Hiroshima

72 years today since the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. Lest we forget. This animated short is incredible.

War ::: Brodermordet

Label: Sacred Bones Records – SBR-069
Format: Vinyl, 7", Limited Edition, Single, 45 RPM
Country: US
Released: 21 Feb 2012
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Post-Punk, Industrial, Synth-pop

Tracklist:
A1 At War For Youth
A2 Kains Mærke
B Brodermordet

Notes
Limited edition version comes in a hand-silk-screened envelope, with wax stamp. Hand numbered to 150 copies.

Download:
http://viid.me/qudqfB

Aleister & Adolf by Douglas Rushkoff (PDF)

Media theorist and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff weaves a mind-bending tale of iconography and mysticism against the backdrop of a battle-torn Europe. In a story spanning generations, and featuring some of the most notable and notorious idealists of the 20th century, legendary occultist Aleister Crowley develops a powerful and dangerous new weapon to defend the world against Adolf Hitler's own war machine spawning an unconventional new form of warfare that is fought not with steel, but with symbols and ideas. Unfortunately, these intangible arsenals are much more insidious and perhaps much more dangerous than their creators could have ever conceived.

"Rushkoff is a cultural treasure and an eccentric author of big, strange ideas, never less than fascinating and always entertaining." -Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine, Red, Trees, and Transmetropolitan

"Douglas has been one of my personal heroes, and I've been a most attentive reader of anything he cares to put between covers, knowing that his combination of a cold eye and a warm heart is guaranteed to astonish and embolden my own thinking about what's possible in the world--about what's possible to enact in the space between one human being and another. He occupies the ground of our most immediate perplexities, and his reports of what he finds are breaking news." -Jonathan Lethem, author of The Best American Comics and The Fortress of Solitude

Download:
http://viid.me/q0JqY0

Lest We Forget

As World War I ended, Abel Gance premiered his epic J’Accuse in Paris. The actors themselves were soldiers fighting in the trenches and by the war's end all of them were dead.  Gance later explained. “I asked the local HQ if I could borrow two thousand. These men had come straight from the front …. They had seen it all, and now they played the dead knowing they would die themselves. In a few weeks or months."

All of the men who appear in the film would die at the front.

In this remarkable film, it's as if the dead themselves rise up one last time to accuse the living: "How could you let this happen?"

Lest we forget!

Nankin 1937 by Nicolas Meylaender & Zhou Zongkai (CBR)

Nanking 1937, the first ever cartoon book on the Nanking Massacre, saw its copyright introduction meeting held in the Belgrade Book Fair. The book was written by a famous French playwright Nick Meland and drawn by Professor Zhou Zongkai of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (SFAI) along with his son Zhou Weizong.

Nanking 1937, planned by the French FEI Publishing House to be presented in a style of woodcut, tells the true story of Xia Shuqin, a survivor from the Nanking Massacre, revealing the anti-human crimes committed by Japanese troops from the angle of a survivor.

On 13th December, 1937, Xia's grandparents, parents, 2 elder sisters and 1 younger sister were killed by Japanese troops, leaving behind only Xia and a 4-year-old sister. At that time, Chairman of the Nanking International Safety Zone, Rabe, kept Xia's story in his diary. An American missionary videoed the miserable conditions of her home located at No. 5, Xinlukou in Zhonghuamen, Nanking.

Zhou Zongkai got in contact with Nanking 1937 in 2010, when the Chinese reprisentative in charge of FEI Publishing House, Xu Gefei, came to SFAI for a visit and had a talk with Zhou in his studio in Huxi Commune (Huxi Gongshe), known as the largest domestic Village of Artists in China.

Xu told Zhou about her intention of adding more Chinese material to the publishing industry, and due to the lack of knowledge of Chinese history around 1937 among European society, it would be informative to put forward her idea.

After viewing the pictures drawn by Zhou for the book of The Diaoyu Fortress, Xu decided to have Nanking 1937 drawn by Zhou.

Nanking 1937 was written by Nick Meland, a famous French playwright. When asked why a foreigner was chosen to write a Chinese story, Xu stated that a foreigner could tell the story in a more objective manner, enabling readers to gain a more balanced impression.

In August 2010, Zhou received the manuscripts of Nanking 1937.

For an entire month, Zhou and his 25-year-old son Zhou Weizong, a young cartoonist, worked on the drawings in his studio for over 10 hours every day.

In 2011, the French Edition of Nanking 1937 was put into the markets in France, Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland. On the memorial day of the 7th July Incident of 1937 in 2014, the book’s Chinese Edition was published by the Sichuan Children's Publishing House.

In 2012, the book's French Edition was awarded the Best Painting prize in the Amiens Animation Festival.

Download:
https://yadi.sk/d/m8d_dzEntZoHA

Metaphysics of War by Julius Evola (ePUB & AZW3)

This is the thoroughly revised edition of a collection of essays that Julius Evola originally wrote for Italian periodicals during the 1930s and '40s, having to do with the transcendental aspects of combat. It represents the development of Evola's thinking on war during the period of the Second World War and its aftermath.

These essays constitute what is certainly the most radical attempt ever made to justify war. This justification takes place essentially on two levels: one profane, the other sacred. At the profane (meaning simply “non-sacred”) level, Evola argues that war is one of the primary means by which heroism expresses itself, and he regards heroism as the noblest expression of the human spirit. Evola reminds us that war is a time in which both combatants and non-combatants realize that they may lose their lives and everything and everyone they value at any moment. This creates a unique moral opportunity for individuals to learn to detach themselves from material possessions, relationships, and concern for their own safety. War puts everything into perspective, and Evola states that it is in such times that “a greater number of persons are led towards an awakening, towards liberation” (p. 135).

According to Evola, the ancient Vedas held that there are two paths to enlightenment: contemplation and action. In traditional Indian terms, the former is the path of the brahmin and the latter of the kshatriya (the warrior caste). Both are forms of yoga, which literally means any practice that has as its aim connecting the individual to his true self, and to the source of all being (which are, in fact, the same thing). The yoga of action is referred to as karma yoga (where karma simply means “action”), and the primary text which teaches it is the Bhagavad-Gita. Evola returns again and again to the Bhagavad-Gita throughout The Metaphysics of War, and it really is the primary text to which Evola’s philosophy of “war as spiritual path” is indebted. The work forms part (a very small part, actually) of the epic poem Mahabharata, the story of which culminates in an apocalyptic war called Kurukshetra. On the eve of battle, the consummate warrior Arjuna (the Siegfried of the piece) surveys the two camps from afar and realizes that on his enemy’s side are many men who are his friends and relations. When Arjuna reflects on the fact that he will have to kill these men the following day, he falters. Fortunately, his charioteer–who is actually the god Krishna–is there to teach him the error of his ways. Krishna tells Arjuna that these men are already dead, for their deaths have been ordained by the gods. In killing them, Arjuna is simply doing his duty and playing his role as a warrior. He must set aside his personal feelings and concentrate on his duty; he must literally become a vehicle for the execution of the divine plan.

