Thoughts on the sad murder of Sarah Everard

 Firstly, I want to make clear that any loss of a life is a terrible tragedy. This piece of writing is not belittling that in any way, in fact I want to stress that bigger forces are manipulating this for their ongoing agenda, to damage many more lives.

Alarm bells went off for me when I heard that the suspected murderer was a policeman. Firstly, I thought of the analysis of Neil Sanders in his book Your Thoughts are Not Your Own that many serial killers in the U.S. have had involvement with the military or police, or been influenced by family members in law enforcement or armed forces. He suggested that these murderers could have been themselves victims of the mind-control the rest of his book documents.  Programmes like MK Ultra have now become part of our cultural lexicon after their reference in popular, mainstream entertainment like Stranger Things. The policeman alleged to have murdered Sarah Everard was, even more suspiciously, a member of a division working on the security of Parliament and diplomats.

I’m not saying that the policeman here was mind-controlled but his profile as a murderer in uniform fits into the agenda that has been forced on us over the last 12 months. I read that Pritti Patel proclaimed that people shouldn’t distrust the police because of the actions of one bad person, that the vast majority of policemen and women were trustworthy and doing a good job. If you read her words another way, she is saying a significant minority of police can’t be trusted.

This narrative recalls the Black Lives Matter, ‘defund the police’ protests of last year. An apparent violent murder of a black man by a policeman was ramped up within hours to go around the world and instigate riots and division. I say ‘apparent violent murder’ because I know there are a number of anomalies regarding the video of the George Floyd incident, and claims that Floyd had actually died some time before, that he and the policeman knew each other and were both actors. Such information and disinformation is typical; what is striking is the way this video went ‘’viral’ (to use the loaded term) and was immediately taken up by BLM, who received millions of dollars in funding from billionaires and multi-nationals. The rich and the powerful fell over themselves to ‘take the knee’ (a number of researchers pointed out this was a Masonic ritual).

In the upside down world the one percent have put us in, a protest movement was created so those who considered themselves ‘woke’ and ‘liberal’ could protest against the abuse of power with the support and enablement of those in power. People, many with the right intentions to stop the very real injustices of racism and police brutality, became the tools of those responsible for these injustices. Divisions were created between black and white, people fought on the streets, already struggling businesses were destroyed.

And now, protests are planned to ‘reclaim the streets’ in London and other parts of the U.K. to call for freedom for women to be able to walk the streets without fear. Of course, no-one should fear going out, should have the freedom to go out and live their life as they please. But the people jumping on this bandwagon are, for the most part, totally unaware of the irony and hypocrisy of campaigning for something which we have all been denied: the entire population are told they must live in fear, refused freedom of movement, expression and speech.  

Again, the explosion from mainstream media, through internet, social media has propelled this isolated incident into blanket statements like ‘why I hate men’’, ‘protect your daughters, educate your sons’ (graffiti seen in Bath today). A Green party peer, Jenny Jones, called for a 6pm curfew for all men so women could walk the streets safely at night. The fact we are all still in lockdown, and told to stay home to ‘’save lives’ seems to have been lost on commentators.

Like BLM, the right of people to protest is being proclaimed loudly by many people who have condemned the anti-lockdown protestors. Yes, the right to protest is vital, so don’t criticise those who want to resist actual establishment totalitarianism and civil rights abuses.

The rights of women and the eradication of violence against them are valid causes. My wife has worked with survivors of abuse and I know it is sadly all too prevalent in the world. But the repressive lockdowns imposed by our government and championed by the supposedly liberal, have caused a horrific escalation of domestic violence. Perhaps allowing us all our civil rights would actually improve the lives of women and enable those in damaging situations to escape?

It strikes me that this tragic death is being used to further the agenda which we have been suffering within. Like the Floyd video and the riots and propaganda that followed, the police are being cast in a negative light. I think the police have been guilty, here and elsewhere, of abuses in arresting people, including the elderly, for simply wanting to walk around, or socialise in their house. The campaign that is ensuing now, like BLM, deflects attention from the fact that we are ALL being subjected to coercion, control and abuse in some form. The powers that shouldn’t be want conflict. They also want to divide and rule, so identity politics is used as a tool to push people apart. BLM was pitting black against white, or left against right (in the false political paradigm). Now, they are trying to divide women from men.

