Letter to a Prisoner

Thank you both for sharing your personal letters.

I’ve read my way around this great website a lot recently, this article made me want to respond in many ways, and as you say Vivienne the more I write, the more I think. And so, the more I want to write.

Foremost in my mind are my thoughts on prison. Prison, the idea of shutting people away and thinking of this as any kind of solution is ridiculous. I don’t see how prisons can be justified in contemporary society.
I was told that Michel Foucault wrote about prison and other institutions. I’ve not read any of his work, but I think the jist of what he says is that we put people in prison and call them bad so we the privileged on the outside can define ourselves as good. How simpleminded we can be. How can grouping ‘bad’ people together for years, institutionalising them (as in Brave New World & 1984) then setting them “free” be considered a solution when all the evidence is to the contrary?

And as for the many people in prison who are not even guilty, such as yourself Leonard, – I cannot express my feelings in words.

Leonard, please have hope that you will be exonerated. I am hoping for something personally myself, hope is a powerful thing. I remember Terry Waite being interviewed about his imprisonment on the radio once. He said that hope was the one thing that got him through his ordeal.

This documentary is on Leonard’s website I thought I’d just put a link here too:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4219825247691110146#

Let me first admit my ignorance of Leonard’s heritage, and indeed the heritage of Paul Revere and The Raiders, never-the-less the sentiments in this song are powerful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grVVC6BgxK4
While I agree with you about the perils of popular culture Vivienne, I’d like to use that song as an example of popular culture which makes us aware. It reminds us of the crazy state in which we exist. Because it is done in a popular way, it is able to talk to the minds of many people who instinctively avoid high culture. Another more contemporary example of the power of this shall I say “medium culture” is the Black eyed peas’ Where is the love. I agree with you so much about the importance of active resistance to propaganda. We must attune our instincts to decipher art. But I think we must not dismiss all popular culture, because some of it is very powerful precisely because of its popularity.

You for example Vivienne, not that I’m calling you popular culture, but you are popular! And it is a delight to see you use your popularity in such a positive way.

Simon

These are the lyrics from
Where is the Love:

What’s wrong with the world, mama
People livin’ like they ain’t got no mamas
I think the whole world addicted to the drama
Only attracted to things that’ll bring you trauma
Overseas, yeah, we try to stop terrorism
But we still got terrorists here livin’
In the USA, the big CIA
The Bloods and The Crips and the KKK
But if you only have love for your own race
Then you only leave space to discriminate
And to discriminate only generates hate
And when you hate then you’re bound to get irate, yeah
Madness is what you demonstrate
And that’s exactly how anger works and operates
Man, you gotta have love just to set it straight
Take control of your mind and meditate
Let your soul gravitate to the love, y’all, y’all

People killin’, people dyin’
Children hurt and you hear them cryin’
Can you practice what you preach
And would you turn the other cheek

Father, Father, Father help us
Send us some guidance from above
‘Cause people got me, got me questionin’
Where is the love (Love)

Where is the love (The love)
Where is the love (The love)
Where is the love
The love, the love

It just ain’t the same, always unchanged
New days are strange, is the world insane
If love and peace is so strong
Why are there pieces of love that don’t belong
Nations droppin’ bombs
Chemical gasses fillin’ lungs of little ones
With ongoin’ sufferin’ as the youth die young
So ask yourself is the lovin’ really gone
So I could ask myself really what is goin’ wrong
In this world that we livin’ in people keep on givin’
in
Makin’ wrong decisions, only visions of them dividends
Not respectin’ each other, deny thy brother
A war is goin’ on but the reason’s undercover
The truth is kept secret, it’s swept under the rug
If you never know truth then you never know love
Where’s the love, y’all, come on (I don’t know)
Where’s the truth, y’all, come on (I don’t know)
Where’s the love, y’all

People killin’, people dyin’
Children hurt and you hear them cryin’
Can you practice what you preach
And would you turn the other cheek

Father, Father, Father help us
Send us some guidance from above
‘Cause people got me, got me questionin’
Where is the love (Love)

Where is the love (The love)
Where is the love (The love)
Where is the love
The love, the love

I feel the weight of the world on my shoulder
As I’m gettin’ older, y’all, people gets colder
Most of us only care about money makin’
Selfishness got us followin’ our wrong direction
Wrong information always shown by the media
Negative images is the main criteria
Infecting the young minds faster than bacteria
Kids wanna act like what they see in the cinema
Yo’, whatever happened to the values of humanity
Whatever happened to the fairness in equality
Instead in spreading love we spreading animosity
Lack of understanding, leading lives away from unity
That’s the reason why sometimes I’m feelin’ under
That’s the reason why sometimes I’m feelin’ down
There’s no wonder why sometimes I’m feelin’ under
Gotta keep my faith alive till love is found

People killin’, people dyin’
Children hurt and you hear them cryin’
Can you practice what you preach
And would you turn the other cheek

Father, Father, Father help us
Send us some guidance from above
‘Cause people got me, got me questionin’
Where is the love (Love)