One might well ask, what’s in it for Arjuna? The answer is that this following of duty becomes a path by which he may triumph over his fears, his passions, his weaknesses–all those things that tie him to what is ephemeral. Following his duty becomes a way for Arjuna to rise above his lesser self and to connect with the divine. This is not mere piety or “love of God.” It is a way to tap into a superhuman source of power and wisdom. The result is that Arjuna becomes more than merely human.

In fact, Krishna puts Arjuna in a situation in which he must fight two wars. One, the “lesser” war is external–it is the one fought on the battlefield with swords and spears. The other, “greater” war is internal and is fought against the internal enemy: “passion, the animal thirst for life” (p. 52). Evola places a great deal of emphasis on this distinction. What Krishna really teaches Arjuna is that in order to fight the lesser war, he must fight the greater one. Really, unless one is able to conquer one’s weaknesses, nothing else may be accomplished. This opens up the possibility that there may be “warriors” who never fight in any conventional, “external” wars. These would be warriors of the spirit. Evola believes that one can be a true warrior without ever lifting a sword or a gun, by conquering the enemy within oneself. And he mentions initiatic cults, like Mithraism, which conceived of their members on the model of soldiers.

In combat one is lifted out of one’s ordinary self and, more specifically, out of one’s concern with the mundane cares of life. One enters into a state where one ceases even to care about personal survival. It is at this point that one has ceased to identify with the “animal” elements in the human personality and has tapped into that part of us that seems to be a divine spark. This is not, however, an intellectual state or “realization.” Instead, it is a new state of being, which pervades the entire person. The ancient Germans called it wut and odhr. And from these two words derive two of the names of the chief Germanic god: Wuotan and Odin. Odin is not, however, conceived simply as the god of war; he is also the god of wisdom and spiritual transformation.

Evola never was particularly interested in biological conceptions of race, because he believed that human nature as such was irreducible to biology. He opposed reductionism, in short, and believed in a spiritual (i.e., non-material) component to our identity. What Evola was most concerned to combat was a racialism that reduced heroism or mastery to simple membership in a race defined by certain biological characteristics. For Evola, heroism is really achieved in a step beyond the biological, and in mastery over it.

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http://www32.zippyshare.com/v/BRu90pid/file.html

A Traditionalist Confronts Fascism by Julius Evola (.ePUB & AZW3)

This volume, a companion to Evola’s Fascism Viewed from the Right and Notes on the Third Reich, contains many of his occasional essays on the topic of fascism as understood from a traditionalist perspective which were written between 1930 and 1971, thus comprising both his contemporary and post-war assessments of the fascist phenomenon. Here we find Evola’s views not only on Italian Fascism and German Nazism, but also his discussions of other movements such as the Spanish Falange and the Japanese Imperial ideal, as well as his commentary on such diverse subjects as Nazi esotericism, the idea of a new spiritual Order to lead Europe, and the reasons for his rejection of Nazi biological racism. Also included are interviews Evola personally conducted with Corneliu Codreanu, the leader of the Iron Guard, and Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the Pan-European Movement (the forerunner of the European Union), and the full text of ‘Orientations’, the famous essay Evola wrote in 1950 concerning the proper approach of the European Right in the post-war era which he further developed in Men Among the Ruins. These essays show Evola to have been an unsparing critic of fascism, always urging traditionalists to aspire for something higher than the merely political.

Download:
http://www91.zippyshare.com/v/H8WRVKgN/file.html

Why Churchill Used Crowleys V For Victory

During World War II symbolism played a bigger role than most of us are aware of. The Nazis chose the swastika because it traditionally wielded immense power of Sun and solar energy. Aleister, having the ear of Winston Churchill at the time, advised him to use the “V for Victory” sign. The “V for Victory” was created by Crowley because of its association with Apophis and Typhon made it the perfect choice. Crowley claimed that this symbol was as powerful as the swastika and it left the Nazis very much afraid. So afraid in fact that the OT.O. was the first 'Masonic' order to be banned in Nazi Germany.

Palestinian rockets killed Gaza civilians during war: Amnesty

Jerusalem: In a damning report released today, Amnesty International said Palestinian rocket fire during the 2014 summer war in Gaza had killed more civilians inside the Gaza Strip than inside Israel.

Such deadly attacks on civilians were against international law and constituted "a war crime," it said.

Read more...

Steven Pinker is Wrong About Violence and War by John Gray

A new orthodoxy, led by Pinker, holds that war and violence in the developed world are declining. The stats are misleading, argues Gray – and the idea of moral progress is wishful thinking and plain wrong.

Read more...

What ISIS Really Wants

This article I think is a must read for anyone wanting to understand the rise of ISIS and what it seeks.  Popular online dialogue on the topic is too often led by the usual self-loathing crowd on the Left and their usual 'the West is to blame for everything' mantra.  It is therefore refreshing to see an article that unapologetically gets at the root of this scourge without the need for self-flagellation. 

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it. Read more.

Lost in translation: Charlie Hebdo, free speech and the unilingual left by Leigh Phillips

In the 48 hours after the Paris massacre, much of the anglophone activist and academic left were quick to sneer at public displays of solidarity with the murdered cartoonists and journalists of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and criticized the vigils, demonstrations and editorial cartoons from other artists as siding with racists.

Of course the killing of journalists is a bad thing, so the argument goes, but come on, Charlie Hebdo is “a racist publication.” So what do you expect? is the implicit, victim-blaming conclusion.  Read more.

