concerning but expected
i’m slightly concerned about the slow erosion of interest in wikileaks. the us have now asked for the personal information of all twitter followers of the wikileaks account, including a member of the icelandic parliament. even though twitter refused, this is a new, and even more concerning, perspective. not only the people publishing are being prosecuted, even though they are protected by international an national laws, but even people that read the said documents are now in danger of being put in threat lists, no fly lists, interrogation lists, etc. so not only publishing is a crime, but reading is too.
but what concerns me is not that a state is using every possible way to maintain control over its citizens and neutralize every threat to the status quo. that’s very common historically. i could go back only 40 years in the history of my country to see it play exactly the same way. maybe the us were just a bit naive, thinking a state could ever be different that every other tried in human societies. their rebellion from europe is nowhere to be seen anymore even though other countries still see it as a land of freedom. the power structures are the same, and so are the vices, including their own separatist terrorist groups, popularized recently by yet another shooting. this is, just like most european countries, just another sad truth about democracy that people continue to ignore.
what is worrying is that nothing happens. nobody is being prosecuted for the crimes published, nobody has stood up for the defense of the publishers, and especially, no state has intervened to stop the sweden/us love affair that is going on, or the fact that sweden is deliberately denying rights to someone so that the us can prosecute them. or that the us have kept a citizen under solitary confinement for 6 months without trial (also illegal according to international law).
i expected it, and as i see it unfold, it is almost too surreal. business as usual. we have crossed the bounds of legality and proven there is no such thing. laws are made to starve the hungry and feed the elites. if freedom of speech exists, it exists only to allow those in power to say the most obscene, down right horrible things, and to leave those that question them and seek the truth helpless in their own demise. it is not a crime for a president to decree a genocide but it is a crime for a citizen to denounce it.
how could we fix it? how could we pretend to want to live in such a world? how could we possibly believe that living in such a system would allow us to change it from the inside? it is a joke. fighting for a better society through standard politics and law is a joke. all judges are bought by money, influence or even just blood ties. all power remains in the hands of the few.
there is no future in the society we’ve constructed. i’ve been saying this for too long. we can do better. our failure as “good people” is to try to change a “bad system”. let it be bad and let it go on in a downwards spiral until it self destructs. let’s focus on building something independent and good. a place where law is for the common good, where power is for the best decision, a place where fame and power is not a goal but a consequence of ones devotion to a cause.
it isn’t hard to build these places. we’ve done a few so far with nothing more than our will power and bare hands. but it takes everyone to stop allowing this to happen. and i’m not naive to think it will.
the most oppressed are the ones that are the most essential to society. but when a farmer sells his food, or i sell my work, i do not care who it is sold to. this leads to an unfair advantage on the ruling class side. they have more money, they will always guarantee their own survival, because money doesn’t show the blood stains it costs.
so what would happen if a farmer was to refuse selling to rich? what would happen if i was to refuse to code immoral apps? what would happen if we decided not to be hypocrites for survival? a sure social collapse. but we can’t. we can’t because we are too afraid we’ll lose what we have. and yes, one could argue we can strive to have nothing. but almost no one is capable of that anymore. i know i’m just as guilty.
one could argue we must change everyone’s life. i don’t. i’m tired of this nonsense of everyone trying to force everyone else into being part of some kind of utopian political system, just because they were brought up or read that that would be a perfect society. no. this is exactly what is wrong. that we don’t leave each other alone. we don’t let differences be differences, we don’t let people be people. what unites us as humans is the fact that we can’t agree on anything. from the color of our shirts to the music we should hear, all the way to the food we eat and the people we love.
we force everyone into being part of a big mess called a globalized society. we use all tools possible. markets, politics, laws, bills of rights, music. everything because we want to spread our own personal “we them” mentality, our own narrow minded view of a problem and our specific solution that is inapplicable to other societies.
the problem is that we want to fix what is none of our business. that we want to have what isn’t ours. that we want more of what we don’t need.
like an old troubadour from the countryside used to say, playing his junkyard guitar made of a petrol tank, the only problem is that everyone wants to live without doing any work.
it would be easy to “steer” this behemoth away. all our upperclass activists would remain in their bubbles, no loss, all gain. but that’s exactly what sinks the ship. the fact that the ship itself is poorly designed. you can steer it in any direction, it will still sink.
we are seeing an erosion of all the rights fought for in the past century, and a slow return to feudalism, this time as a capitalist oligarchy. and all activism seems focused on specifics, instead of referring to the big elephant in the room. has it gotten so big that people don’t know there are other ways to live?
why aren’t we building cities with our bare hands like our ancestors, and making them resilient enough to be an example? why are we all trying to be neutral, when neutrality is systematically instrumentalized by our rulers and employers?
we need city states again, resilient so that nobody starves while refusing to sell to the highest bidder. we must learn to refuse business. to refuse selling our work forgetting about morals, selling our research for grant money, selling our crops for blood money.
i’m not naive. i know it is not going to happen. that’s why we started the places we started, and that’s why i won’t stop. i have seen a better world in the communities we lived in. they don’t scale up, but they can be independently applied.
i’ll be continuing this topic when we unravel the series on things. for now, just a silly bagpipe with a king’s head on it, i found it appropriate.