One potential result of this, or at least another element amongst many, is a decrease in the birth rate. Fertility is already at a record low, sperm counts in men are way down and girls are experiencing early puberty and women are losing eggs and having more miscarriages (Count down: The infertility crisis - EHN ). Physical changes caused by radiation, heavy metals, chemicals are exacerbated by social changes. The sudden proliferation of transgenderism, with children being encouraged to take puberty blockers whose effects can’t be reversed if there is any future change of mind, result in the inability to bear children. The UK government guidance on the current experimental COVID ‘vaccines’ says that they ‘don’t know’ what their effect on fertility will be. Some people have declared they won’t have children because of man-made (elite fabricated) CO2 climate change - a continuing part of the institutionalised self-loathing for being human which feeds into the eugenics agenda to reduce the population.

I see the reaction to this individual tragic murder (which will sweep up many who are genuine in their intentions) as fulfilling another goal of the elite: when there is talk of society (maybe, hopefully, if we are really obedient) slowly being opened up, this is provoking calls for curfews, engendering fear about being out and in public. I read an internet chat with several women remembering times they had been on nights out in the past, getting drunk with friends, and walked home alone. None mentioned they had been attacked, they may have been putting themselves at unnecessary risk at the time, but they were now talking about going out with friends in negative terms. The longed for freedom to go out again and party was being corrupted as another fear was brought to the forefront of their minds. One of the women said she would go on one of the ‘reclaim the streets’ protests, just as she had gone on BLM marches, but she disapproved passionately of anti-lockdown protests.

I’m sure, following Jenny Jones ridiculous statement, there will be further calls in the coming weeks and months for either women to stay home to stay safe, or for men to stay home to make women feel safe. Another facet of the agenda of fear and control will be played out, encouraging people to distrust each other and retreat to insular, virtual worlds.  

The Language Virus

 

I wrote a novel years ago which was partly about a future people who have no symbolic or verbal language. They only communicate telepathically by transmitting images and emotions. Language of the past is seen by these future people as synonymous with violence and deception and because of this, merely uttering sounds from the mouth is seen as shameful. Speaking is now taboo and this prohibition is rigidly enforced by the elders of the village.

I was reminded of this when stumbling upon several reports, in mainstream media, of official, supposedly scientific studies which said that not only singing can spread the virus, so can talking. For example:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8647491/Talking-just-risky-SINGING-spreading-coronavirus.html

and:

Moving on from the fact the above article was published in the ‘I’ newspaper in the U.K. on September 11^th, and the fact it pushes the boundaries even in these insane times for how far we are supposed to believe the pronouncements of scientists, the article states that actually raising your decibels in speech increases the transmission of the virus. It tells us that ‘droplets too small for the eye to see are ejected while speaking. They evaporate to leave behind particles big enough to carry viable virus’. This puts the thought out (and the planting of thoughts is itself an invisible transmission that infects people’s minds) that by speaking to someone, you can be killing them, or killing someone else in the future. This reminds me of both Tony Burgess’ novel Pontypool Changes Everything, where zombies are created through a breakdown in language, and Ben Marcus’ novel The Flame Alphabet where a deadly disease is transmitted through speech, specifically by children. In The Flame Alphabet, the adult authorities have children rounded up and taken to internment camps. In unrelated news the British Army, in their role ‘helping’ people to test and self-isolate in Liverpool (first city in a nationwide operation) have been carrying out testing of children in schools. At least one school told parents their children would be barcoded and those who test positive ‘secured’:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/army-to-carry-out-mass-covid-19-tests-on-children-in-liverpool/ar-BB1aOl6f?MSCC=1603455896

‘Secured’? Where and how? Imagine being a parent receiving that letter (the school in question were forced to backtrack). Far worse, imagine being one of the children faced with the army coming to their school, administering tests on them, and telling them they are infectious and need to be isolated from their friends and family…

In further unrelated news, there have been articles about camps in Canada where people with COVID can be housed, away from the general population. Michael Ryan, a high-level WHO official, publicly stated that most infections were now happening in homes and authorities therefore needed ‘to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick, and remove them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner.’ So, asking for children to be removed from their families, or for parents to be removed from their children, if someone is thought to be with COVID. Even though children, even in official, sanctioned studies, are at almost zero risk of serious illness. The infamous Bill 6666 introduced in the American Congress in May this year gives $100 billion funding for the testing and tracing of people who may have ‘the’ virus, through mobile units which can go to community ‘hot-spots’ and test and ‘quarantine’ people ‘at their residences’. The Bill is short and vague, which is in keeping with emergency legislation ushered through in this country (U.K.) without any meaningful questioning by our politicians.

