22-06-2010, 11:33 AM
Thanks for the stuff on Peter Watkins Jan.
I confess I was only vaguely aware of the guy and the controversy over 'The War Game".
Anyway I've just spent over an hour on his website and all I can say is 'WOW'.
It's people and initiatives like that, that give me some hope that the morass of conformist, war-mongering, environment-destroying, big-brother-fearing, passively-consuming, stupidity that we in the West are sinking ever deeper into - and dragging the rest of the world with us - may somehow be reversed.
Then I wake up and realise just what an overwhelmingly forlorn hope that really is.
I am personally finding it more and more difficult to stir myself to work towards such a reversal - a nobel exercise in futility is how it increasingly appears to me. The trajectory of the developing Orwellian nightmare is fixed and it just gets worse and worse. As Peter Watkins points out so lucidly on that site, it is actually built into the very structure that almost ALL productions with any prospect of a mass audience must conform - and content becomes almost incidental when form is so rigidly dictated.
Inspiring and depressing in equal measure.
I confess I was only vaguely aware of the guy and the controversy over 'The War Game".
Anyway I've just spent over an hour on his website and all I can say is 'WOW'.
It's people and initiatives like that, that give me some hope that the morass of conformist, war-mongering, environment-destroying, big-brother-fearing, passively-consuming, stupidity that we in the West are sinking ever deeper into - and dragging the rest of the world with us - may somehow be reversed.
Then I wake up and realise just what an overwhelmingly forlorn hope that really is.
I am personally finding it more and more difficult to stir myself to work towards such a reversal - a nobel exercise in futility is how it increasingly appears to me. The trajectory of the developing Orwellian nightmare is fixed and it just gets worse and worse. As Peter Watkins points out so lucidly on that site, it is actually built into the very structure that almost ALL productions with any prospect of a mass audience must conform - and content becomes almost incidental when form is so rigidly dictated.
Inspiring and depressing in equal measure.
Peter Presland
".....there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims"
Guido Preparata. Preface to 'Conjuring Hitler'[size=12][size=12]
"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied"
Claud Cockburn
[/SIZE][/SIZE]
".....there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims"
Guido Preparata. Preface to 'Conjuring Hitler'[size=12][size=12]
"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied"
Claud Cockburn
[/SIZE][/SIZE]