200 Chomsky Lies by Paul Bogdanor

“He begins as a preacher to the world and ends as an intellectual crook.”
– Arthur Schlesinger
(Commentary, December 1969)

“Noam Chomsky skittles and skithers all over the political landscape to distract the reader’s attention from the plain truth.”
– Sidney Hook
(The Humanist, March-April 1971)

“In his ideological fanaticism he constantly shifts his arguments and bends references, quotations and facts, while declaring his ‘commitment to find the truth.’”
– Leopold Labedz
(Encounter, July 1980)

“Even on the rare occasions when Mr. Chomsky is dealing with facts and not with fantasies, he exaggerates by a factor of, plus or minus, four or five.”
– Walter Laqueur
(The New Republic, March 24, 1982)

“After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false. He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake.”
– Paul Postal
(The New Yorker, March 31, 2003)

In point by point style, Paul Bogdanor nails 200 absolute lies told by darling of the left Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky's political output is consistent with the rest of his oeuvre in one important respect: the method of argumentation. Across disciplines, he has long employed a variety of unscholarly techniques to insulate his conclusions from criticism. The linguist George Lakoff once identified Chomsky's tendency to "fight dirty when he argues. He uses every trick in the book." In the journal Artificial Intelligence, Margaret Boden, Professor of Cognitive Science at Sussex University, notesthat a review of her book by Chomsky is "a sadly unscholarly piece, guaranteed to mislead its readers about both the tone and the content of the book. It is also defamatory." In politics, Chomsky's preferred technique is vituperative abuse of his opponents. Take a few examples. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times is an "astonishing racist and megalomaniac". In disputing Chomsky's analogy between 9/11 and President Clinton's attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, Christopher Hitchens "must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt". The French nation collectively has a "highly parochial and remarkably illiterate culture".

The irony of Chomskyan invective in the political sphere is that it is highly selective. Chomsky has never regretted his intervention in the 1980s on behalf of a Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson. Chomsky has no sympathy with Holocaust denial, and if he had stuck to defending Faurisson's right to free expression he would have been right and principled. Instead, he wrote: "As far as I can determine, [Faurisson] is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort." The point here is not the perversity of the judgement. It is the way in which Chomsky espouses supposedly universal principles while extravagantly failing to apply them. Liberals and left-wingers who see value in US interventionism are racists, frauds, apologists for state terror and so on. Yet a man like Faurisson who exemplifies all of these qualities is regarded differently.

Consider, too, Chomsky's writings on Indochina, the issue on which he became famous as a political controversialist. He did not only excoriate an unjust and brutal US war. He derided refugee accounts of horrors after the fall of Cambodia, pointedly referring to "alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities" and disputing a comparison of Pol Pot's rule to Nazi Germany. In an interview last year, Chomsky characteristically congratulated himself on the astuteness of this analysis, declaring: "If we were to rewrite it now, we'd do it exactly the same way."

Here is your chance to see Chomsky at his deceptive best.  Download this book, read it, and pass it on.  Let's smash the Chomsky myth.

Download ebook here.

The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence by Susie Linfield

In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.

A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look.

Download book:
 http://www.adrive.com/public/cmHenf/Linfield%2C%20Susie%20-%20The%20Cruel%20Radiance.%20Photography%20and%20Political%20Violence.pdf

The Weeping Tree - How Utopia Leads to Slaughter

“Driven back and utterly ashamed shall be those who trust in an image.” Isaiah 42:17

As an optimistic young man I was convinced that beyond the turn of the century a gentler world would materialize. Don’t get me wrong, I was never a believer in that terrible naiveté called utopia and have never thought such a thing possible, indeed I think the opposite is true, that any talk of utopia deserves serious chastisement and any actual attempt at utopia is tantamount to human stagnation, destruction and slaughter.

Utopia is the mother of genocide. An aberration that claims complete ‘right’, an arrogance that pretends to understand what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’. This delusion inevitably leads to criminal assertions over who is fit to live and who deserves to die. Of course I am not alone in this belief and many others also have mistrusted this bizarre impulse. Vladimir Bukovsky explained it best:

“This dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people’s minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood…” [1]

Freud too, in a single lucid sentence, illustrated well why the idea of utopia invites horrific consequences upon those unfortunate enough to entertain such delusion:

“Our logic is at fault if we ignore the fact that right is founded on brute force and even today needs violence to maintain it.” [2]

Utopia assumes the greatness of sameness and in this faith it ignores the fact that we are each (subtly and overtly) influenced by unique personal environments and individual experiences that give rise to complex needs.

Your happiness is thankfully not my happiness. Nor should it ever be.

Your desires are not my desires.

My desires are constructed upon the experiences that have shaped me. My idea of happiness makes sense only to me because it is I who constructed the idea. It is only I who understand the meaning of the idea. To impose my idea of happiness and its desires on you would be to deny you your right to interpret your own experiences, to deny you your Will.

My conviction that the world beyond the turn of the century would be gentler and more educated was never a reflection of any utopian ideals; in fact if anything the opposite is true. The world I saw as possible was a result of an acceptance of difference, an appreciation of diversity in thinking, behaviour and expression and an intense love of all things progressive.

Of course it turned out that I was wrong, terribly wrong in fact.

Certainly the world was more educated but still the proof that I was wrong ripped through my hopes on the 11th of September 2001, when a horrific attack whose utopian ideals belonged back in the 7th century initiated the 21st century in blood. This was yet further confirmation that the idea of sameness would find expression only in indiscriminate slaughter, only in the assumption that ‘right’ was indeed ‘founded on brute force’.

Although the attacks may have been spectacular, the ideas behind them expressed no new territory; there was nothing terribly different in them, we had long been familiar with this bizarre landscape. These same ideals, these same impulses to slaughter in the name of utopia have been with us from the beginning and these same varied plays on fanaticism have stained our walls with blood surely even for as long as humans have held the advantage of language.

There was nothing remarkable about the suicide attacks of September 11, or indeed the many suicide attacks that have plagued us regularly ever since. The same grotesque impulse finds examples all the way back to the 11th century where we encounter the Hashishiyyin (the Assassins) and their infamous leader Hassan Sabbah. This fanatical sect of Shiite assassins took upon themselves the role of creating a Shiite utopia built upon slaughter and suicide attacks. They initiated their attacks from a mountain stronghold where followers were shown a sexual, hashish induced ‘paradise’ and promised even greater pleasures should they sacrifice their lives to the utopian cause.