 And this brings us to another side of the importance of language: reading and listening to what is said, and speaking out to question it. This is being denied, restricted or silenced. The mainstream media overwhelmingly pumps out propaganda to support the official narrative and will only mention counter arguments disparagingly, in ways which frame it as nonsense and dangerous to be considered. The big internet search engines and social media platforms have carried out a purge of those voices which are deemed undesirable. Even videos and written articles by qualified doctors, other medical professionals and scientists have been removed from the internet for daring to question the imposed narrative, no matter the accuracy of the data they provide, no matter the research they have done and the expert analysis and opinion they contain. There have even been those who have lost their job or been arrested, such as the German Dr Heiko Schoning at the Hyde Park protest, and the Swiss cardiologist Dr Thomas Binder MD (as he discusses on the Richie Allen Show on 4 November https://player.fm/series/the-richie-allen-show-2428800/the-richie-allen-show-wednesday-november-4th-2020 )

 The oft quoted right to free speech has been dismantled and, perhaps most disturbingly of all, people and institutions that call themselves liberal are the quickest and loudest to shout THEIR message that  censorship is GOOD. Censorship is important because to be allowed to question is dangerous. Many of these people have the temerity to accuse those campaigning AGAINST the destruction of civil rights as fascist. Our world is so clearly conforming to the blueprint written by Orwell over 70 years ago – ‘Doublethink’ and ‘newspeak’ are all tools utilised daily.

Language has been dumbed down, reduced to soundbites, memes, twitter posts and slogans. Repetition of the mind-control propaganda of our time burrows phrases into our minds so everyone spews them out as if they always have, ‘lockdown’ (previously confined to prisons), ‘stay safe’, ‘protect the NHS’, ‘clap for carers’, ‘stay home’ till we are all bound with the new normal.

Words have power, they can manipulate, they can take over minds, they can control. And they can kill. And so can the denial of words, if people stay silent when they should speak out. Language is at the centre of this agenda as it is to all human society. Through words, the propaganda machine manipulates and controls. An analogy of what is happening this year would be a crowded hall with many people where one person shouts ‘Fire!’ Whether through malice, or error, or perhaps they have seen a very small flame. But the word is heard by others who panic, not seeing the fire but fearing it anyway they start to run and shout ‘fire’ as well, so people start to scream as the panic spreads and there is a stampede for the exits. Some people, the weakest, stumble, are pushed, and fall to the floor while others trample over them to try and save themselves. And the weak and unfortunate die because of fear, from a word, not from smoke or fire.

We have been told for months that the people around us, our friends, even our own families, are to be avoided and kept at a distance. We are forced to wear masks, in some countries even in the open air, so speech is often muffled and facial expressions are obscured. The most basic human interaction is rendered criminal; we are told we are endangering the ones we love if we embrace them. And the people pushing this are doing it because when you are physically close to someone you can confer meaning and emotion which is not always possible in the same way remotely, in a Zoom meeting or FaceTime call. Barriers are broken and a word can be whispered in the ear which the authorities can’t hear.

The prohibition against singing contributes to the destruction of culture which the lockdown measures have caused. But to actually begin to suggest that speech itself, the way we communicate, can lead to death, can be infectious like a killer virus, is starting a process which…it couldn’t surely could it?... leads to a world like my novel, where actual speech is considered dangerous and vile.

