Many of the deadly events described in the books and episodes that explore the wars actually happened, although in reality there was no secret cabal of genetically enhanced people behind them.
That we know of.
Certainly there are fragments of very strange and scary stories. Some of course are nonsense, while others are simple and fragmentary enough not to be. I remember hearing about one British retired military officer saying he had worked in an animal experiment lab with “sheep the size of horses.”
You don’t need conspiracy theories to know there’s stuff happening in the edges of what’s ethical.
Sure, but I was just addressing events that we know happened, such as the wars in Yugoslavia, the attempted coup of Gorbachev, the US backing of the Mujahedin in Afghanistan, etc, etc, all of which showed up in Cox’s Eugenics wars books (which I have one of, but not the other).
The weirder side of the cold war, stuff like MK Ultra, most certainly was looking into such things, but at this point, there was no secret cabal of scientists who successfully created supermen in the 60s and 70s… But as you say, that we know of. Given MK Ultra, I have little doubt that there weren’t ham-fisted attempts at such things, but of course to really change the human genome, you need to have mapped it, which didn’t happen until relatively recently.
Yep. Just experimenting on people with psychedelics was highly unethical. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!
I’m not really a fan of punk, though I do like Devo, Siouxsie & The Banshees, and some others. So my knowledge is pretty minimal. But I’ve read that punk rock (partly) grew out of a rebellion against progressive rock, where classical chops were important. Could this have happened in many places at the same time?
I’m also interested in Devo’s roots as art and protest, which I think sort of follows in the same vein – though they definitely were really good musicians (especially the drummer!).
I think it’s a yes and no there? There were some punks who started out legitimately not knowing how to play their instruments at first, but that’s not everyone. Glenn Matlock (the original bassist for the Sex Pistols) was quite a solid songwriter and musician. Joe Strummer was part of the pre-punk pub rock scene. Lee Ving from Fear had been a working musician since the 60s. Some became quite talented over the years. But others did not have a music background… Viv Albertine from the Slits had to learn to play. Sid Vicious had no real experience playing before Flowers of Romance and then as bass player for the Pistols. The Germs had no idea what they were doing… it’s kid of a mixed bag, really. It certainly became part of the punk ethos to not have any idea what you’re doing, because it allowed some ability to experiment. But there were plenty of punk bands with experience with music. Like other things about punk, the name came first, and the idea that it was a rebellion against what have you was sort of embraced a bit later… But it’s also telling that lots of bands that were indeed initially part of the “punk” wave are now no longer considered punk, because what that meant as a genre changed a good bit from the mid-70s, where it was amorphous and wide open to the early 80s, where there is some genre defining happening. Most people would not call Devo or Talking Heads punk, but at one point they were because they were sort of part of those scenes.
History repeats when people who believe that history repeats take actions that cause history to repeat. Yet many of those same people seeing an individual stuck in a cycle such as poverty firmly believe that difference choices will make a difference.
If there is something that defines humanity, cognitive dissonance might just be it.
The exponential advance of technology makes “history repeating” kind of unlikely, seems to me. Another is the massive power of corporations, especially international ones. I imagine the Hudson Bay had a lot of power, as did “company towns,” but I feel like now huge corporations are above nations in the hierarchy of human civilization. And worldwide instant communication and computer networks (and processing power) has played an enormous role in this.
Where do you think this country now called Canada came from. We were literally a department store creation. See also the East India Company.
We don’t have to be run by corporations. We could return corporations to solely the means by which an individual can be isolated from a business (so that your house isn’t considered an asset of your deli, if your deli goes bankrupt) without their outsized political power, but we keep making decisions to increase that power. Thus we move towards the next iteration of feudalism.
And where is it going to? And the rest of the world. Sometimes I think there already is a world-girdling super-nation/corporation that runs everything, via their puppets, who then run governments according to instructions from above.
I have wondered about this myself. It seems to me that power tends to show itself only as needed, so as not to cause any more trouble for itself than needed to maintain power. Thus we only see the small corrupt interventions needed to maintain the status quo, and not the larger interventions which could be performed if needed to address a true threat, like a certain Senator from Vermont. People who lived in Central and South American countries over the last century might agree with this characterization.
History repeats itself when people want it to. The Great War happened because too many people were eager to settle scores and try for advantages. The reason the current Iran situation sounds so much like Iraq 18 years ago is because that worked for the hawks then, so they are trying the same thing now.
I appreciate this being kind of angry. I’m finding it hard to keep capacity for it, instead of falling into some kind of empty grief, but on some objective level all these discussions should be angry. This kind of injustice and gaslighting is exactly what anger is for in the first place.
Yes, my whole point… History is not something that happens outside of us and our society, something that happens TO us, it’s (as Marx said) man making his own history, just not with perfect agency…
Yes, and pointing that out is absolutely critical to avoiding it. But the people who want a war with Iran (because of what they see as the potential benefits to themselves) want us to believe that war is our natural state, and historical necessary, which of course, it is not. It’s a choice…
This month’s missive is about the R-n-R Hall of fame and the “controversy” that crops up every year when the inductees are announced… TLDR, people miss the point about what this is all about…