Comparisons have already been made between Hasan Sabbah and Osama bin Laden and we should be careful to note that all such comparisons are for the most part superficial and idealized. However, the basic impulse remains the same, as political scientist Salim Mansur well illustrates:

“Osama bin Laden and his band of fanatical warriors are a contemporary version of Hasan Sabbah and his Order of Assassins. Mr. bin Laden’s hideout in the mountains of Afghanistan is a reminder of Sabbah’s mountain stronghold. Like Sabbah, Mr. bin Laden has raised his warriors from boyhood to accept death for a political program dressed in religious slogans that set him apart from mainstream Islam.” [3]

What bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and the many offshoots that have sprouted since 2001 want is Jihad. A prolonged war waged against all opponents (both real and imagined) until Sharia law is established over the world and its disturbed promise of utopia becomes a reality. This point is well illustrated in David Aaron’s work In Their Own Words: Voices of Jihad:

“Jihadism is utopian. It seeks nothing less than the creation of a worldwide fundamentalist Islamic state. Its adherents believe that this can be achieved only through violence. It targets both governments in Muslim lands and those in the West that support them… Like Wahhabis and other fundamentalists, they insist that the only true Islam is that which was practiced by Muhammad and his early followers, the Salaf, and therefore they sometimes call themselves Salafis. But jihadis go further, insisting that ‘holy war’ is the central tenet and obligation of Islam.” [4]

What seems little understood — particularly in the West — is that the steps to the utopian shrine are bathed in blood and indeed this horror can only be implemented by wholesale slaughter; we ignore this reality at our own peril. It was therefore strange that following the attacks of September 11, 2001, we were given a silly commercial-like jingle which declared a ‘war on terror’. We were playing the wrong tune it seems because what we were facing was not terrorism — indeed any terrorist acts were merely symptoms — no, what we were facing was the sickness of utopian idealism. The same siren call that gave us the horrors of Nazism, the same whiff of absurdity that slaughtered millions with apparent ease in Stalin’s Russia, and the same nightmare that gave us Rwanda and every other dripping mountain of lives cut short.

The evidence speaks for itself and it reminds us that the real criminals are not only those who set up the gallows, or those who pull the triggers, or indeed those who dig the pits that will later be filled with the bodies of lives deemed unworthy to be lived. These are only the necessary sleepers strung along by the power of the meme that blinds them, often as much victims of the utopian nightmare as those whose lives they extinguish. No, the real criminals are those who promote utopia and promise us the paradise of sameness. The real criminals are those who, once the slaughter commences, maintain the delusion with worded excuses and attack those would seek its end. These are the real criminals and they too belong in front of world courts charged with crimes against humanity, even crimes against civilization, against thought and against feeling.

Genocide is current and its easy appeal is all too evident in the more than 250 armed conflicts (involving aspects of genocide) that have plagued us post World War II. Without utopian propaganda the fuel that feeds genocide would quickly burn itself out. Sane individuals when unchained by the utopian meme well understand the horror of war and its long-term consequences. Surely we are now well acquainted with war’s horrific history and know well the shame war brings on generations foolish enough to indulge in its sour deeds.

It takes utopia to drift us head-first into dreamland, to make us forget; a magician’s spell, powerful enough to veil our senses and turn us into collective sadists.

You will find this propaganda universal when the delusion of utopia commands its dizzying conditioning. During the horrors of World War II there appeared in a magazine titled Illustrierte Zeitung Leipzig: Sonderausgabe 1944, Der europäische Mensch, an advertisement for Focke-Wulf airplane manufacturers. It read:

“Focke-Wulf has been building airplanes for 20 years. We join in the vastly increased use of labour and technology in the German aircraft industry. We are thus helping to solve the great tasks of the day, the fulfilment of which will bring about a New Order in Europe.” [5]

The promise of a ‘New Order’, a new peace, and a new equality rides on the back of slaughter and genocide, it always has. Countless regimes have encouraged — or demanded at the end of a barrel — submission into sameness for the sake of this utopian ideal. And while:

“The particular utopias these regimes or states advocated varied significantly. Yet every one of them envisioned a homogeneous society of one sort or another, which necessarily meant the expulsion or extermination of particular groups. Indeed, all these regimes claimed that utopia would be created only through the destruction of one or more enemy groups.” [6]

The enemy is an essential ingredient in the utopian recipe, without it the soup misses its taste and the whole dish feels somewhat unsatisfying. Without the defeated devil the hunger still lurks and the whole feast remains grossly inadequate. The flavour is missing. The triumph must be bathed in blood if it is to taste complete.

It is this malicious enemy that prevents utopia; the Trojan horse that stands in the way of promised happiness. If only this enemy were destroyed then happiness would be a reality. The meal would have its taste.

This poisoned chalice is so easily positioned at the lips that it led Herman Göring to comment during his time at the Nuremberg trials:

“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” [7]

If the illusion of an external enemy is not sufficient to fan the flames of slaughter then surely the idea of progress will set the stage; and this peculiar ambition has destroyed even otherwise perfectly intelligent minds. George Bernard Shaw looked upon Nazi Germany as a continuation of European enlightenment and in the same light he looked to Stalin’s Russia as the source of glorified progress.

On his seventy-fifth birthday a party was held in his honour in Moscow while he visited there in August of 1930. He told his stunned, starving audience, that upon learning that he was travelling to Russia, concerned friends back home had given him boxes of tinned food to take to the people of Russia. However, he told them giggling, he had thrown all of the food out of the train window while he was still in Poland and before crossing into the Soviet Union.

Why? Simple. Mass starvation and thus mass extermination were natural and even desired symptoms on the way to progress, who was he to slow down progress? The promised utopia required sacrifice: their sacrifice.

And what a sacrifice it was. From 1917 until 1959 an estimated 60 million people were exterminated. There was no secret in their extermination, in fact if anything there was support and celebration. Progress required sacrifice, everyone understood. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich in their seminal history Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, remind us:

“There is no question that the Soviet people knew about the massacres in the countryside. In fact, no one tried to conceal it. Stalin spoke openly about the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’, and all his lieutenants echoed him. At the railroad stations, city dwellers could see the thousands of women and children who had fled from the villages and were dying from hunger.” [8]

Such is the nightmare of utopia.

And there is yet a third delusion that will gladly lead us down the road to utopian slaughter. This is the delusion of salvation; that humanity has fallen and is in need of some type of cleansing in order to redeem it. This dangerous madness is gleefully celebrated in the ramblings of many of the world’s major religions. The world needs a baptism of blood, a mass slaughter of as yet unimaginable magnitude, before the particular saviour-flavour subscribed to will be stirred to action and remember his dying creation.

Such beliefs have found root in many parts of the world but they are most fertile in the Abrahamic imagination of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In these traditions the world is in wait for a final showdown between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Often such hope for a final decisive cataclysm is accompanied by bizarre beliefs in pre-determined victory brought about by supernatural forces that will reward the believers and slaughter the unbelievers.