 

 If we consider the word ‘virus’, this had already taken on a new meaning through computer software – again with Gates central, as head of Microsoft – as a stream of code, of data, that erodes text, erodes the strata of programs which hold together a creation, from which a virtual construction is built. And now we have the present constructed virus – with its web of words and symbols eroding the foundation of our existing view of reality. The propaganda and censorship obliterating words which are deemed wrong, the Fahrenheit 451 book-burning of the digital age. Gates is now driving the vaccine agenda, his foundation investing billions to buy the influence of medical officials, governments and media. The new experimental vaccines for the ‘virus’ are, for the first time I understand, RNA. So, they are introducing synthetic messenger RNA molecules into cells. The mainstream is determined to dissuade so-called conspiracy theory that this is re-writing human DNA. But, at a molecular level, the vaccine is changing the way a body’s cells communicate and supposedly causing the cells to react in a specified way. As, in the macrocosm, us individual people are given new instructions to make us react and interact in a predetermined way. And it isn’t as if the re-writing of DNA is something which is only in the realms of science fiction or ‘conspiracy theory’:

The current stage in the imposition of the new order is now being rolled out in the guise of the ‘Great Reset’ which is in no way whatsoever to be confused with the New World Order. The ‘pandemic’ has conveniently opened the opportunity for this new world…, sorry, Great Reset but the supposed architect of it, Klaus Schwab, wrote his book Shaping the Future of The Fourth Industrial Revolution two years ago or more. In this book, as noted on the Zerohedge.com website, Schwab openly discusses and actually advocates a transhumanism which is supposedly the province of crazy conspiracy theorists.

“Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies will not stop at becoming part of the physical world around us—they will become part of us,” writes Schwab. “Indeed, some of us already feel that our smartphones have become an extension of ourselves. Today’s external devices—from wearable computers to virtual reality headsets—will almost certainly become implantable in our bodies and brains.”

Schwab is enthusiastic about “active implantable microchips that break the skin barrier of our bodies.” He asserts that such “implanted devices will likely also help to communicate thoughts normally expressed verbally through a ‘built-in’ smartphone, and potentially unexpressed thoughts or moods by reading brain waves and other signals.”

Worrying as all this is, it also made me think of my novel that I mentioned at the beginning of this article. Schwab and other technocrats want unspoken ‘thoughts or moods’ transmitted via technology implanted within the human body. My imagined future was more about a telepathic, almost spiritual connection between people. Sadly, the elites governing our future want ultimate control of our minds. They already have most people’s anyway, now the means to do it is becoming more blatant, and intrinsically implanted within the human. So we are being moved to a situation where eventually people will only communicate through technology, through images, codes and data. The individual voice is being lost.

 

https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/mark-froud/the-individual/paperback/product-1dz28gyk.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Stranger Things: what lies beneath

I wrote in my book The Lost Child in Literature and Culture that the lost child figure is a void beneath our world. Symbolically this is represented in Stranger Things by the ‘Upside Down’ netherworld of the ‘demigorgon’ (or the ‘Mind Flayer’  in the new series) but also, in a more mechanical and “real” way by the introduction of a secret underground military base that has been built by the Russians under the Starcourt shopping mall in Hawkins. This underground base works as symbol and representation on many levels. The references to the Cold War (as the series are all set in the 1980s) serve as propaganda now in our time when the Russians are again presented as one of the bad guy nations threatening the democracy and family-values of America and its allies in the west. Joann Conrad wrote in 1999 that during Reagan’s administration (the dominant presidency in the 1980s) Russian Communism was presented as a threat to the nuclear family (and what a loaded term that is) of America. The government idealised the blond, blue-eyed child as a symbol of American wholesomeness while introducing policies which damaged the family. The ideological enemy of Communism and the nation of enmity, the Soviet Union, were presented as the threat to the lives of American children when the real damage was being inflicted on them from within American society. The presentation of a Russian state guilty of infiltrating America and corrupting the minds of the young is a convenient parallel with today’s anti-Russian media and governments. Surely it should remind us that we are being shown the same propaganda now as we were in the Cold War, and against Germany before the First World War, to give two examples.

Which brings us to another metaphor: the Russian base is constructed beneath a shopping mall. The series portrays the damage done to small, traditional businesses of the small town, Hawkins. The mall is the place to go for the residents, particular the young. The establishment was built with the complicity of the corrupt city mayor but he is merely the dupe of the Soviet Russian state. Therefore the programme neatly blames the corruption of society, and particularly its children, on a foreign enemy rather than internal forces. One of the series’ episodes is entitled ‘Mall rats’ which links the now-common term for children who spend all their time in shopping malls with the rats who are the initial carriers of the monstrous Mind-Flayer’s plague. And rats are also frequently subterranean, travelling via sewers and burrowing underground.

