Chưa kịp “ngẫm” thì bài viết của ông Paul Craig Roberts đã hiện lên trước. Cái tựa bài “ 2014 sẽ đem thêm sụp đổ xã hội” (2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse), giòng chữ vô âm nhưng không lặng lẽ. Nó quát to tiếng vang dội phá tan làn sáng tinh mơ- nó đã lấn át hết giọng hát giàn trải của Khánh Ly những lời khắc khoải của Trịnh Công Sơn.
Thôi thì đành phải nối ý ông PCR, có vài lời đầu năm 2014 vậy.
Ông PCR viết những suy ngẫm của ông nhân nghe lời thông điệp Giáng Sinh của Edward Snowden, thông điệp thế chỗ những lời rườm ra nhão nhoẹt của nữ hoàng Anh theo thông lệ hàng năm của đài số 4. Lần đặc biệt này- Snowden gửi Thông điệp về tính quan yếu của Quyền Riêng Tư. Và ông PCR cũng chỉ thở than chỉ vì thế!
Ông ngậm ngùi nhìn lại cái tính riêng tư nền tảng của Con Người đã mất dần theo năm tháng... từ những thập niên trước ở hậu bán thế kỷ thứ 20 chứ không phải đợi đến bây giờ.
Ông than thở về xã hội Mỹ của ông đã biến dạng, nơi mọi người nói và bị nghe không ngừng nghỉ. Nơi những con người không còn ý niệm “lễ, sỉ”, không còn nhận thức về tính đàng hoàng (liêm sỉ) của quan hệ xã hội (decency). Nơi mọi người hầu như ai cũng chỉ muốn “phơi bày” (exhibitionism) để được chú ý.
Ông chỉ kể lại và so sánh, nhưng không nói rõ nó mất đi là từ đâu? Do đâu? Người ta đánh mất hay bị lấy cắp, tước đoạt? Và Ai là kẻ cắp?
Không biết PCR có nhận ra rằng vấn nạn nước Mỹ của ông nó đang là vấn nạn của cả nhân loại này! Căn bệnh "nói không ngưng nghỉ" qua di động, hoặc thích "phơi bày" trên FaceBooks, Youtube v.v Nó đã trở thành "văn hóa toàn cầu". Và bản chất của nhà nước, dù là nhà nước Mỹ hay Việt Nam, Tầu, Nga v.v luôn luôn vẫn là uốn nắn quần chúng bằng bạo lực và thủ thuật thông tin tuyên truyền nhiều dạng thái, theo mô thức xã hội của chúng thiết lập, trong đó con người "được huấn luyện" để tự nguyện xin mất hết quyền tự chủ, và mất dần nhận thức giá trị tự thân. Tiến trình uốn nắn này (social engineering) nó rất tế vi và tiệm tiến một cách trường kỳ với tính kê tục tự nhiên của định chế và "niềm tin" huân tập của quần chúng.
Phải đợi đến thế kỷ 16 người ta mới khởi đầu bước ra khỏi bóng dáng bé nhỏ của những tên VUA CHÚA để sống tự do khá hơn - và dần dần khoa học, tư tưởng giá trị tự thân, đã giúp nhiều người từ bỏ được hình bóng đe dọa của các "thượng đế" trong vòng kềm tỏa bịp bợp của giới tăng lữ giáo sĩ, để sống tốt hơn, trân trọng chủ quyền cá nhân, bình đẳng với nhau cho đến hôm nay.
Từ lúc có những thay đổi nền tảng đó cho đến bây giờ, thế lực quyền bính và tôn giáo, dĩ nhiên, không ngồi yên chịu bị hủy diệt mất quyền. Chúng vẫn còn nắm nhiều điều kiện thượng phong trong xã hội và tiếp tục củng cố thay hình đổi dạng- nhưng mục tiêu nhất quán vẫn là uốn nắn điều kiện hóa xã hội khống trị quần chúng.