When dressed in Christian garments this belief proposes:

“…that the moral conditions of the world and the church are destined to get increasingly worse. When they get almost unbearably bad, the Lord Jesus will return in the clouds to ‘rapture’ the living saints up to heaven.” [9]

The ‘rapture’ is slaughter, an orgiastic mass genocide disguised as joyous deliverance. The idea of utopia delivers such force and blindness to individuals — and more dangerously to whole societies — that it can stare at cold-blooded genocide and call it ‘rapture’, ‘ecstasy’ and ‘joy’.

The promise of happiness gives way so easily to forgetfulness.

In his acceptance speech for the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature, Czeslaw Milosz made the curious remark that what characterized our present age was a “refusal to remember.” As an example of our collective forgetfulness he illustrated his remark with the fact that at the time of his speech there were over 100 books denying the Holocaust. American television journalist Bill Moyers reiterated this forgetfulness when he lamented:

“I worry that my own business . . . helps to make this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs …. We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.” [10]

This forgetfulness is made even more apparent by the steady rise of conspiracy theories that have plagued the internet since the attacks of September 11. While the internet has certainly provided us with a ready stream of information, what has risen to the top of the murky waters of online opinion is also a steady stream of bizarre paranoia. Media has become fragmented, delivering bytes rather than historical context. This provides the necessary vacuum readily filled with opinion disguised or mistaken as truth. The larger and wider the vacuum the more certain the opinions will be and with more absurdity their claims will be expressed.

Conspiracy theory is of course nothing new and conspiracy theorists have been recycling the same fear and selling the same snake-oil for as long as history cares to record their babblings. What has made their paranoid ramblings a little more public now is not that their ‘case’ has become more solid, or that their fear has finally been corroborated with evidence. No, what has made them more public is simply their access to Youtube and other forms of social media. Conspiracy theorists today are just as deluded as they have always been; the only real difference now is they have an audience.

Conspiracy theory is a modern day cult riding (parasite-like) on the back of horror, fear and uncertainty. It feeds on paranoia and promises a disturbed utopia complete with ‘unseen’ enemies and visions of progress and salvation. It adopts the language of every cult on earth with its in-group and out-group slang. It considers its followers ‘awake’ while the rest (the unbelievers) deserve little more than the derogatory moniker: ‘sheeple’.

Given power, this lunatic fringe would readily take up arms and happily set up the gallows and dig the pits to watch with glee as their vision of utopia stains the walls of civilization with yet another wave of slaughter. Such is our nature and our collective weakness that we forget the past easily; almost gladly.

From reptilians to chemtrails, no theory is too absurd and no conjecture too outlandish when the prize is utopia. The path from conjecture to murder is only paved in opportunity.

On July 17th, 2013, Zee News ran an article titled Malala Yousafzai urged by Taliban to come back, join madrassa. The piece concerns the well-known story of the shooting of Malala, a young Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban for wanting an education. It reported that a letter had been written by the Taliban to Malala asking her to come back and join a madrassa. What is interesting about the letter is the language of conspiracy theory readily found wherever and whenever this absurdity rears its ugly head:

“I advise you to come back home, adopt the Islamic and Pashtun culture, join any female Islamic madrassa near your hometown, study and learn the book of Allah, use your pen for Islam and the plight of Muslim ummah and reveal the conspiracy of the tiny elite who want to enslave the whole humanity for their evil agendas in the name of a new world order.” [11]

It would seem that the illness of conspiracy paranoia is already happily engaged in murder and its Western proponents cannot understand — much less see — their willing endorsement of slaughter. Utopia blinds magnificently.

All of this merely reiterates the troubling fact that collectively we are not yet ready to take up the liberating challenge of overcoming our fears. The individual is still at risk of the mob breaking down his door and dragging his shell to the rope.

Can we find a solution? Can the wheel that drives us to murder be turned? Can the curse of utopia be finally eradicated from the thoughts and languages of the earth?

I propose as a solution, and I suggest this with utmost humility, that we divert our devotion away from humanity, which is in reality a devotion to a group or mob, and turn it instead to a devotion to the individual. I propose even a taste of extreme individualism where the ‘self’ is as it were an independent nation allowed to furnish its own growth and independence as it sees fit. I propose that if the individual be free then it follows that humanity as a group will enjoy freedom. The group ruled by the individual and not the individual ruled by the group. The real tyranny rests in the persistent belief that what is good for the group must also be good for the individual, it is not.

What does the group understand of love, of loss, of joy, of sorrow? It understands not because it is not individual, it is collective and in its collectiveness it has lost its humanity.

Per audacia ad ignotum.

________________________________

Notes:
1. Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, Viking Press 1979
2. In a letter to Einstein and reprinted in Al Smith’s Why War: The Human Investment in Slaughter and the Possibilities of Peace, Lulu.com 2006 p. 424
3. Salim Mansur, The Father of all Assassins, The Globe and Mail October 11, 2001 p. A21
4. David Aaron, In Their Own Words: Voices of Jihad, Rand Corporation 2008 p. 4
5. Cited in The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Thomson Gale 2005 p. 1
6. Ibid p. 1125
7. G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, Perseus Books Group 1995
8. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, Summit Books 1988
9. A. Smith, Jerry Falwell’s eschatological schizophrenia, WorldNetDaily™, at: http://www.wnd.com/2001/07/10140/
10. Quote appears in Bill Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Penguin Books 2006, p. 137
11. ‘Malala Yousafzai urged by Taliban to come back, join madrassa’, Zee News July 17, 2013, http://zeenews.india.com/news/south-asia/taliban-urge-malala-yousafzai-to-come-back-join-madrassa_862850.html

After the revolution comes the real terror

"…the whole so-called Libertarian ideology …. may sound nice on the surface but if you think it through, it's just a call for corporate tyranny. It takes away any barrier to corporate tyranny." - Noam Chomsky

"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." - Wendell Berry

This essay examines what would really happen if conspiracy theorists got their way.  It is an examination of a splintered pseudo-religious cult and its dangerous ideas and how - if such ideas were ever to gain ground -  society as we know it would would be severely affected.   Their far-right libertarian view of revolution is fueled by a conspiratorial paranoia whose consequences are readily obvious.  The problem right from the start, of course, is that the conspiracy theories are false, and their adherents ideas for changing the world are based on an incorrect and often downright delusional view of reality. That means that their post-revolution solutions would have very severe unintended consequences because their solutions aren't aimed at solving real problems in the real world, but rather solving false problems that exist only in their fantasy world.