The motif in the third series of the small town inhabitants being subsumed and taken over by the monster from ‘Upside Down’ was reminiscent not only of the zombie films like Day of the Dead (watched by the children who sneak in to the cinema to watch) but also the Invasion of the Body Snatcher films where humans become possessed by aliens who take away their soul, their humanity. Of course, the earlier 1978 film Dawn of the Dead set the zombies in a shopping mall.

This is an important message also – that people who look and act as if they have free will are actually being controlled from outside, their thoughts and actions are not actually their own. The ‘Upside Down’ is supposedly an evil, inverted version of our world which threatens the wholesome childhood games of small-town America. Except, in this series the Mind-Flayer is trapped within our world, the darkness is within, like the underground military base is hidden beneath the town of Hawkins. The monster even bites into Eleven and a small sub-creature has to be extracted from her leg (after which she loses her telekinetic powers). This is reminiscent of films like Alien, with the famous alien from the belly, and David Cronenburg’s “body horror” – and this third series did seem to make more reference to horror films of the 70s and 80s rather than the predominant sci-fi and “family” film references from the era which the first two series referenced.

Again, by having the underground base built by the Russians, the story obscures the fact that our western governments have untold miles of underground, secret military bases. They are frequently claimed to be sites where the likes of the MK Ultra experiments were carried out on children (the actual American government programme referenced in the first series of Stranger Things, which was given as the source of Eleven’s confinement and torture). In series three, four of the young people find themselves in the underground base, on a mission which the youngest of them terms ‘child endangerment’. The two oldest youths are captured and beaten and drugged while wearing sailor suites from the ice-cream parlour where they work. They are representations of the children abused and used by the deep state of many countries.

Many argue that underground bases are still places where many of the hundreds of missing children in our society are taken. A man from Ammanford, South Wales has recorded horrific sounds coming from under a property he used to live next to. The sounds of the screams are so shocking I urge people to be wary of listening while also stressing the importance of listening so whatever is happening to these poor women and/or children will not continue to be covered up:

http://www.noisesinmylane.co.uk/

Whether it is beneath a seemingly abandoned house in South Wales, in a giant underground military facility (like the one that Isaac Kapey, the Hollywood outer of alleged paedophiles, supposedly committed suicide outside of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9VEKqNCmko) , or the Epstein island, paedophilia is being committed beneath the ground on which we walk and in the society where we try to bring up children. And it is being covered up, not only by the ground but by the corrupt deep state and secret societies who control us. Because paedophilia, and other crimes against children, are the most destructive obscenity upon which our world is built, and to expose it is to uncover the lie upon which the common perception of reality is built.

The child Eleven is herself a junction of the mental potential of us all and the abuses of this by those who control us. The character is also, in the first series at least, presented as androgynous-looking (as Jay Dyer noted in his online analysis). She is human but more than human and a link between “our world” and the ‘Upside Down’. She is also the means by which the opening, the crack between the world and the ‘Upside Down’ is closed. The lost child is presented as both the conduit through which the monstrous evil comes into our world (as Will’s disappearance began the first series) and as the means by which we can confront and ultimately block off this evil. This is at the heart of my discussion in my book: that the lost child is a trauma in our society, which the fears of our society centre around. The lost child is within the foundations, literally, of our world. Jay Dyer wrote in his article on the first Stranger Things Series, on his Esoteric Analysis website, that:

The sacrifice of the youth for the dark designs of the shadow government is the ultimate conspiracy in the series, but what is more remarkable than this is the explanation by the Man in Black Dr. Brenner (Matthew Modine) that the sacrifice of sons and daughters for the gorgodemon is for the good of America.  In other words, we are given the impression our villain knows the real source of the dark power in Hawkins, the demonic, and that the sacrifice of humans and blood draws it nearer and nearer.  Foolishly assuming this dark energy can be harnessed for U.S. supremacy, Dr. Brenner is behind both MK Ultra and the SDI program that requires the sacrifice of America’s “sons and daughters”!  This spiritual dimension is the accurate and insightful aspect of the series, but the message is not all good.