Một trong những thành công nền tảng của tiến trình củng cố quyền lực “phong kiến”, hay phải gọi đúng là “tân phong kiến” là thiết lập cái gọi là nền “dân chủ gián tiếp” trên nền tảng quốc gia nhà nước. Cái tên khác, nhưng bản chất cái ruột vẫn là dùng một ảo thề tuyệt đối để cai trị- một chính phủ (VUA) trong đó vị “tổng thống” hay “thủ tướng” đại diện thực hiện cái quyền tuyệt đối của nhà nước (thượng đế). Quần chúng “được quyền” gián tiếp chọn “chính phủ” do chính chúng đề cử- nhưng phải tuân hành nhà nước tuyệt đối còn hơn cả xưa kia tuân phục thượng đế chúa trời!
Chủ nghĩa quốc gia (nationalism- statism) đã được khẳng định như là một mô thức (paradigm) tận thiện cuối cùng ắt có không thể thiếu- tất cả mọi tài vật thiên nhiên hay nhân tạo, và sinh mạng cá nhân con người trở thành tài sản công cụ của Nhà nước. Nhà Nước Quốc Gia (The States - Nation) trở thành một "vị thần chủ thể bất tử" quyền năng. Nhà nước có quyền tuyệt đối tùy tiện trưng dụng bất cứ cái gì, bất cứ ai. Theo định nghĩa, "Ý nghĩa và mục đích cao quí nhất" của cuộc đời một công dân là "phục vụ và hy sinh cho Nhà nước".
Trong hệ thống này, nền giáo dục và “văn hóa” thường trực huân tập con người một cách tế vi về một lối sống vi lợi, trọng thương, và thị quyền. Tất nhiên hệ quả là những nỗ lực khơi dậy tự do, tự chủ, bình đẳng v.v đều bị loại bỏ tiêu diệt bằng mọi cách, không còn là “khi quân, bất trung”, “quỉ ám chống thượng đế”, nhưng với những ngôn từ “mới cùng nội dung như “chống xã hội”, “phản quốc” "thuyết âm mưu",“khủng bố”! George Owell đã soạn ra cả một "từ điển" của bọn nhà nước tận thiện và báo chí chính qui (1984)
Và thế là cũng như từ ngàn xưa, những ai yêu tự do bình đẳng, yêu hòa bình, kêu gọi thương yêu hòa hiếu giữa con người, đối kháng quyền lực áp chế, chống chiến tranh v.v đều bị bôi nhọ, mỉa mai, trù dập, bắt bớ hoặc hành tội.
-Cảnh sát công an quân đội hôm nay khác gì binh lính lâm quân triều đình ngày xưa?
-“Tập đoàn kinh thương” có khác gì các lãnh chúa vương tộc địa chủ thời trước?
-“Công dân” hôm nay có khác gì “thần dân” khi xưa?
- Và tâm địa của hàng tỉ người, đã khác gì ngàn năm xưa?
Khi cái gọi là “nhà nước quốc gia” một ảo thể bất tử với cái quyền tuyệt đối bao phủ toàn bộ đời sống con người, mà bọn chính phủ tận dụng nhân danh, còn đó - thì tất cả vấn nạn băng hoại xã hội từ quyền lực, chiến tranh còn đó. Và nền tự do, chủ quyền riêng tư của cá nhân con người không thể toàn vẹn hiện hữu.
Ông Paul Craig Roberts không biết có nhận ra chăng?
Ly cà phê đã nguội lạnh, chút nắng ban mai đã lẻn đâu mất từ lúc nào, nhường chỗ cho đám mây mờ nhẩn nha dẫn cơn mưa rắt, rỉ rả trên mái. Hàng xóm cũng bắt đầu ồn ào một ngày mới...như mọi ngày. Facebooks, Youtube đã rầm rập hiện lên với đầy dẫy những riêng tư cho “công cộng” thưởng thức quan chiêm- hình ảnh tiệc tùng hoan hỉ vô tư lự. Truyền hình lại tiếp tục lải nhải những chương trình, những “bản tin”, những mục giải trí... cùng một nội dung uốn nắn con người như từ bao ngàn năm...
Câu hỏi từ hơn 50 năm trước của Bob Dylan từ chiến tranh Việt Nam vẫn chưa được trả lời "Bao nhiêu lần bom đạn phải bay nữa trước khi bị ngăn cấm vĩnh viễn? (How many times must the cannon balls fly Before they're forever banned ?)
Giọng khàn rỉ của Louis Amstrong lại ước mơ trổi lên ".. Và tôi tự nhủ, thật là một thế giới tuyệt vời!" (And I said to myself, What a wonderful world!"
