Hi all, I'm sorry I haven't posted for ages, I've been very busy. I probably won't post again for ages after this, but please don't take it personally.
I think it is totally impossible for our generation to make any concerted rebellion against TPTB because we're too far down the line. This would have needed to have happened decades ago. Probably the best time was in the late 60s when there was a fair bit of radicalism on student campuses and an organised 'left' (I'm not 100% convinced that the people involved in this really had all the answers, but they were doing pretty well for the time, and had at least recognised that the establishment was corrupt). Unfortunately, all of those groups were systematically infiltrated and destroyed. There's no room for radicalism on campuses now because everyone's fucking skint.
Virtually all of the important infrastructure is owned now. Pretty much all of the important resources have been stitched up. Every single country on the earth is so vulnerable to the whim of the markets and the corporate fascist banking system that no-one can assert any form of independence from it. And that's leaving aside the fact that virtually every nation has reached the point of debt saturation (that's excluding those that have already been turned into neo-feudal vassal states). And as if that's not enough, they've also long since turned the law against the people. Think you can fight them? Try taking them on in court, and see how you get on. There's a massive legal fiction on their side that has been built up over centuries, which doesn't seem that fictional when you come up against it. We just had the LIBOR rigging scandal – conservatively hundreds of billions of dollars of systematic fraud. A genuine conspiracy involving systematic collusion by the Bank of England and numerous massive banks. No-one even faced criminal charges.
The only thing that could make a difference would be the will of the people. A huge populist rebellion; a revolution, if you will. But this is impossible because people don't have anything to rebel against. They just want a bigger slice of the cake. If you hear people complaining about government, about social issues, it will be at least 90% of the time talking about economic issues (occasionally you might hear them talking about services, but even that is economically-related).
And there is an important thing to note here. Most people don't even know what money is, so they are lambs to the slaughter when talking about these economic issues. The Tories just famously produced a party political broadcast where they lied about Britain's national debt. You can read about this here:
blogs.spectator.co.uk/fraser-nelson/2013...tains-national-debt/
They can easily get away with it because virtually no-one knows anything about it. And, of course, this is a very basic issue, it's not the systematic creation of a interdependent, worldwide banking network that controls the planet and is all fed into the Bank for International Settlements. It's just the difference between 'deficit' and 'debt'. If you can't understand the latter, what chance have you got of understanding the former?
In that sense it is impossible for there to be any significant rebellion against the social order because people don't even know that the social order exists. 99% of people don't realise that there's anything to organise against. They don't realise that they live in a fascist economic state now. Either socio-economic problems are completely misdiagnosed, or people are given completely false explanations for socio-economic phenomena, or else taught to scapegoat a certain group, or, even better, scapegoat a certain group while also engaging in one-upmanship against them. And that's just the people that are paying any form of attention. Bread and circuses are enough to see off most people.
The greatest triumph of this socio-economic system is not only having people be dependent on it – that would be a pretty big achievement in itself – but in actually making people associate their own standard of living, identity and self-esteem with products produced by it, to the degree where any other form of social order is unimaginable. How can there be any form of rebellion when people just want a better iPad, and when they get one, they're temporarily happily, until the gloss has worn off, and then they 'decide' that they want something else? Never mind the conditions that the iPad was produced in. Of course, they haven't made the decision, their desires made the decision.
"We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs" - Paul Mazur.
There's nothing to rebel against because at that point you can sit there whining about your personal economic circumstances, but your desires simply feed into the forces that are creating those very circumstances. Complaining about them makes about as much sense as shooting your own dog, and then shooting it again to try to bring it back to life.
And even those of us that do have some idea of what's going on become nearly as bad because it reaches the point where you can't survive without these things. If you have a telephone line installed, you've got a choice between Sky (Murdoch – need I go on?), Virgin Media (Branson – involved in privatisation of the NHS) and BT (absolutely appalling monopolistic corporation), or no phone line. No phone line, no Internet. And it's honestly getting to the point where it's hard to get by without Internet access, even if you don't need it for work, which an increasing number of people do. This is just one example; there are many others.
I don't particularly like the term 'conspiracy theory'. Either something has merit, or it doesn't. If it doesn't have merit, it will fall apart of its own accord, if it does have merit, then I think 'conspiracy theory' is just a weasel word way of dismissing it. But if CT have a point, it should be to open people's eyes to the nature of this economic servitude, and make it clear to people the precise ways in which they're being screwed every day of their lives, why the usual forms of affecting change (eg. voting for mainstream political parties) are redundant, some forms of valid rebellion against the fascist economic system, and hopefully and ideally attempt some form of systematic organisation to at least make some practical steps in the right direction.
I haven't seen this from anyone with a public platform, whether 'conspiracy theorist', or the likes of Pilger and Chomsky, or even people like Christopher Hitchens – whose latterly expressed political views I completely disagreed with – or his brother for that matter. The only person I've actually seen it from is Max Keiser, who will actually say 'here is something you can do', who actually does engage in activism in several ways beyond talking. And they might say, 'why don't you do something?'. Because I haven't got a massive public platform, and I don't know anyone that agrees with me! Everyone I know disagrees with me as an automatic reaction about everything, even if it's 100% documented and cannot possibly be denied.
So I don't have much hope for our generation. Aside from those that don't see how bad things are, there are always a billion apologists for the social order who act as useful idiots because they're too scared or ignorant to face up to reality. But I hope that future generations will one day see that a world in which there are 1 billion people on the verge of starvation, nearly as many that don't have any access to clean water, with 2.5 billion people not having access to safe sanitary conditions, while 2 billion people live on less than $2 per day...but in which the Queen having a small bout of gastroenteritis is headline news...
Is a pretty warped one.
