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Showing posts with label Unite Against Fascism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unite Against Fascism. Show all posts

27 March 2009

Antagonista TV: Grate Britain Vs Terence McKenna

Visionary, ethnobotanist, entheobotanist, writer, linguist, shaman, philosopher, psychonaut and psychedelic explorer Terence McKenna, speaking in Seattle -- at the time of the infamous anti-capitalist inspired Battle of Seattle -- spoke the following words and advised in no uncertain terms, "Culture is not your friend". McKenna was of course talking about corporate culture, the type which seeks to hold hostage and keep from you sounds, shapes, patterns, colours and images that would otherwise be free for all to share.
What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation. And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love and the community to produce a kind of human paradise. But we are led by the least among us - the least intelligent, the least noble, the least visionary. We are led by the least among us and we do not fight back against the dehumanising values that are handed down as control icons.

This is something -- I mean I don't really want to get off on this tear because it's a lecture in itself -- but culture is not your friend. Culture is for other people's convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well treated by culture.

Yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual, the rights of the individual. We understand the felt-presence of experience is what is most important. But the culture is a perversion. It fetishises objects, creates consumer mania, it preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanise themselves by behaving like machines - meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue and Hollywood and what have you.

How do we fight back? It's a question worth answering. I think that by creating art -- art -- man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon, it's some kind of cannibalistic dema urge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.

By putting the art pedal to the metal we really, I think, maximise our humanness and become much more necessary and incomprehensible to the machines.

Terence McKenna - Culture is not your friend

The following is, in all likelihood, exactly the sort of thing to which McKenna was referring when he suggested the creation of art as part of the fight back against corporate culture and the mass psychology of fascism:


"What price for freedom? Fascist martial law."

As the man says, don't give up on solutions.

Thanks to Bridget in the comments here for the pointer to Grate Britain.

03 December 2008

"Terrorist" Damian Green & Antagonista Radio Pick of the Week

Nobody listened much to the protestations of those who raised their objections to the manifold proposals of loosely worded "anti-terrorist" legislation of the last seven years. Nobody cared enough to do anything when that loosely worded "anti-terrorist" legislation was passed into their law books. Nobody cared enough to do anything when loosely worded "anti-terrorist" legislation was used to justify Muslims being lifted off the streets for the crime of being Muslim or possession of a CD, the contents of which they had never looked at. Nobody cared enough to do anything when the true scope of the loosely worded "anti-terrorist" legislation was realised again as the assets of an Icelandic bank were frozen under the same anti-terrorist legislation. Or so it seemed.

But when a member of the establishment, Tory front-bencher Damian Green -- in an operation overseen by the most senior "anti-terrorist" officer Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick -- then becomes a target of the State bootboys and their "anti-terrorist" laws, liberal middle-England sits up and takes notice.

BBC Radio 4's Any Answers, presented by Jonathan Dimbleby, received a bit of coverage here before when a member of the unruly and unwashed masses placed Dimbleby on the back foot with regard to the truth about The Troubles. Last Saturday the incensed outrage of telephone-calling Middle England gave Dimbleby another run for his money. Listen again while you can:
Tony Benn, the Labour former cabinet minister, said this on BBC Radio today: "I may sound strangely medieval, but once the police can interfere with parliament, I tell you, you are into a police state. Parliament is a safeguard against the abuse of power and once you start clamping down on it you are saying goodbye to the freedom that parliament gives you."
Gotta love Lord Tony Benn, his words sound emptier and hollower than ever before. Unless of course when he says "you" he means "us" and is referring solely to serving members of parliament. The rest of the general populace is afforded no such comfort by the "safeguard against the abuse of power" that is fondly held by some as the Palace of Westminster, quite the opposite in fact.

For the "lower orders", it is more than a little amusing that the Metropolitan jackboots have ruffled a few feathers in the selectively-bred ruling class nest. Turf wars between ruling class factions and groupuscules.

When all is said and done it is the State that removes our freedoms by word and it is the police that removes our freedoms by deed. The bootboys busting the boot polishers confirms with renewed vigour and finality that the State entity, of which the police are an intrinsic part -- in the midst of the global, manufactured economic crisis that is the last capitalism in its current incarnation will ever see -- offers the greater majority of people nothing other than further subjugation and ever greater wage slavery in the subservient interests of the only thing that matters to the rich; the system; the economy.