1-1-2014
NKPTC
==
Paul Craig Roberts
2014 is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the 21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” To us George Orwell’s 1984 seemed so far in the future we would never get there. Now it is 30 years in the past.
Did we get there in Orwell’s sense? In terms of surveillance technology, we are far beyond Orwell’s imagination. In terms of the unaccountability of government, we exceptional and indispensable people now live a 1984 existence. In his alternative to the Queen’s Christmas speech, Edward Snowden made the point that a person born in the 21st century will never experience privacy. For new generations the word privacy will refer to something mythical, like a unicorn.
Many Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could not always provide private lines. There were “party lines” in which two or more customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and inappropriate to listen in on someone’s calls and to monopolize the line with long duration conversations.
The privacy of telephone conversations was also epitomized by telephone booths, which stood on street corners, in a variety of public places, and in “filling stations” where an attendant would pump gasoline into your car’s fuel tank, check the water in the radiator, the oil in the engine, the air in the tires, and clean the windshield. A dollar’s worth would purchase 3 gallons, and $5 would fill the tank.
Even in the 1980s and for part of the 1990s there were lines of telephones on airport waiting room walls, each separated from the other by sound absorbing panels. Whether the panels absorbed the sounds of the conversation or not, they conveyed the idea that calls were private.
The notion that telephone calls are private left Americans’ consciousness prior to the NSA listening in. If memory serves, it was sometime in the 1990s when I entered the men’s room of an airport and observed a row of men speaking on their cell phones in the midst of the tinkling sound of urine hitting water and noises of flushing toilets. The thought hit hard that privacy had lost its value.
I remember when I arrived at Merton College, Oxford, for the first term of 1964. I was advised never to telephone anyone whom I had not met, as it would be an affront to invade the privacy of a person to whom I was unknown. The telephone was reserved for friends and acquaintances, a civility that contrasts with American telemarketing.
The efficiency of the Royal Mail service protected the privacy of the telephone. What one did in those days in England was to write a letter requesting a meeting or an appointment. It was possible to send a letter via the Royal Mail to London in the morning and to receive a reply in the afternoon. Previously it had been possible to send a letter in the morning and to receive a morning reply, and to send another in the afternoon and receive an afternoon reply.
When one flies today, unless one stops up one’s ears with something, one hears one’s seat mate’s conversations prior to takeoff and immediately upon landing. Literally, everyone is talking nonstop. One wonders how the economy functioned at such a high level of incomes and success prior to cell phones. I can remember being able to travel both domestically and internationally on important business without having to telephone anyone. What has happened to America that no one can any longer go anywhere without constant talking?
If you sit at an airport gate awaiting a flight, you might think you are listening to a porn film. The overhead visuals are usually Fox “News” going on about the need for a new war, but the cell phone audio might be young women describing their latest sexual affair.
Americans, or many of them, are such exhibitionists that they do not mind being spied upon or recorded. It gives them importance. According to Wikipedia, Paris Hilton, a multimillionaire heiress, posted her sexual escapades online, and Facebook had to block users from posting nude photos of themselves. Sometime between my time and now people ceased to read 1984. They have no conception that a loss of privacy is a loss of self. They don’t understand that a loss of privacy means that they can be intimidated, blackmailed, framed, and viewed in the buff. Little wonder they submitted to porno-scanners.
The loss of privacy is a serious matter. The privacy of the family used to be paramount. Today it is routinely invaded by neighbors, police, Child Protective Services (sic), school administrators, and just about anyone else.
Consider this: A mother of six and nine year old kids sat in a lawn chair next to her house watching her kids ride scooters in the driveway and cul-de-sac on which they live.
Normally, this would be an idyllic picture. But not in America. A neighbor, who apparently did not see the watching mother, called the police to report that two young children were outside playing without adult supervision. Note that the next door neighbor, a woman, did not bother to go next door to speak with the mother of the children and express her concern that they children were not being monitored while they played. The neighbor called the police.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mom-sues-polices-she-arrested-letting-her-kids-134628018.html
“We’re here for you,” the cops told the mother, who was carried off in handcuffs and spent the next 18 hours in a cell in prison clothes.
The news report doesn’t say what happened to the children, whether the father appeared and insisted on custody of his offspring or whether the cops turned the kids over to Child Protective Services.