The vision I present here of a post-revolution conspiracist dominated world is, by definition, speculative. But then again, so is George Orwell’s 1984, a book that many conspiracy theorists cite as prescient gospel truth, and which many believe is literally coming to pass now (or already has). This essay is not a prediction of what I think will come to pass, just as Orwell’s wasn't either. This article is a profile of what may come to pass if conspiracy theorists of the sort who support Alex Jones, David Icke and the rest of the conspiratuality gurus had free reign to build the world that they say they want.  So close your eyes if you will and imagine the revolution has just taken place, the governments are toppled and the conspiracists are in control.  What will come next?

The first step on this journey would probably be the gallows.  Those deemed traitors to the 'cause' would be rounded up and strung up.  I myself have been told twice (on the David Icke forum) that when the revolution comes I will be standing on the gallows with the other 'traitors'.  This talk of gallows (among other ways of execution including burning people alive) appears all too common among conspiracists and examples are not hard to find:

9/11 Truthers:

https://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/semiliterateparanoiacswhofantasizeaboutt

http://www.vice.com/read/the-conspiracy-theory-community-are-dangerous-enemies-to-make

Chemtrailers:

This reasoning, which is (like most things conspiracy theorists believe in) not fully thought out, assumes that there will be some sort of 'revolution' where presumably the current political order will be undone, the conspiracies that these people believe in will be halted, and those who supported them will be punished.

So now what?  The government is toppled, the traitors are swinging from their ropes and society has more or less come to a halt.  Here we find the vacuum that is so common with all revolutions.  How will it be filled?  Examining just one of these group's ideas it is quickly understood that the post-revolution philosophy found in most conspiratuality is centered around a far-right libertarian agenda.  Thrive is a movie and movement centered around conspiracies and New Age ideas which has quickly developed into a movement.  It was set up by Foster Gamble and you can see their site here:

http://www.thrivemovement.com/

The website's Liberty page for example is a real shocker:

http://www.thrivemovement.com/solutions-liberty

Peppered with quotes from Ayn Rand, Ron Paul and Stefan Molyneux, the page even includes an attack on democracy. Gamble lumps democracy in with bigotry, imperialism, socialism, and fascism, and claims all of these - including democracy! - violate the "intrinsic freedom of others."    Although Gamble thinks he is creating a political center where the right and left can join together - in part because he interviews progressives throughout his film - most of the actual solutions he proposes are strictly libertarian.

The political center to which Gamble refers is a myth. George Lakoff, author of The Political Mind, explains why there is no such thing as an established 'moderate' or 'centrist' worldview - i.e., no single set of ideas characterizes a center or moderate political position. Consequently, different people will describe 'the center' in different ways, depending on their particular beliefs about what defines a political center. Moreover, the 'center' will also be defined by the prevailing political narrative. If libertarians, conservatives, and ultra right wing factions are debating liberal Democrats, the center will always be on the right. However, if socialists and communists were added to the debate, the center would move toward the left. So, identifying who is allowed into the discussion is a determining factor in defining the 'center.'

Lakoff's discovery is an important contribution to understanding how and why people vote the way they do. It explains the role of emotions, metaphors, and psychological history, all of which determine which buttons we push in the voting booth as well as which buttons have been pushed by the manipulators who know how to influence our behavior. 

But I fear we are diverting too much into discussion here so let me quickly return you to that post-revolution world.

Show Me the Money.
Just as everywhere today, the key factor in the world that conspiracy theorists have built is money. The problem, however, is that there isn't any. In a post-conspiracy world there are no banks or formal financial institutions. In the past 50 years, conspiracy theories regarding banks, finance and currency - infused with libertarian propaganda - became so prevalent that the banks either collapsed, were outlawed, or were driven out of business. Needless to say in America the U.S. Federal Reserve was the first to go. 'Fiat currency' is the ultimate evil, the tool of the Illuminati for world domination, so the very appearance of it is social taboo. Just as libertarians and conspiracy theorists today demand, the U.S. is back on the gold standard: all currency is backed by gold. However, early in the revolution, large corporations quickly purchased all of the gold bullion in the United States from the failing banks. All of this gold is still held in their vaults, heavily guarded. It never enters circulation. Gold and gold-backed currency are still traded by the large corporations, but in purely theoretical transactions that take place on balance sheets and in computer programs.

Looking at the situation in America alone as a result of this situation, there is no currency in circulation. The U.S. Treasury stopped printing money. In fact, due to massive de-funding of government, the U.S. Treasury no longer exists. No one has seen a piece of paper currency or coin except in a museum.  But because the amount of gold bullion in the United States is only a tiny fraction of the amount of money needed to keep the economy moving, and because the gold reserves are under effective control of private corporations, America has become a land of barter economies. Corporations who wish to do business with each other trade favors, contractual obligations and customers; this form of barter has been unofficially institutionalized in the form of 'credits,' which are not backed by any precious metals. Ironically, credits exactly mimic most of the features of 'fiat currency' that has been supposedly outlawed and socially stigmatized. In rural areas, as we will see, the chief form of currency is ammunition. Needless to say, the ideals of a conspiracist economy and the realities do not match up.

The Cities: Corporate Feudalism.
The supplanting of democracy by conspiracist thinking and libertarian ideology had the effect, during the revolution, of dismantling government at all levels. Because there is no effective law and the economy collapsed, the result was large-scale anarchy. Major cities are the only islands of calm in a sea of violence and lawlessness.

These major cities are all run by an interlocking coalition of corporations - the same ones that control all the gold and all the wealth. The major function of these corporations is to sell social services to city residents, and they are all monopolies. The Law Enforcement Corporation sells physical security. The Habitation Corporation sells housing. The Food Corporation sells food. The Justice Corporation sells access to the wholly-privatized court system. There is no economic competition. There is also no regulation. Prices are fixed, but in this environment prices don't matter, as we'll see.

The cities are walled enclaves, heavily guarded by military personnel, where residents have at least a chance at a life above the anarchy and poverty of the outside world - but at a huge cost. The price for a house alone in one of the cities is far beyond the amount of gold, credits or barter that any ordinary person could ever possess in a lifetime. Nevertheless, the corporations waive their prices and admit new residents in exchange for lifetime commitments to work for them - commitments secured by immense debt loads. This form of indentured servitude is essentially feudalism: the workers cannot quit, cannot lobby, cannot organize, and can be fired and expelled from the city for any reason or no reason. Social mobility is unknown. It is impossible for a common worker—one who cleans the streets, works in the restaurants, drives the bus, provides childcare, etc.- to rise above his or her station; the debt load that the common person has taken on in exchange for living in the city is insurmountable in a dozen lifetimes. In fact, the corporations have begun to tack the balance of peoples' unpaid debts on to the debts of their children in exchange for agreeing to let their children continue to live in the city after they reach the age of majority. In this way, the corporations acquire an underclass of hereditary serfs, bound to the land and the lord, just like medieval feudalism. These serf-like customers are often traded between corporations as a form of barter.