Where is the love (The love)
Where is the love (The love)
Where is the love (The love)

Where is the love (The love)
Where is the love (The love)
Where is the love (The love)

Comment by Simon McAndrew on 15/12/2010 at 5:21 pm

Dear Simon
I’m sorry it has taken me so long to respond to your letter of 15 December – I’ve just been so busy!
Regarding the lyrics of Paul Revere & the Raiders, they are full of imagination – the ability to care about others and put yourself in their place. To be intelligent, people need heart and head.
Paul Revere calls on God for help. But the point of the AR Manifesto is that through the love of art you can understand the world. You’ll never get blown away – you’ll have the strength to fight injustice and fight for a better world.
Paul Revere mentioned ‘discrimination’. He means racial discrimination. But the fundamental and general meaning of discrimination is to separate out one thing from another. This power is what makes us human and it is at the root of all human intelligence.
I send fashion students to the art galleries and I tell them, “Before you move from one room to the next, imagine that the fire alarm went. Imagine which painting you would choose to rescue. If you continue to visit the galleries, then 6 months later you would choose a different one. You are developing your judgement and this is discrimination.”
The art lover discovers the difference between what is great and what is OK.
Students usually start by liking sentimental things – later they want only the things that are true. Education is always self-education (DIY). Teachers can only lead and guide and give some information. Uneducated people need distraction through entertainment or excitement – they love anything sentimental or abnormal.
As I go through the Manifesto, commenting in the Manifesto Blog, I will deal further with the idea of popular culture. But, for the moment, it’s up to you to find out the difference between that and true culture. The Manifesto is a practice, follow it and go to galleries, concerts if you have access to them – and read.
Thank you for your letter. You obviously have heart and head.
Vivienne
PS: M Foucault is an academic writer, ie useful only for mental gymnastics. I have not found him worth the trouble to decipher.

Comment by Vivienne on 07/02/2011 at 10:47 pm

Dear Vivienne, dear Leonard,

you both, especially you Vivienne, talked about that Brave New World is one of the most important books in the 20th century. Why do you think that and what do you think makes this book so important and worth reading? It just came up to my mind and I would be happy if you would maybe answer that.

Much love, joy

Comment by Joy on 24/06/2012 at 7:58 pm

Dear Joy, In answer to your question I’m sending you this essay written by Vivienne. I hope it answers your question:

The two most important books that were written in the 20th century in English are Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World – you’ve got to read those books. Huxley, by the way, is I think the greatest writer in the language. He wrote many books and they’re all really, really worth reading. I think that Huxley is a very, very great writer. But essentially the world that he lives is also a satire of a future world and it’s about conditioning people to be happy. And it’s about consumption. It’s about giving them what they want and nothing more, and everybody’s happy because they’re programmed to only want what they get.

Of course Huxley lived at a particular time, and he was coming from a family of – you would call them bureaucrats – school teacher, thinkers. His grandfather was TH Huxley, who was a disciple of Darwin, a scientist. His relations were intellectual people. His brother was the scientist William Huxley – he was astonished that his brother had got it so right, the idea that you would be able to grow an embryo in a laboratory. Way before anybody did that, Huxley had it all working in his book, a very quick way of dealing with the idea of conditioning people for the life they are going to lead.
You have to realise that he comes from this type of background but I think he’s really got ideas and his books are, in a way, he’s called them this himself – they’re sort of Portmanteau books, meaning that the book is a vehicle for his ideas, and the characters speak his ideas.

He didn’t really spend much time with the new invention of television – he probably didn’t understand what it could do, but he sort of got it all over with the test tube, he’s already conditioned them to start with. And then the story is about people whose imagination can’t go beyond what they’re programmed to want, and it’s a way of controlling the world. You can look at how the world is controlled today, it’s definitely by Orwell’s method of violence, and power for the sake of power in that violent sense – torture or whatever – but it’s also very much to do with making things easy for everybody and we don’t – we give people what they want. And that’s what our world has become: we’re in a terrible mess. You have to just bear with Huxley, some of the idioms he uses come from another time, but you have to just go and live there, which you can because it’s great, and see this world that he invented, which is in fact a kind of model for our world. The thing about Huxley is that the people are happy but when a few things go wrong, they probably put a bit too much alcohol in the test tube or whatever or somebody’s not the Alpha or Beta or Gamma that they’re supposed to be. They might be a bit wrong, they might not conform to that group that they’ve been conditioned for. But the point that I’m trying to make that most of the people in Brave New World are all happy because the conditioning has been very, very thorough. Of course people are not quite so happy in the world today. They have been conditioned, but they don’t know what to do; they’re not happy with what they’ve got. So the conditioning isn’t thorough enough for the world we live in.