The message is not in any way good. The title of Joann Conrad’s essay, centring around the Jonbenet Ramsey case, refers to the ‘Lost Innocent and Sacrificial Delegate’. One child, a child with an image which is endlessly repeatable and conforms to the ideal presented as an embodiment of a culture, is made to stand in for all the other children in the country as a sacrifice to supposedly  reinforce the ‘values’ of that culture, that nation.  Actually, the image of the child, the tragic loss of the child, only reinforces what is inherently false and destructive behind those fabricated values.

In literary, academic research, much has been written about Freud’s essay on the ‘uncanny’, which in German translates as ‘unheimlich’, or un-homely. In the German word, the negative word contains within it the good connotation, and therefore, through some linguistic contagion, the ‘good’ word, ‘homely’, contains at least the potential for its subversion. The uncanny is that sense of something being not quite right within the apparently normal and everyday, the sense of uneasiness about the world around you which makes you feel unsafe. And it is important that this uneasiness is also within language, because language influences, and frequently controls, how we think about the world. Our world is constructed by language and what we believe about who we are and where we are in the world is governed to a huge degree by what we say, read, write and hear.

Which brings me to Orwell’s 1984, and his concepts of newsspeak and double-think, the way control and manipulation of language can be used to eradicate dissent and control meaning. A paragraph from the novel:

"It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course," he added as an afterthought."

This reminds me of un/Heimlich in German but here ambiguity is ripped out of language so the wielders of power do not only control the narrative, they control the words and therefore any thoughts. I have written in my book The Lost Child in Literature and Culture and also in my novel, The Individual (available on Lulu.com) about how the lost child figure is not only central to our society and culture, it is actually at the heart of our language. Words now, as they are used particularly in the public spheres of the media and politics, are empty or, worse, they say one thing and mean the opposite. The most damning deception is the abuse of children at the deepest and highest levels of society. I believe that this suppressed trauma is the reason why so many stories in our history and our recent culture are about lost, endangered or silent children. Children who are outside of normal language (and Eleven’s speech is slightly fractured as a result of her imprisonment in the government facility from an early age) highlight the arbitrariness of meaning. Their inability to speak, or to fully enter into the language which defines the world, shows that there is an emptiness at the heart of what we say.

But also, as I have listened and read more people’s research in recent years, I realise that the lost child figure in our culture is not only an unconscious symbol which repeats and reappears constantly, it is also frequently consciously placed in our sight to burrow within our minds. I have written about how the lost child figure in stories and images acts as a screen in the double-edged meaning of the word – it projects out like a TV screen (or on a TV or film screen – like the children in Stranger Things), showing us what someone else wants us to see, while also being a screen which is put up between us and the truth, so we cannot see behind it. So we watch and are entertained, get our vicarious thrills, perhaps taking our psyches to places which are supposedly forbidden, and we do not see or hear or feel the real children who are stolen, spirited away and buried beneath our feet.

.

They're gunning for the conspiracy theorists...

18 is the number, the age, in Britain anyway, which denotes leaving childhood. This is also the number of school  ‘shootings’ in the U.S. in 2018, already by the middle of February, according to the group ‘Everytown for Gun Safety’.  Although a Washington Post article, posted on MSN, disputes the validity of this number:

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/no-there-haven%E2%80%99t-been-18-school-shootings-in-2018-that-number-is-flat-wrong/ar-BBJc0JQ?li=AAmiR2Z&ocid=ientp

The article explains that the group class a ‘school shooting’ as any incident involving firearms being discharged in a school grounds. The number 18 includes incidents such as a suicide of an adult in a car parked outside a school. The school had actually been closed for several months. Other incidents include those where guns were fired at night after classes were finished and cases where accidental shots caused no injury. The group make the point that ‘every time a gun is discharged on school grounds it shatters the sense of safety” for students, parents and the community. This is true, I’m sure, but the Washington Post article counters this by saying that the criteria isn’t widely publicised and the figures can be misleading. Some would say that is deliberate, and that there is an agenda to take ordinary Americans guns from them. Apart from the National Rifle Association’s vociferous defence of the constitutional right to ‘bear arms’ (incidentally, it’s interesting the way the word ‘arms’, through ‘firearms’, makes guns synonymous with limbs, as if they were an essential part of us), there are those ‘conspiracy theorists’ who argue that hidden powers do not want ordinary Americans to have weapons as without them they are easier to control.

Personally, I think that the deep state is quite happy for people to keep shooting each other, as that helps reduce the population and keep us in fear, together with the alleged acts of terrorism. 

