271. Security & the Neo-feudalists – One Dimensional Chess

FeudalCastleA few cen­turies ago Europe was dot­ted with castle fortresses, sur­rounded by sup­pos­edly impreg­nable stone walls and moats of water. Bar­ri­caded in these castles were lords and ladies, suck­ing the life out of the peas­ant farms around them, and blow­ing the sur­plus on weapons, wars and glut­tony. They were war-lords, or in mod­ern par­lance, mafia god­fa­thers. Their cur­rent incar­na­tions are a bit more com­pli­cated. They go by the names of pres­i­dents, prime min­is­ters, cor­po­rate chief­tains etc, but their fan­tasies and fears are still essen­tially feu­dal. “Secu­rity” is their obses­sion. Day and night they fear for their own arses, while whole pop­u­la­tions are conned into pay­ing the bills for their deprav­ity. And as in the Mid­dle Ages, these neo-feu­dal­ists gold-plat­ing their scor­pion nests in Wash­ing­ton, Bei­jing, Moscow etc have induced new breeds of out­laws. For every action in nature, there is an equal and oppo­site reac­tion.

For the sto­ry­tellers amongst us, the present dis­or­ders hum­bling those who would be gods is a rich har­vest of irony. A while back, we had hopes for Barack Obama, but he turns out to be another sock pup­pet, with his min­ders, the gen­er­als and the money-lenders, tus­sling inside his sock. The great­est cheat-game in his­tory, new toys to steal the pri­vate lives and secrets of every­one on the planet (Prism, NSA XKeyscore etc), has been busted wide open by a gent called Edward Snow­den, dis­missed as a lowly techie. It turns out that Snow­den was a sys­tems design ana­lyst, tasked with find­ing weak­nesses in the whole mon­ster machine. He had keys to every door in the castle, and hor­ror of hor­rors, gen­uine intel­li­gence. Unlike the lawyers and MBas who pre­tend to “man­age” our civ­i­liza­tion, he actu­ally under­stands both the pol­i­tics and the tech­nol­ogy. He skipped ahead of them to Hong Kong, from whence the Wash­ing­ton lords, con­sumed by their own arro­gance, drove him to Moscow and forced him to stay there. They forced a man like Snow­den, awash with all their secu­rity secrets, into the arms of a spy­mas­ter like Vladimir Putin. Now there was bril­liance, duh? With half a brain between them, they could have let Snow­den slip off to South Amer­ica and picked him up eas­ily. Instead Obama and his mil­i­tary min­ders have proved con­clu­sively that they lack the com­pe­tence, integrity and cal­i­bre to man­age or inter­pret the tor­rents of infor­ma­tion about all of us which they have stolen. There is a the­ory going around that some­body in this game is play­ing eleven-dimen­sional chess, Matrix style. If so, Snow­den and Putin have out­classed the Wash­ing­ton scor­pi­ons on every move.

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