Naked and spectacular

Total pageviews

2011-04-06

The pill at the centre of the structure

Ring of Power: Empire of the City - 4000 Years of Repressed History

A five-hour ten-episode documentary with a home-made analogue feel to it, cutting and pasting clips from other works.  It details who is wearing the "ring of power" in our global civilisation and who has been wearing it for thousands of years.

The first two episodes show how the 9/11 terrorist attacks were not perpetrated as officially reported and that there are three independent city states, within London, within Columbia, Washington DC and of course Vatican City, that are under the jurisdiction of no government and are in fact very rich corporations.  The film then goes back thousands of years to the Egyptian empire and suggests the patriarchs depicted in the Bible, such as Abraham, were in fact Egyptian pharaohs.  In this exciting historical section the film suggests that Jesus was the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and as a child was sent to India under the guardianship of a couple named Mary and Joseph because his mother feared for his life amidst the political turmoil that resulted in the assassination of Julius Caesar.  When he returned armed with Buddhist philosophy he was set to reclaim the family empire by creating a new religion.  The film then details how the Egyptian empire became the Roman empire became the British empire and that the same 300 families have been ruling us for thousands of years, primarily these days through money, owning banks and large chunks of the corporations in the world and through the self-evident wage slavery that many of us subscribe to.  It even beautifully suggests that Queen Elizabeth II and George Bush are related and that Prince William is the Antichrist before offering us some practical solutions to what we can do to reclaim our power from those who seek to manipulate us.  
 
"You conspiracy theory junkies are shamefully sucking up any piece of drivel you stumble across. Anti Semitism shows its ugly head in many ways.. get off your horse." 
 
I am not a conspiracy theory junkie and I do not believe in the thesis of this film. I also do not believe in the capitalism-democracy-Christianity-science-morality theory that is propagated through mainstream media and politics. I think we have the right to reclaim our history, reimagine our reality and question our cultural ideologies without being labelled dismissively as "conspiracy theory junkies" as if it is stupid to question the authority institutions who are clearly manipulating us for their own profit, whether or not they're clever enough to orchestrate anything as elaborate as this film suggests. 
 
There is a tremendous amount of freedom in resigning the responsibility of deciding whether the media you consume is true or false.  When you are able to observe and enjoy something without placing it on this limited abstract dichotomy it is possible to extract from it a greater truth than wrong or right, you are able to compare it to your experience of the world and allow it to enrich your perspective on the world in any way that makes sense to you.  I happen to know there are myriad ways of interpolating a film such as this once liberated from the true/false dichotomy; it can provoke thought on the obvious experience of being manipulated by institutional authority and corporate interests, whether the face of control is really the seat of control, whether our manipulators, who appear neurotic and psychotic, are actually capable of composing so intricate a global domination plan and where we place our self in relation to the obvious and invisible power structures in our civilisation. 
 
I happen to know that history is a matter of interpretation and presentation, that history is a story and the story is told by those who tell it.  I am not content to accept the story told to me by authority figures and my interest in history exposes me to as many histories as possible.  I decide upon the best histories by noticing which excite me the most, rather than which I think is most likely "true".  I presume that the more a history excites me, the more it has to offer me in enriching my understanding of my experience of the world; because of course we all consume history to understand the present, rather than the past. 
 
Perhaps we're on the last page of the book of history.  Perhaps this book is not linear, but actually a Choose Your Own Adventure book in which the last page could be situated anywhere throughout the book and there are many interweaving paths we could have taken to get here and the fact that we are here proves nothing but the fact that we are here and we can reconstruct our history in any way we see fit and perhaps there are many ways of reconstructing it; and of course we always construct history backwards in time from the present. 
 
The reason we can be accused of anti-semitism is because we have a word for it.  No arrogant European colonist could have considered that he was racist because he had no word for racism.  The word racism has allowed us to become aware of our racist attitudes and behaviours and hopefully eliminate them where appropriate.  For some reason the Semitic race have their own word, despite "racism" including all races.  Because of this we can observe anti-semitism and even see it where it doesn't occur.  No one would accuse this film of being racist, but a number of people have accused it of anti-semitism.  I suppose this is because the film suggests that Zionists may have been responsible for 9/11 and that the power elite stretching back to Ancient Egypt come from the Hebrew people.  Whether or not this is true it seems very strange to me that we can be compared to anti-human fascists who were indeed anti-semitic for suggesting an alternative history involving Semitic people.  Does this mean the theory that all humans are the offspring of a single African woman is racist?  Because of various political interests manipulating history as long as history has been recorded we cannot know for sure what is "true".  We do however know that the basis of Western civilisation and the three major monotheistic religions emerge from an ancient Hebrew book and the culture that created it.  This is not anti-semitic, it is fact as far as we can tell, despite the fact that much of the trauma in the last two thousand years has been the result of Christianity and Islam and thousands of years of conflict in the Middle East are traced back to divergent interpretations of a passage from this ancient Hebrew book.  This is not anti-semitism either. 
 
While in the real world we are respectful and kind to everyone we meet and we progressively overcome our natural instinctive racism that is no longer appropriate in a global society, in our imaginary intellectual world we are free to contrive and collate as many universes as we can imagine without being restricted or apprehended by intellectual fascists and their words. 
 
We have been taught to see the pill as the saviour.  We go to the doctor (God) and he gives us one pill (the Messiah) that cleanses us of all our sins and provides us with salvation. 
 
Around my apartment we have been forced to lay our cardboard structures to capture the cockroaches that torment us with their presence.  The inside base of these structures is so sticky that the exterminator told me not to touch them; at the centre of this sticky base is a pill that is for some reason immensely desirable to cockroaches.  The cockroaches smell this pill and attempt to crawl towards it.  However, their first step onto the sticky base sticks them for the rest of their life and they die there slowly.  The pill continue to attract cockroaches and as the perimeter fills more cockroaches crawl over the dead and dying bodies of their brothers to get to this pill, this Holy Grail, at the centre of the cardboard structure.  After many generations of this callous, hysterical behaviour the cockroaches get closer and closer to the pill at the centre of the structure and maybe one day they will get so close that their feet will stick right beside the pill and they can manically lick it until they're dead.

No comments: