In this context, the word man is gender neutral, so the same, of course, is true of a woman...
It is also true of a government.
Or an entire nation.
Or just simply an entire species, like the Naked Ape.
Ah Pook is here.
Power is as power does. And the power of power rests in the demonstration of power.
Just like the Shock and Awe use of overwhelming force during the invasion of Iraq (or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in other times before it) was a "demonstration" of power, so has been, in its own way, the relentless persecution of Julian Assange.
That's what the whole exercise is about: a demonstration of relentless, raw, naked power.
Know your place, people.
Submit to your better.
Don't rock the boat.
And, oh yes, remember to vote for whom you are told to, every four years or so.
Imagine an organization like Wikileaks in the 15th or 16th century publicly disseminating incriminating documents about the House of Borgia. Well, it would be of no consequence to the Borgias, of course. The people at large already knew or strongly suspected most of what would have been revealed and worse, and, in a way, had grown to expect it from people in power. Wikileaks would only have confirmed what "everybody knows." And, then...what?
Wikileaks, on the other hand, would be destroyed by the Borgias. Publicly so, so as to make an example. Julian Assange, no doubt, would have his tongue cut out, and would be hung, strung and quartered for good measure.
This is what most people fail to realize about our era, the Borgias' times were but only yesterday.
Our young fledgling modern democracies are hardly democracies, at all.
The seemingly gentler era we are living in, that thin veneer of civilization, is but a fragile illusion.
"May you be recognized by people in high places" (sometimes also reported as: May you attract the attention of the government) is the second curse out of three apocryphal Chinese curses of increasing severity, the first one (and most well known) being "May you live in interesting times," and the last one "May you find what you are looking for."
ReplyDeleteThere is also a fable by Florian, about a Cricket, whose moral lesson contends that in order "to live happily," one ought "to live hidden."
It seems rather dubious, when it comes to it, whether the cricket of the fable would be living happily (let alone "hidden") in, say, the Orwellian dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, where most of the world population has become victim of perpetual war, government propaganda, omnipresent surveillance, Newspreak (and News Speak), memory hole and thoughtcrime.
Paraphrasing Frank Herbert ("Whipping Star"), corporate media is essentially "a life form" and the MSM reporter "one of its cells."
"That analogy teaches us which are the more important cells, which in greatest peril, which most easily replaced, and how easy it is to be mediocre..." Or—a coward?
To the sometimes heavy-handed pithy maxims of the fables of a Florian or an Aesop , I have always preferred the satire of an Horace or a Juvenal...
Or, closer to these times, the sarcasm of a CJ Hopkins:
Uncle Tom's Empire.
C J Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin.
He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org
Feel free to come find him in Berlin and buy him a beer. He’s been known to frequent an assortment of extremely suspicious RUSSIAN establishments in Kreuzberg.