History, Sentimentality and Censorship
I’ve started on a new project to tidy up and categorise all of my “possessions”, photos, CDs, Paul’s bits and pieces. I figure if I do a little bit each day it will be done by the time I die and then it can be all cast away in a rubbish tip somewhere. My history will be gone but my words will stay. Or a least they will until the planet ceases to exist.
Aren’t we a funny bunch. Clinging onto sentimentality for the past, what has come before in our lives. Mementos of those we loved or struggled with who have now moved on, passed on, little scraps that represent moments of happiness or creativity or even sadness and loss.
One thing that I did find was a whole lot of 8mm video cassette tapes that had been missing for well over a decade. I found them 2 days ago mixed up in Paul’s cassette tapes. Most people these days wouldn’t even be able to imagine what these little plastic things could be even though to me they represent the peak of high capture technology from the late 20th century. These recordings are from the years 1996-1999 and will have images of Paul and Allissa as teenagers. My challenge now will be to digitalise them and an even bigger challenge will be to watch them.
I look at each item that I pick up. A plastic figure of He Man, a character from Masters of the Universe which represents the innocence of Paul’s first 10 years of life or Buzz Lightyear who does that same for Finn albeit 20 years later. I suppose that a lot of us cling onto these rather useless items as a final way of not letting the memory of a person or a period disappear like the suds popping in a bathtub.
I stand there and hold onto an item, look at it and ask myself whether I can bear to dispose of it then I put it into a new box until next time. The pile of junk that will finally make its way to the tip is getting a bit bigger but not anywhere as big as I had anticipated.
Maybe that’s one of the liabilities of growing older and placing so much significance on the decades that are now gone.
Nothing transcends death. Or should I say more simply that you simply can’t take any of this physical shit with you. You either get rid of it yourself or leave it for some poor bastard to get rid of it for you. That says it all doesn’t it?
When I was a teenager I went to the cinema on my own to watch a movie called The Collector starring Terence Stamp. I did that as a kid, went to movies on my own. I had some strange intellectual need to challenge my own tolerance of creativity. Maybe this idea of being a Collector stuck with me, even though he was a psycho and collected women and locked them up! Not my thing at all.
Maybe I’ll be able to let a few more bits and pieces go now.
Having said all of that I still firmly believe that an understanding of what came before can help to make sense of what is happening now.
That is why I believe an awareness of history is so important.
It’s like knowing that the reason an adult is as they are now is because they were battered as a child. The powers that be try to cover up the facts and as a result attitudes and actions persist.
The potential that 9/11 was an insider job is there. The ramifications are exploding in the tabloids and real life now with the fall of Kabul. If you look closely and behind the veil of lies it is obvious that the US and their allies had no right or reason to make war on Afghanistan back in 2001. It’s been 20 years. A sliding door moment that changed the path of history but unless people now have access to the truth, the real reasons and motivations that were behind it in the first place the way we look on it now will be coloured and abberated by the false history that has been written. America stopped winning wars in the 1940s. Korea, Vietnam and the 100s of other countless conflicts that they imposed on other countries in the name of democracy and freedom. All perpetrated for no lasting reason apart from amassing more power and wealth.
Back then the wars were justified based on the so called threat of communism but to understand that you would need to go back further and look at colonialism and the acts of oppression that the British Empire and other military powers imposed on peaceful countries in the name of democracy and freedom or even religion. But underlying all of the killing, all of the destruction there was money and power.
Now we find ourselves beyond “barbaric” wars where men fight each other. We now use invisible drones to kill innocent people. That way no-one is really responsible. There is a long list of justifications. Now wars are transcending how they are fought again and the underlying “rules of combat” are changing once again.
What better way to take away a person’s freedom than to censor them. To take away their voice. To stop them from questioning the motivation of those in control. To clear the way for the false propaganda that will forward their need for power and money and control. Most people will fall for it. They will back the invisible forces that will shape the next 20 years mainly because the voice of dissent has now been silenced and the lines of communication are controlled like they were in the novel 1984, also a part off history, that most people forget or simply don’t know ever existed.
