge. Take out the ideas, the viewpoints, that are antithetical to the mainstream endgame. It's continuing today. 1984, over and over and over again.