Anyway, both 1984 and Brave New World, are future worlds. So if I just jump now to Orwell, because his future world, 1984, was a future world earlier than the one Huxley was thinking of. Orwell was writing just at the time of the Second World War, and he finished the book just after it – he died finishing it, really. It was written when communism was very strong and people had begun to see the danger and the cruelty of it all and so 1984 – the idea of always being surveyed and frightened of saying anything ever because you didn’t know where all the spies were who were going to get you into trouble. You had to conform in every way and you wouldn’t dare to say anything that might land you in terrible trouble, by not agreeing to the whole dogma of the age.

Some people have never heard, they don’t even realise, where the idea of ‘Big Brother’ comes from. You know I had a couple of fans from that reality TV show who came to see me. They had no idea about Huxley and the idea of this ‘Big Brother is watching you’ -what it came from. And of course people use the adjective ‘Orwellian’ because so many of his ideas have come through to us, like the Ministry of Defence is called ‘minipax’ because it’s just a shorter way of saying it, and the Ministry of Propaganda is called ‘minitrue’. Everything is shortened because the idea of actually shortening words, but also as well as that reducing the words in the language, means that you reduce thinking. And all kinds of stuff in there has come through to us which we call Orwellian.

The point I want to make is that this book is a satire on the world we live in today, as well as the world Orwell was imagining from what he knew of the communist system. I mean you know Mao Zedong – China was just like that. You’ve only got to read ‘Wild Swans’ by Jung Chang – what Mao did to her father was just what happened to Winston in 1984. This kind of thing is still going on in the world; it might not be going on in the house next door to you, but maybe it is for all I know and so they’re not only examples of a dystopia – a world that’s not sort of very nice to live in – but they are real worlds. And by the way, his wife worked underground in Somerset House, that’s where the Ministry of Propaganda was. She worked in Room 101 in the Ministry of Propaganda for the war effort. So Orwell got to know an awful lot about the tactics and methods of the Ministry and the way that they behaved and what propaganda really is. But the book is about power for the sake of power, it’s for no other reason than that. It’s not enough to have people pretend to agree with you and chant the dogma, they’ve also got to believe it – it’s power for the sake of power. And this is why I say it’s the world we live in today. What are these evil forces that control the world? At the end of the day I do believe that that’s the motive when you boil it down – power for the sake of power, there’s no other reason for the damage that people are prepared to do. I think it’s a really great book and I think people should read it.

Comment by Cynthia on 29/06/2012 at 9:52 am

Dear Vivienne, Cynthia, Joy and other Active Resisters,

I don’t know if any of you have heard about Operation Paperclip, which took place in Post War America, which involved gaining Nazi scientists to come and work for the US, in the hopes that it would prevent their enemy the USSR from gaining their skills. One such project that was spawned from this was Project MK ULTRA, a horrific study into human behaviour and the ways in which people can be controlled.

The horrendous experiments that were carried out on unwitting participants were completely abhorrent, following the theory that having experienced extreme trauma a subject will develop Multiple Personality Disorder (now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder). Dissociation is a natural coping mechanism of the human body, as a way of escaping incomprehensible suffering. The theory continues that these personalities can be conditioned into essentially slave beings. These sorts of experiments were allegedly stopped in the 70s but a little known sub-project of this became known as Monarch Programming, something which is regularly referenced in popular music, and their accompanying music videos, as a form of conditioning the masses. It’s something I would certainly suggest people read into; even if the program is no longer pursued the very origins of it are utterly barbaric, having stemmed from Mengele’s experiments in Auschwitz.

Whether Monarch has been made to seem a ridiculous notion is a way of detracting from any truth that lies within or not is irrelevant, what we must see is that these experiments did happen, at least in the 50s and 60s if not today, and that we are well and truly living in Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.

The only way we can avoid these things from happening is to engage in true culture. Allegedly Monarch symbols are perpetuated through television, music and film all major aspects of so-called Popular Culture. Only through self education and self discipline can we avoid these things happening to ourselves.

Society ostracises those who try to break away from the norm. But I feel deeply and passionately that without those who do break out society will soon be run by a small group of people with more power than our so called world leaders. People may call it scaremongering, but as is the case with Climate Change, until people realise how dire our situation is, they will never ever change.

And that worries me.

James

Comment by James Emmett on 29/06/2012 at 11:37 am

I love reading up on these things and a few years ago someone mentioned the conspiracy behind illuminati to me whilst working at a very well known digital brand who’s leader has now passed. This company with out a doubt condition their employees and are vetted before employment. You only see it when you are no longer part if the culture and ethos. So much information out there it’s such a minefield. Can’t believe I only just ame across these posts! I haven’t read the above books however its most certainly on my list now. I think now more than ever people are beginning to open their eyes. To a certain extent I guess the above links through to the new world order and such topics. The general concept of it? Funny you should mention mk ultra and monarch – a fellow creative who is working with audio / music mentioned this to me not long ago. Nothing surprises me anymore after having read so much information on various test and control topics. Not just of the conditioning of the human brain but also scientifically – things like Haarp for instance. Time will tell and hopefully people will realise what’s going on / may be going on and come together.

Comment by Priti on 17/01/2013 at 4:42 pm