Fuck You! - The Crystal Spirit

It's another birthday and I'm too old for comfort. And I'm nobody much, especially after the night I had last night. But I don't care because I've never felt bigger and brighter and bolder in all my life. Because that's the way the world seems to feel, and it makes me feel the same way.
For the first time I can remember, people are simply saying Fuck You (Anglo-Saxon is always best) at the tops of their voices to an entire regiment of steam-age dictators who have ruled through a combination of steam-age weapons and insanity for generations. Their weapons are now obsolete. - the tank is not the weapon of the Information Age. And the people are terribly sane. So sane they have run the figures on the amount of blood needed to win freedom, and the audit is favourable. The Workers Flag really is deepest red. And until recently, we never realised just how much the balance of the historic freedom Account, paid into regularly over the mellenia, was in credit. And so we want to draw out our Freedom, thank you very much. No more jam tomorrow. Jam Today. Or Fuck You, in other words. The Fuckocracy has arrived, and there is no negotiation, no pussyfooting forward with caution. The creaking diplomatic Ghost-train designed to scare children away from change, with its lurching moth-eaten bogeymen, always relied on generous suspension of disbelief to stay in business at all. We stopped being afraid of it about the same time we stopped believing in Santa Claus.

The Old Bastards

The Old Bastard Ghadaffi may still be able to pay his mercenaries to mortar the people while he hides in his bunker in Tripoli, but everywhere else the Old Bastards are out, and the people are in. And all Old Bastards from The Bank of America to Mik Il Jong will have to mend their ways, or go. Chaos and Rampaging Bloodlust and the rumble of tumbrils? Mob Rule as predicted by the vermin press and the liberal wankers? Not at all. 
The same weapons which provided the courage to ged rid of the Old Bastards will be just as effective in sorting out any New Bastards who fancy taking those freedoms away again. And without the obscene human cost of destroying the Old Bastards. Even clever New Bastards, who think that they can dominate by running companies called Facebook or Google. 

It's A Living

All over the middle east, nice Muslim girls, whose elder sisters could only dream of a profession as an accountant married to a richer accountant are now dreaming of careers as professional revolutionaries. As bloggers for freedom. To be a revolutionary is now a genuine profession, and one which many parents can now take genuine, unreserved pride in. I'm sure even Gigi Ibrahim's parents are pleased as punch (really) at their little girl's achievements. And so they should be. And the attraction is not merely the noble objective, or even the temporary fame, but the fact that the revolutionary, at whatever level, is simply more alive than the conformist, who is possibly not alive at all. People do want to love each other more than they want to hate each other, and through that simple mental revolution they are more alive than any money-chaser. As the greatest optimist of the C20th says, all you need is love:

'Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.'

Bread and Roses

The choice will come soon enough between the air-conditioned, dead-end Consumerist paradise - and love. But the bond forged between those now changing the world will make that choice much easier and responsible.
Bless the heroes and martyrs of Tunisia and Egypt and Libya. Happy Birthday to You all, the living and murdered. My other birthday presents were nice, but your Crystal Spirit is the greatest possible gift, even if it was the most expensive. Happy Birthday to us all.

                                            '... the thing that I saw in your face
                                           No power can disinherit:
                                           No bomb that ever burst
                                           Shatters the crystal spirit.'    - George Orwell, 1942

FUCK YOU!

FUCK OFF!

Last Week - Tunis. Today - Cairo. Tomorrow - Riyadh

Hosni Mubarak has just finished announcing to a furious Egyptian nation that he will make some progressive reforms, but 'maintain stability' at all costs. In other words, no real change, he is staying, and his family have probably fled the country. He doesn't get it at all.
The longer he clings on, courtesy of tanks and guns supplied by America, enforcing the American economic regime which is causing the revolution in t he first place, the more the people will blame America. Naturally enough. And the greater will be the danger of America's worst fear, a fundamentalist regime running Egypt. Which would be a classic American bungle.
However, this will not come from the Muslim brotherhood, and in fact it seems that the era of massed Islamic militancy may be coming to an end. This seems natural enough somehow. As well as the almost biblical crumbling of an entire chain of rancid dictatorships across the world, not excluding America's jewel in the crown, Saudi Arabia, we may well be witnessing an early form of social change which doesn't need leaders in its early, revolutionary phase, just a means to keep in constant contact with enough people who feel the same way. It doesn't need gods or visionaries, just communication.
What kind of change then happens depends largely on how much opposition it encounters, and from what direction and in what form. The history of revolutions shows that the quickest way to turn them into dictatorships is to interfere with them.

Wikileaks And The Trouserless United Nations

A single typical file from the Wikileaks hoard would at one point have easily cost one life, directly or indirectly, given the number of operatives and contacts and the Byzantine convolution of deception and human bungling required to deposit each file under its park bench on Hampstead Heath.
Now it is possible for anyone to anonymously submit any classified or Dark Information to Wikileaks, and via them to the world. The great fear is that this will eventually uncover the genuine political and economic policies of states, and reveal how little democratic control the people actually enjoy. That the knowledge of the existence of another universe of policies and strategems and treachery will expose the modern nation state for the massive Lie Machine it is. However, a trouserless United Nations would in fact be a Very Good Thing indeed. If the mighty US has lost its trousers, how many other countries can guarantee their modesty? If any dissident can now publish to the world in relative confidence, what price state secrecy? Governments might even have to live by their manifesto commitments. And where would we be then?
A previous generation of political thought would have called this a revolution. The fact that there are no barricades or Molotov cocktails does not prevent it from being one.