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The Fraught Aughts*: Decade of revolutions
Harold Hark
11 October 2002

The time of revolutions and civil wars approacheth. O Lloyd have mercy on our souls ... those of us who have them.
--Lloyd God, from his blog: "Conversations with My Lesser Self"

Mind-blowing, is it not, that a privileged punk from Texas could be jeopardising the peace, let alone future, of the entire pathetic planet?

P.D. Ouspensky posited that politicians are incarnated ad nauseam simply to keep sticking it to a wilfully uninvolved human race. Makes sense when you think about it. Have you ever known or heard of a politician who didn't remind you of a real estate salesman? I mean, we're talking cardboard cutouts here. This is a profession of slippery eels, and when the eels come from the conservative end of the swamp, you have got trouble.

And they all seem hell bent on fomenting the very things they keep telling us they're trying to stop, albeit dimwittedly. The war on terrorism has, presto chango, become the war on freedom. Osama won without having to leave his cave!

Who knows what is happening? Was John Howard installed by the CIA? Did Dubbya (or his puppeteers) allow the towers to be bombed to install the government Cheney and Rumsfeld (and whoever is pulling their strings) have always wanted? A Power sufficiently above accountability that, having eaten The Other with impunity, must now eat its own? As Paul Virilio puts it: "Endo-colonization happens when a political power turns against its own people ... [when] totalitarian societies colonize their own people." (See John Armitage.)

Whoever is behind all this is as unknowable to us preterites as God. Just ask Lloyd. Hell, he never read Socrates, either.

What we do know is that 2002 is eerily like the northern hemisphere end of winter and beginning of spring in Germany, 1933.

Not exactly the same, but the fingerprints are a close match.

The mob is about to capitulate. The same mob that capitulated to Hitler from exhaustion at the his armed inevitability. Your neighbour and mine capitulated at the election of November 2001. You and I might too, one day. Winston Smith finally did.

Because, make no mistake, we are descending into a time of mindless, repressive chaos. Little by little, like Hitler took Germany, Howard is taking Australia, as Bush is taking America. Small town patriotic corps of volunteers are popping up all over the USofA, organised units organised to combat anything scary, from anthrax to the folks over the line in Shelbyville, who, come to think of it, always did look different. Above all, they don't drink Duff.

Teary-eyed, weeping sister, hankie-twisting, bleeding hearts are going to get the Pol Pot treatment, or at least the updated consumer-oriented version. All conservative governments have as their ultimate goal the oppression, if not execution, of free thinkers. That may only include about five per cent of the population, but on a planet of 6,264,133,350 (as of 8 October 2002, at 11:07:25 Australian EST**) that is a considerable number. It includes the children who would have continued the evolutionary tradition of questioning authority while expanding the limits of civilisation, but who, thanks to the persistent rarefaction of affordable education will give up and follow the work ethic, with its unquestioning obeisance to routine and pay cheque. It includes the movers and shakers, not of temporal business enterprises, but of evolution. "We'll have none of that," command the Saddams, the Slobodans, the Howards, the Dubbya's. "Ban. Remove, Disappear. Execute," is the motto that resides in the black pit of their feebly pulsing hearts.

I'm not religious, but to me people can be divided into two camps. Those who are, by nature, compadres of Jesus and Buddha, the We're-all-in-it-together folks, and those who are not. Of course people in the not camp keep trying to fool everyone by going to church and/or mouthing the platitudes, but they are still heathens, in the true sense. They are in it for me-and-mine-and-to-hell-with-everyone-else.

Well, that's life on Planet X, for you.

And so, once again, everyday citizens are going to be turned into revolutionaries, because when the one-dim cutouts get too greedy, the people just have to take matters into their own hands. There will be turmoil, incarcerations and deaths, hired government goons in the streets, no rights, no freedoms, no dissent, no arts, no education, and on and on.

There will, however, be one remaining right. The right to consume. Business will flourish as it always has.

The bleeding obvious, eh?

* Sorry, the Naughty Aughties do not apply to the first decade of the twenty-first century.

** See World population clock

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