In his excellent book, Small Is Beautiful, the economist Eric Schumacher told us how people who work in large bureaucratic organisations lose the ability to think independently. I agree with him with one reservation, that I do not think that such people have the capacity to think independently in the first place. In the past month, British television has exposed three major international companies for reducing their workforces to a positon that I have outlined here of modern slavery. This, as I have been telling you for some years now, is the inevitable outcome of globalisation and of the experiment that Thatcher embarked on in 1979. This situation is quite deliberate and purposeful and has been the goal of free market neoliberals for the past forty years. The three companies exposed on our television are of course simply the tip of the iceberg and are easily exposed because they are so blatant and visible. We had the news this month of a firm of egg producers in England who were exposed keeping Lithuanian workers in appalling conditions, described on our news channels as slavery, to the extent that the workers were provided with paper bags and cans in which to urinate and defecate because they were denied, either the facilities, or the time off, to toilet. This is reality in modern Britain, the real legacy of the Blessed Margaret and her henchmen. On each occasion in those exposes on television, the companies indignantly denied point blank that such terms and conditions were either company policy, nor were the reality for their workforce. On each occasion, the television were able to produce official internal documents outlining the very policies and practices that they were so righteously denying, as well as the visual evidence from hidden cameras and recordings. We can chart the slow descent of the British state from civilisation into barbarism from 1975 when Thatcher became leader of the Tories.
However, what I have been reflecting on is how easily and happily ordinary people will implement such conditions and impose them on a day to day basis on behalf of such companies. It is the ordinary workers themselves, the middle and under managers, the petty bureaucrats, who are inflicting such conditions on their fellows. I often wonder about the ordinary soldiers in Guantanamo Bay who enthusiastically carry out the daily inhumanities on people who they know are innocent. Civilisation is truly a very fragile phenomenon and I find it extremely disturbing how so many ordinary people who live ordinary lives will unthinkingly cooperate in the inhumanity required of them by the imperatives of economic and social organisations driven by free market ideology. This is what Hannah Arendt termed the banality of evil. We are daily regaled in our news outlets in this benighted nation of tales how the Department of Work and Pensions are driving people to their deaths through inhuman harassment, insisting that people with terminal illnesses etc. are fit for work and having their benefits removed. This is Tory policy and is too well documented to deny, but my concern is with the ordinary people who implement such policy and who must know they are party to a modern day evil. We expect nothing else from the Westminster filth but surely can expect more from people who are themselves only a hairsbreadth away from being in that position themselves.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn explains in his writings how people have the capacity to, in his words, voluntarily step into the bottomless pit, and divest themselves of their humanity. They lose the capacity for normal human feelings and become something else. He experienced this at first hand, and I suspect we are seeing this today under the influence of a perverted and destructive ideology. It was a similar destructive and perverted ideology that drove the people witnessed by Solzhenitsyn. I had a discussion with a pompous middle class person recently who was fulminating about the workers who are taking industrial action and who didn't care about the disruption they were causing the public. I asked him why the workers should care? He was taken aback when I told him that he was completely indifferent to what companies and managers did to their workers as long as he was not inconvenienced, so why should other people care how their actions impacted on him. I told him that as far as he was concerned, employers could chain their workers to the walls and routinely whip them, and they had better not take any action to remedy such a situation if it inconvenienced him. I asked him if he ever gave a thought to the impact of free market policies on the families of such working people, on their children and their future. Of course he never gives such things a thought, nor cares either, as long as his train runs on time and his bus turns up. The fact that such disruption happens is of course, never the fault of the company or the employer, it is always the fault of the workers who are fighting to maintain a semblance of survival and decent living standards. The prominence of people like Trump, Farage, Boris the Spider etc. tells us much about who the ordinary people in our respective nations are looking to for guidance. We are in a dark place and it is getting darker, and our first priority is to expose our dominant ideology for what it truly is. When we do that, its exponents will be similarly exposed and we can begin the process of recovery to a semblance of sanity and decency. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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