This is a round up, who will speak for you?

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Further reading:
And, courtesy of J7: The July 7th Truth Campaign:

19 November 2008

Propaganda Coups & PsyOps #101 - The BNP Member List

Quick as a flash, or perhaps even quicker, a complete list of British National Party members -- the useful far-right, Neo-Nazi idiots who insist on waging a race war because, unlike racist bigotry, revolutionary class war is outside the bounds of acceptable mainstream political activity -- appeared on the Internet. And then promptly disappeared.
Blog has been removed

Sorry, the blog at bnpmemberslist.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.

Disappeared, momentarily, before reappearing as a Swedish registered and hosted web site, a text file, a spreadsheet and even an SQL database file, rapidly made searchable by postcode - complete with links to Googlemaps of member locations. There's also Cryptome, LOLGRIFFIN - Nazis. I hate those guys, BNP Near Me, a BNP heat-map, the Guardian going one better with an Interactive Far Right Map of Britain, and the Daily Mash doing what it does best. All this and the requisite levels of cross-media publicity in the blog world, the dead trees, and on the telescreen. The published list apparently includes serving policemen (surprise!), armed forces personnel (surprise!), seven journalists (surprise!), prison officers (surprise!), vicars and, in some cases, entire families! It also features an extra seven people not on the original list.

Little talk of goose-sauce also being good for the gander. Redwatch, paid back in own-goal spades.

Rumour has it that the party's former treasurer, John Walker, might be responsible for the leak. These suspicions are given further weight by the comments of BNP leader, Nick Griffin, as reported in The Times:
"We are pretty sure (we know who leaked it). We had a problem with a very senior former employee who left last year. He was one of the hard-liners I inherited from my predecessor, he didn't like the direction the party was going in, thought it was too moderate, so he broke away taking the list with him."
Given that it is almost the end of the year referred to by Gregorian calendars as 2008, a "senior former employee who left last year" would have had to have left at least 11 months ago. Potentially they may have left any time between 11 and 23 months ago. In the case of Walker, who is also known for leading fuel protests, he left the BNP in August 2007 after some fisticuffs at the BNP's annual Red, White and Blue Farcestival. This is where Griffin's claim gets interesting because, according to the Lancaster Unite Against Fascism blog, "additions to the list are as recent as September of this year".

This is not to convict or absolve John Walker of having leaked the list -- "innocent until proven guilty" still applies to whitey -- but instead to suggest that if he was indeed responsible for the leak, it would have had to have been done with some assistance from inside the existing BNP structure to account for the "as recent as September of this year" additions.

Nick Griffin discusses curtains

In light of this timely release of the BNP membership list, Conspiraloons who recall Sinn Féin party administrator Denis Donaldson might further ponder the potential level of State involvement in / infiltration of the BNP, in line with the State's general levels of involvement in and infiltration of practically any organisations with a vaguely political agenda.

You can almost see how this story might play out in the coming weeks. The list of BNP members went online for ten minutes, which was just long enough for a bunch of 'radicals' and 'extremists' to get hold of it, and soon a few hateful and hate-filled white men will turn up in the 'news' claiming to have been persecuted / beaten up / attacked by the 'radicals' and 'extremists' of the wrong sort, those that might not be quite so supportive of fascism as BNP members. A phone call already allegedly received by one member, as reported by Lancaster UAF, is the first trickle in what has the potential to become a mass media tsunami, complete with fighting in the streets. Maybe even a spectacular on 7/7/2001 7/7/2005 7/7/2009.

British Oppression, the reprise?

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Meanwhile, in news worth knowing:
One of Britain's most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq, describing it as a serious violation of international law, and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a "world vigilante".
....
Governments were bound by international law as much as by their domestic laws, he said. "The current ministerial code," he added "binding on British ministers, requires them as an overarching duty to 'comply with the law, including international law and treaty obligations'."
....
Addressing the British Institute of International and Comparative Law last night, Bingham said: "If I am right that the invasion of Iraq by the US, the UK, and some other states was unauthorised by the security council there was, of course, a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.

"For the effect of acting unilaterally was to undermine the foundation on which the post-1945 consensus had been constructed: the prohibition of force (save in self-defence, or perhaps, to avert an impending humanitarian catastrophe) unless formally authorised by the nations of the world empowered to make collective decisions in the security council ..."