This shows you what Americans are really like. Neither the neighbor nor the police had a lick of sense. The only idea that they had was to punish someone. This is why America has the highest incarceration rate and the highest total number of prison inmates in the entire world. Washington can go on and on about “authoritarian” regimes in Russia and China, but both countries have far lower prison populations than “freedom and democracy” America.
I was unaware that laws now exist requiring the supervision of children at play. Children vary in their need for supervision. In my day supervision was up to the mother’s judgment. Older children were often tasked with supervising the younger. It was one way that children were taught responsibility and developed their own judgment.
When I was five years old, I walked to the neighborhood school by myself. Today my mother would be arrested for child endangerment.
In America punishment falls more heavily on the innocent, the young, and the poor than it does on the banksters who are living on the Federal Reserve’s subsidy known as Quantitative Easing and who have escaped criminal liability for the fraudulent financial instruments that they sold to the world. Single mothers, depressed by the lack of commitment of the fathers of their children, are locked away for using drugs to block out their depression. Their children are seized by a Gestapo institution, Child Protective Services, and end up in foster care where many are abused.
According to numerous press reports, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 year-old children who play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers during recess and raise a pointed finger while saying “bang-bang” are arrested and carried off to jail in handcuffs as threats to their classmates. In my day every male child and the females who were “Tom boys” would have been taken to jail. Playground fights were normal, but no police were ever called. Handcuffing a child would not have been tolerated.
From the earliest age, boys were taught never to hit a girl. In those days there were no reports of police beating up teenage girls and women or body slamming the elderly. To comprehend the degeneration of the American police into psychopaths and sociopaths, go online and observe the video of Lee Oswald in police custody in 1963. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FDDuRSgzFk
Oswald was believed to have assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered a Dallas police officer only a few hours previously to the film. Yet he had not been beaten, his nose wasn’t broken, and his lips were not a bloody mess. Now go online and pick from the vast number of police brutality videos from our present time and observe the swollen and bleeding faces of teenage girls accused of sassing overbearing police officers.
In America today people with power are no longer accountable. This means citizens have become subjects, an indication of social collapse.
About Dr. Paul Craig Roberts Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.
==
2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse — Paul Craig Roberts
2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse
Paul Craig Roberts
2014 is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the 21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” To us George Orwell’s 1984 seemed so far in the future we would never get there. Now it is 30 years in the past.
Did we get there in Orwell’s sense? In terms of surveillance technology, we are far beyond Orwell’s imagination. In terms of the unaccountability of government, we exceptional and indispensable people now live a 1984 existence. In his alternative to the Queen’s Christmas speech, Edward Snowden made the point that a person born in the 21st century will never experience privacy. For new generations the word privacy will refer to something mythical, like a unicorn.
Many Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could not always provide private lines. There were “party lines” in which two or more customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and inappropriate to listen in on someone’s calls and to monopolize the line with long duration conversations.
The privacy of telephone conversations was also epitomized by telephone booths, which stood on street corners, in a variety of public places, and in “filling stations” where an attendant would pump gasoline into your car’s fuel tank, check the water in the radiator, the oil in the engine, the air in the tires, and clean the windshield. A dollar’s worth would purchase 3 gallons, and $5 would fill the tank.
Even in the 1980s and for part of the 1990s there were lines of telephones on airport waiting room walls, each separated from the other by sound absorbing panels. Whether the panels absorbed the sounds of the conversation or not, they conveyed the idea that calls were private.
The notion that telephone calls are private left Americans’ consciousness prior to the NSA listening in. If memory serves, it was sometime in the 1990s when I entered the men’s room of an airport and observed a row of men speaking on their cell phones in the midst of the tinkling sound of urine hitting water and noises of flushing toilets. The thought hit hard that privacy had lost its value.
I remember when I arrived at Merton College, Oxford, for the first term of 1964. I was advised never to telephone anyone whom I had not met, as it would be an affront to invade the privacy of a person to whom I was unknown. The telephone was reserved for friends and acquaintances, a civility that contrasts with American telemarketing.
The efficiency of the Royal Mail service protected the privacy of the telephone. What one did in those days in England was to write a letter requesting a meeting or an appointment. It was possible to send a letter via the Royal Mail to London in the morning and to receive a reply in the afternoon. Previously it had been possible to send a letter in the morning and to receive a morning reply, and to send another in the afternoon and receive an afternoon reply.