And, the actual figures regarding school shootings are horrific enough without manipulation. The Washington Post’s own analysis has found that more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. A number which does not include dozens of suicides, accidents and after-school assaults that have also exposed young people to gunfire. The article also quotes a recent study of World Health Organization data published in the American Journal of Medicine that found that, among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by bullets lived in the United States. On average, two dozen children are shot every day in the United States, and in 2016 more youths were killed by gunfire — 1,637 — than during any previous year this millennium.

In isolation, this loss of life is sickening enough. But when it is put together with the many other assaults on children that I have referred to in previous posts, such as trafficking, paedophilia, abduction, and the every day pressures on children such as bullying (online as well as physical), which lead to self-harm, anxiety, depression and suicide, it is like a war on childhood. The FBI’s National Crime Information Center states that, in 2014 there were 466,949 under 18s reported missing (compared to 168, 206 18 and older). These statistics include anyone reported missing for 1 or 2 days and children taken by family members. More information about the massive, multi-faceted problem is on the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children website:

http://www.missingkids.com/theissues/missing

In Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to talk about Kevin, about a teenager who kills several of his classmates (although this time with a crossbow, not a gun), Kevin’s father, Franklin, normally fiercely patriotic, tells his wife that ‘This whole country’s anti-child’ (Shriver 108). I argue, in my book, that childhood has been reviled and feared at least in equal measure to, and often concurrent with, feelings of reverence and love. People are perhaps secretly repulsed that children stand outside the structures that enclose them and resent it, or else resent themselves for bringing children into this terrible, corrupting world.

Jen Webb discusses Shriver’s admission that We Need to talk about Kevin is partly a critique of America. Webb extends this to argue that it is also a critique of a global society dominated by American doctrines: ‘Eva, Franklin and Kevin exemplify not just the absence at the heart of discourses of ‘the family’, but the emptiness of the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, and silence about the violence of global capital’ (Webb 134). Webb argues that Kevin is ‘the gap that lies below – indeed, that forms the foundation of – the notions of family, nation, and meaning’ (Webb 136). Kevin ‘stands for nothing but absence’ (Webb 137), he is the lost child who disrupts the signifiers which we base our realities on, the power struggles within relationships, families, and countries. He is lost not as a victim himself but as a representative of all that is missing from the world, ‘silences and absences: the gap between how things are and how they seem to be, between the United States and the rest of the world, between representation and reality’ (Webb 136). The character of Kevin highlights the absence, the nothingness, which underlies the world we live in the people we are, and the words we use.

Eva describes how Kevin not only pretended he couldn’t speak up to the age of three, he also withheld his knowledge of written language. When he finally sits down and writes out perfectly words from his ‘grade-school primer’ he exposes its ‘insidious nihilism’. His handwriting has ‘no character’, no personality, it is merely a copy, repetition which reveals the nothingness that lies beneath language:

From the point he admitted he knew how, his printing unerringly replicated the examples in his textbook, with no extra tails or squiggles; his T’s were crossed and I’s dotted, and never before had the bloated interior of B’s and O’s and D’s seemed to contain so much empty space. (Shriver 227)

The ‘empty space’ within the letters is a metaphor for this nothingness, an emptiness which could also sum up Kevin’s attitude to human life. Kevin is himself the absence between representation and reality, signifier and signified. Webb argues that Kevin’s refusal to play the ‘the game of representation’, stripping away ‘the veneer of discourse to show there is nothing behind it’ reveals what ‘linguists and philosophers already know, of course: signs are empty, and take on meaning only when people agree to pretend together that they have content’ (Webb 139-140).

It may seem inappropriate to refer to linguistic or theoretical hypothesising in relation to people – particularly children’s – lives being lost. And yet, it is very relevant to debates surrounding the Florida, and other, shootings. There has been a backlash in the mainstream media, and amongst many in the general public, against claims from some ‘truthers’ who believe that the shooting itself was faked and/or the young people organising protests in favour of gun control are being manipulated. Understandably, perceived attacks on young people who have suffered trauma triggers an emotional response.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/briannasacks/nope-the-florida-school-shooting-survivors-demanding-gun?utm_term=.pyLJKN8gQ#.khnw245pn

I don’t believe that the event was faked. I certainly do believe that many young people were killed in the Florida shooting. It has been pointed out that the term “false flag”, used by some to describe this and many other incidents, from 9/11 to seemingly random shootings, does not historically refer to faked or imaginary events. It stems from old nautical terms when a ship would make an attack while displaying the flag of a different nation, or perhaps a pirate banner, in order to escape detection and enable it to sneak up and attack an unwitting enemy. In the modern context, it is used by “conspiracy theorists” when they believe that an attack within a country, whether blamed on terrorist factions, other countries, or lone gunmen, is actually committed deceptively by that country’s own government, or factions of a “deep state” within it.