The corporations have no incentive to treat the workers well. So many more people want to get into the cities than the number of slots available. Consequently the labor supply is cheap and inexhaustible, so any concessions to workers are an unnecessary drain on efficiency. Workers toil 14 hours a day, seven days a week. If they get sick, they are fired and sent out of the city. Although they live better than anyone else in the society, the directors and managers of the corporations don't live without fear. The influence of conspiracist thinking at all levels of society makes a stable existence very precarious. All it takes is one errant accusation that a person is working for the Illuminati, or even sympathizes with the Illuminati, and the person will be ostracized from society, fired from his job, possibly expelled from the city itself or hung from the same gallows as the 'traitors'.

Evidence is irrelevant, and legal process is unnecessary; an accusation, even an implausible one, is tantamount to guilt. Savvy businessmen routinely accuse their rivals of being Illuminati agents. Promotion and demotion within corporations is due far less often to merit and hard work than it is personnel shifts as a result of firings and expulsions from the city, most of them reactions to conspiracy allegations. Consequently, the corporations are poorly-run, grotesquely wasteful and rife with incompetence. Because they have a captive base of indentured customers, however, and competence and efficiency have no economic value, the ineptitude of the corporate managers has no effect on profits.

The Countryside: Mad Max With Pogroms.
If life is bad in the cities, it's even worse in the countryside. Government - feared and vilified by conspiracy theorists as the root of all evil - simply does not exist. Outside the cities, there are no police, no local or state officials, and no organization of any kind. There are no courts. There are no hospitals. There are no schools. Roads crumbled into dust decades ago because no one was around to maintain them. No one provides any private social services. For one thing, the big corporations have nothing to gain by selling their services outside the city; the rural population has no money to pay for them anyway. For another, they don't need the business; they've got more customers than they can serve within the walls of the cities. Outside those walls, people manage to survive - barely - by tilling their own tiny farms at a subsistence level.

The level of violence in the countryside is shocking. During the revolution, the only personal liberty that was even remotely respected was the right to bear arms, and out in the country you can't survive without heavy firepower. Family farms are defended by minefields, barbed-wire fences and kids toting automatic weapons. In many areas, warlords have managed to take over the more productive farms, resulting in irregular patchworks of fiefdoms that are constantly fighting with each other. In addition to outright barter, ammunition is the chief de facto currency in these areas. Heavy weaponry looted from abandoned military bases is the chief source of power. Life in this libertarian paradise is, in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes, "nasty, brutish and short."

Disease takes a terrible toll on all sectors of society, including the rich in the cities, but out in the countryside it's particularly bad. Vaccines of any kind are distrusted as tools of the Illuminati. As a result, diseases that are easily preventable - polio, measles, rubella, chicken pox, etc. - kill and cripple tens of thousands every year, especially children. Infant mortality is frightful. There are no doctors in these outlying areas. They too were denounced long ago as tools of conspirators; during the revolution many doctors, accused of hiding cancer cures and collaborating with Illuminati-controlled pharmaceutical companies, were massacred or driven out of business. Even medical knowledge itself is dying out since all the medical schools were closed long ago.

The people who fare the worst in this society are Jews. Universally blamed for the imaginary conspiracies that supposedly brought society to the brink of ruin, Jews are refused entry to the cities, and in the countryside they are ruthlessly persecuted and massacred with regularity in horrific pogroms that resemble those of medieval Europe - except with automatic weapons. What few Jews remain have walled themselves up in heavily-armed ghettos with even worse conditions than the countryside whose virulently anti-Semitic (and heavily-armed) population they are hiding from. Nevertheless, as much as they hate Jews, the common people and the more powerful warlords of the countryside cannot organize any collective efforts to exterminate them, as much as they would like to. This inability is the only thing that allows the insular Jewish communities that still exist to carry on, hopeful that someday conditions will change and the world will come to its senses.

Knowledge—Forbidden Fruit.
The revolution that brought the conspiracy order to power was profoundly anti-intellectual. Experts on anything - especially scientists, economists (who argued against the economic changes), historians (who explained how the past had really occurred) and doctors (who were accused of suppressing cancer cures and tainting vaccines) - were mercilessly persecuted and massacred. In the revolution, all the universities were closed. Many libraries were burned or destroyed, their books distrusted as tools of the Illuminati. The Internet was regarded as a much more pure and reliable source of knowledge, because the Internet contained 'the truth' about conspiracies and books did not. As a result, in this conspiracist order, systemized education barely exists, libraries are virtually nonexistent, and most books are locked away and forgotten in vaults owned by the major city corporations - similar to the way books in the Middle Ages were locked up in monasteries.

If you think this is an exaggeration you should look at some of the Chemtrail conspiracy theories which allege that all the science books in the world (along with old films, WWII photos, and newspaper archives) have been tampered with to make it look like contrails have always been persistent, when in fact it only started around 1997. See for example here:

http://tankerenemy.blogspot.com/2009/01/contrailsciencecom-fake-books.html

The corporate managers of the cities, understanding that their power rests upon the perpetuation of conspiracy theories, carefully control what knowledge gets out to the common people. Any book or document that even remotely refutes or even questions conspiracy theories has been destroyed or altered after the fact to support conspiracy explanations. In this world, Osama bin Laden is lauded as a martyr, on whom the Illuminati unfairly blamed 9/11 and then assassinated him for this imaginary crime. Books or websites about Adolf Hitler routinely omit the Holocaust and instead laud his pro-free-market policies. American history books are wildly inaccurate, and present the country’s history as a relentless narrative of exploitation and conspiracies by the Illuminati and the Jews. Even science books contain numerous errors and omissions.

But, not many people read these books anyway; in fact, literacy has declined greatly because education as we now know it has ceased to exist. Most common people get all of their information from the Internet, which is controlled by the Information Corporation. There is very little written text on the Internet. Most material is either in the form of pictograms or videos. Almost all are either pornography, or simple morality plays dramatizing the evil and immorality of the Illuminati and the Jews. Most of these videos are less than a minute long and feature some hideously gory act of violence. Even very young children are desensitized to the most horrible images of human suffering, having been exposed to an unending stream of images of brutal retributions carried out against Illuminati sympathizers.