When one flies today, unless one stops up one’s ears with something, one hears one’s seat mate’s conversations prior to takeoff and immediately upon landing. Literally, everyone is talking nonstop. One wonders how the economy functioned at such a high level of incomes and success prior to cell phones. I can remember being able to travel both domestically and internationally on important business without having to telephone anyone. What has happened to America that no one can any longer go anywhere without constant talking?
If you sit at an airport gate awaiting a flight, you might think you are listening to a porn film. The overhead visuals are usually Fox “News” going on about the need for a new war, but the cell phone audio might be young women describing their latest sexual affair.
Americans, or many of them, are such exhibitionists that they do not mind being spied upon or recorded. It gives them importance. According to Wikipedia, Paris Hilton, a multimillionaire heiress, posted her sexual escapades online, and Facebook had to block users from posting nude photos of themselves. Sometime between my time and now people ceased to read 1984. They have no conception that a loss of privacy is a loss of self. They don’t understand that a loss of privacy means that they can be intimidated, blackmailed, framed, and viewed in the buff. Little wonder they submitted to porno-scanners.
The loss of privacy is a serious matter. The privacy of the family used to be paramount. Today it is routinely invaded by neighbors, police, Child Protective Services (sic), school administrators, and just about anyone else.
Consider this: A mother of six and nine year old kids sat in a lawn chair next to her house watching her kids ride scooters in the driveway and cul-de-sac on which they live.
Normally, this would be an idyllic picture. But not in America. A neighbor, who apparently did not see the watching mother, called the police to report that two young children were outside playing without adult supervision. Note that the next door neighbor, a woman, did not bother to go next door to speak with the mother of the children and express her concern that they children were not being monitored while they played. The neighbor called the police.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mom-sues-polices-she-arrested-letting-her-kids-134628018.html
“We’re here for you,” the cops told the mother, who was carried off in handcuffs and spent the next 18 hours in a cell in prison clothes.
The news report doesn’t say what happened to the children, whether the father appeared and insisted on custody of his offspring or whether the cops turned the kids over to Child Protective Services.
This shows you what Americans are really like. Neither the neighbor nor the police had a lick of sense. The only idea that they had was to punish someone. This is why America has the highest incarceration rate and the highest total number of prison inmates in the entire world. Washington can go on and on about “authoritarian” regimes in Russia and China, but both countries have far lower prison populations than “freedom and democracy” America.
I was unaware that laws now exist requiring the supervision of children at play. Children vary in their need for supervision. In my day supervision was up to the mother’s judgment. Older children were often tasked with supervising the younger. It was one way that children were taught responsibility and developed their own judgment.
When I was five years old, I walked to the neighborhood school by myself. Today my mother would be arrested for child endangerment.
In America punishment falls more heavily on the innocent, the young, and the poor than it does on the banksters who are living on the Federal Reserve’s subsidy known as Quantitative Easing and who have escaped criminal liability for the fraudulent financial instruments that they sold to the world. Single mothers, depressed by the lack of commitment of the fathers of their children, are locked away for using drugs to block out their depression. Their children are seized by a Gestapo institution, Child Protective Services, and end up in foster care where many are abused.
According to numerous press reports, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 year-old children who play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers during recess and raise a pointed finger while saying “bang-bang” are arrested and carried off to jail in handcuffs as threats to their classmates. In my day every male child and the females who were “Tom boys” would have been taken to jail. Playground fights were normal, but no police were ever called. Handcuffing a child would not have been tolerated.
From the earliest age, boys were taught never to hit a girl. In those days there were no reports of police beating up teenage girls and women or body slamming the elderly. To comprehend the degeneration of the American police into psychopaths and sociopaths, go online and observe the video of Lee Oswald in police custody in 1963. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FDDuRSgzFk
Oswald was believed to have assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered a Dallas police officer only a few hours previously to the film. Yet he had not been beaten, his nose wasn’t broken, and his lips were not a bloody mess. Now go online and pick from the vast number of police brutality videos from our present time and observe the swollen and bleeding faces of teenage girls accused of sassing overbearing police officers.
In America today people with power are no longer accountable. This means citizens have become subjects, an indication of social collapse.
