You don't have to dig very deep to get a pretty clear picture of the decline of today's global civilization. The good times are gone, over, finished. We're out of stuff, plain and simple. The game today is for one select group of people to employ its considerable advantages to mine the remaining wealth out of everyone else. We've become the last, best natural resource and the system has been rigged to effect the greatest unearned transfer of wealth ever. It has symptoms - inequality of income, of wealth and of opportunity; the wholesale theft of political power through "capture" of legislators and, in the US, even its courts; media organizations that now serve the power they once confronted; widespread and probably irreversible environmental degradation; secrecy and the triumph of the surveillance state.
Some of us have joined outfits such as Dark Mountain, a place for those tired of the lies civilization tells itself. It's a meeting place for people who know that the game is rigged and that most of the opposition is shadow boxing.
Alternet's John Pilger writes that, "The world we've constructed is far beyond George Orwell's worst nightmare."
"As advanced societies are de-politicized, the changes are both subtle and spectacular. In everyday discourse, political language is turned on its head, as Orwell prophesied in '1984.' 'Democracy' is now a rhetorical device. Peace is 'perpetual war'. 'Global' is imperial. The once hopeful concept of 'reform' now means regression, even destruction. 'Austerity' is the imposition of extreme capitalism on the poor and the gift of socialism for the rich: an ingenious system under which the majority service the debts of the few."
Go back and read that brief passage again. Do you seriously disagree with anything Pilger observes? If not, what does that tell you? Pilger continues:
"In politics as in journalism and the arts, it seems that dissent once tolerated in the 'mainstream' has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground. When I began a career in Britian's Fleet Street in the 1960s, it was acceptable to critique western power as a rapacious force. Read James Cameron's celebrated reports of the hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll, the barbaric war in Korea and the American bombing of North Vietnam. Today's grand illusion is of an information age when, in truth, we live in a media age in which incessant corporate propaganda is insidious, contagious, effective and liberal."
Do you honestly believe that the Liberals today are not committed vassals to corporatism? Hell, so is Mulcair's crowd. Here's the thing. Ask yourself whether a healthy democracy can co-exist with a corporatist state. It's no accident that the House of Commons is stuffed with petro-pols on both sides of the aisle. I'll conclude with one final passage from Pilger's excellent essay. In his concluding paragraph Pilger points out how easy it is for all of us - you and me - to be corrupted.
"In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl and asked her about her films that glorified the Nazis. Using revolutionary camera and lighting techniques, she produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; it was her 'Triumph of the Will' that reputedly cast Hitler's spell. I asked her about propaganda in societies that imagined themselves superior. She replied that the 'messages' in her films were dependent not on 'orders from above' but on a 'submissive void' in the German population. 'Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie' I asked. 'Everyone' she replied, 'and of course the intelligentsia.'"
Are you part of a 'submissive void'? From what I've learned over the past seven years of many people who frequent these sites, there's a damned good chance you are. Think on it.