As the knowledge of true history, true science and critical thinking gradually fades, society is rapidly losing any real sense of its past or itself. Almost all events in history are reduced and simplified to a one-note narrative of exploitation by the Illuminati followed by the redemption of the revolution. Ancient history and the origins of man are described as being the result of extraterrestrial visitation. No one in this society knows that humans built the pyramids; even well-educated elites accept and honestly believe that all prehistoric structures of this nature were built by aliens. 

The major religions are all waning in practice. There are very few churches left. No one in this society has read or even heard of Shakespeare, of Tolstoy or of Leonardo Da Vinci. No one has ever been to an art museum or a music concert. In 100 years’ time, the collective store of human knowledge existing on Earth will have been reduced by half or more. It is truly a new Dark Age.

The Environment - A Rising Tide of Disaster.
Because there is no government, no environmental regulation and the city corporations have no incentive to be environmentally responsible, most countries are a stinking cesspool of environmental degradation. The corporation-run cities generate power through burning coal and oil - all reserves privately owned and controlled, of course. The cities export their garbage to the countryside where it sits in rotting heaps, breeding diseases and cancer clusters among the semi-feral rural population. Rural dwellers routinely build and furnish their own houses from the refuse of the cities, much of it contaminated. Because the corporate-run cities have no need for water treatment facilities—they can simply pump their sewage into the rivers at zero cost - rivers downstream of the major cities are indescribably foul. There are few forests left, the rural residents having deforested their lands for firewood.

The worst problem is global warming. Because the conspiracist order denounced anthropogenic global warming as a scam and a hoax by the Illuminati, even mentioning the existence of this problem is absolutely forbidden. Absolutely nothing has been done to ameliorate global warming - in fact, carbon emissions since the revolution have increased, despite having much less industry, because the corporations that run the cities have changed over to dirtier and more inefficient means of energy production and industrial usage. Rising sea levels have inundated coastlines. In the larger coastal cities like New York, makeshift seawalls have been built to hold back the ocean (built by slave labor of customer-serfs), but in rural coastal areas, the rising sea levels have turned many areas into fetid swamps. These swamps breed mosquitoes, which results in a high incidence of malaria in areas where it had once been thought to be eradicated. Combined with society’s distrust of doctors—thanks to conspiracy theories about suppressed cancer cures and tainted vaccines—the mortality from tropical diseases is much higher than it was before the revolution.

Global warming has also made peoples' jobs of feeding themselves much harder. Food crops are more difficult and costlier to raise, invasive and parasite species are hardier and more difficult to kill, and erosion of desiccated topsoil has turned vast areas into semi-arid wastelands incapable of cultivation. The increased strength of hurricanes due to global warming results in large swaths of the Atlantic coast being decimated at regular intervals - and because there is no government there are no relief agencies. No one pays any attention to these problems. In the cities, even mentioning the words “global warming” will mark you as an Illuminati sympathizer; in the countryside, the scientific knowledge to explain what’s happening no longer exists. In the meantime greenhouse gases continue to foul the atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate. The disaster of global warming is now, fifty years after the revolution, far beyond man's capacity to reverse it.

When the sun sets on this bleak country, filled with pollution and decay, its rays bleed through layers of carbon dioxide vapor and sulfuric acid. It sets on mosquito-infested marshes that were comfortable beachfront communities 60 years before. The clouds approaching on the horizon are filled with acid rain. Their caustic drops fall on acres of landfills and junkyards, oozing poison into a water table already contaminated with toxic chemicals and human feces. This is the brave new world that conspiracy ideology has built.

But there is worse yet to come...

These 9,000 bodies stenciled on a Normandy beach will break your heart

The seaside town of Arromanches, France, looked quite different over the weekend. Nine thousand silhouettes were hand-drawn in the sand on the Normandy beach to commemorate the soldiers and civilians who died on June 6, 1944. This stirring tribute, called "The Fallen," was conceived by British artists Jamie Wardley and Andy Moss, who enlisted the help of 200 volunteers to mark the International Day of Peace over the weekend. It took two years to prepare for the project, and the results, which were ultimately washed away by the tide, were heartbreaking. "All around us there are relics of the Second World War, but the one thing that is missing are the people that actually died," Wardley said. "We've very quietly made a big statement

Read more...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2429903/Peace-Day-Reminder-millions-lives-lost-war-artists-stencil-9-000-bodies-Normandy-beach.html

Khmer Rouge’s Killing Fields

1.7 million Cambodians died during those bloody years

For five seemingly endless years, a former school in Phnom Penh codenamed S-21 was death’s antechamber. During the worse excesses of the Khmer Rouge, over 16,000 people were tortured and imprisoned in the rooms of this prison before being carted off to their executions in the nearby killing fields. And most of them passed in front of an expressionless teenager’s camera.

Nhem Ein was just ten when he left the family farm and joined the Khmer Rouge with his four brothers in 1970. In 1975, he was sent to Shanghai to study photography and filmmaking, and was subsequently made chief photographer at S-21. Using looted cameras, he meticulously chronicled life inside Pol Pot’s abattoir (New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world/asia/27cambo.html)

If Brother Number One’s killing machines worked perfectly, it was due to the help of thousands like Nhem Ein who worked tirelessly to keep cogs well-oiled. As he removed their blindfolds and adjusted lights, Nhem Ein would lie to the newly arrived prisoners that “I’m just a photographer; I don’t know anything.” He would photograph hundreds of people a day, processing his film overnight to be attached to individual dossiers, comfortably cocooned from terrible realities of the Killing Fields from inside his isolated darkroom. He was careful not to let screams from torture chambers disturb his sleep, for he had to get up early to photograph the next batch of prisoners, he later recalled. As Arendt said of Eichmann, it was banality of evil personified, and like Eichmann, Nhem Ein had since retreated into bureaucratic doublespeak that he merely did what was asked of him.

That said, life was definitely not easy working for mercurial Pol Pot. When Nhem Ein accidentally damaged during development a negative of Pol Pot’s visit to China — there were spots on the eyes of the leader — he was sent to a prison farm. Only by convincing his interrogators that the film had been damaged before it reached him, Nhem Ein was spared the fate of thousands whose portraits he had taken.

Nhem Ein’s original negatives were left behind inside S-21 after the fall of Khmer Rouge. In 1997, two photographers, Douglas Niven and Chris Riley, discovered some 7,000 of them in S-21 and published 78 of them in a book called ”The Killing Fields.” Identifying them is next to impossible.

http://www.tuolsleng.com/