“False flag” is, by definition, a signifier, a symbol which is hollow, which pretends to be something it isn’t, behind which a violent force hides. From this “meaningless” representation, comes death. And beyond death, there is the emptiness of not knowing what is real.

And that, maybe, is the ultimate aim of this most recent, tragic inflicting of death on the young. As with politics, the people deep in control will manipulate and maintain their power whether “left” or “right” win an election. In the furore over the Florida shooting and the ensuing campaign, old animosities have been ramped up. As someone who has previous described myself as liberal, left-leaning, I still naturally side with those wanting guns, particularly automatic weapons, out of circulation. Because it is insane isn’t it, that people, teenagers, the mentally ill, anyone can have that capacity to kill so easily available? Almost as insane as selling weapons to states that will use them to bomb innocent children in their schools...

But, one way or another, the two sides will continue ripping each other apart. And, seemingly as a side product of this dispute, there is suddenly widespread mainstream media reference to “conspiracy theory” websites and social media posters who are questioning whether the young student campaigners are supported, or even orchestrated, by “left-wing groups”. Amid the conflicting factions, in the increasing promotion of identity politics, the void will consume those voices that seek to challenge the prescribed narrative, that try to expose lies, falsehood, false flags. I was struck by the speech given by chief executive of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, where he vociferously defended the NRA and gun-ownership in general, citing it, and the American way of life, was under attack from “European style Socialism” and referring to a number of perceived enemies, which the article below identifies as Jewish.

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-in-nra-s-response-to-school-massacre-dog-whistle-anti-semitism-1.5845365

This article argues that the speech is an example of anti-Semitism, a form of attack that has been aimed at some well-known conspiracy theorists such as David Icke. LaPierre’s speech does seem scattergun (to choose an unfortunately appropriate phrase) – drawing in Bernie Sanders with people such as George Soros and Democrat politicians. The main point, for me, is that he does touch on elements of the elite conspiracy that are true. There is an agenda, there is manipulation and control, there is deception, and LaPierre names some of those complicit in this. But, crucially, any ongoing reference by the many serious, analytical researchers into deep state abuses and what lies behind the veneer of our society will now be categorised as in league with the NRA, with Trump, the extreme Right-wing, with anti-Semitism, and lining up with these against children who have been shot at, killed or traumatised.

I was very interested to read a quote, shared by An0maly on his Facebook page, from Hitler's Mein Kampf:

“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.” 

Those who seek a deeper meaning will be censored; in fact, they are already being censored, shadow banned and their content removed, lost into the void of the monopolies of Facebook, Google and Youtube. They will all be sucked up together, no matter if they are unresearched click bait or intellectual, painstaking analysis. They will all be classed as child killers, destroyers of the future, and purveyors of falsehood. While those false flags keep sailing across the void.

School shootings

Essentially, even if the people that run America and run the world did not deliberately make people shoot fellow school children, even if shootings weren’t staged, even if there was no hand in mind controlling the perpetrators, even then, those people who control society are responsible. They do not have to have deliberately put a gun into a teenager’s hand, they do not have to have planned to medicate and alter the young person’s mind to instigate homicidal thoughts. Because the world we move through already bombards children with anxiety inducing images through every waking moment, reaches into minds to create self-doubt, feelings of insecurity and alienation. It enables us to crowd in on each other’s thoughts to accuse, threaten and undermine. It encourages, actually enforces, that from the youngest age we consume drugs to alter our body and mind chemistry, puts additives in our food. They cause the young to modify themselves, seeking implants of plastic and metal to hold their insides in. And they build structures such as schools which enclose the child and feed them the acceptable propaganda of history and being, denying creativity and spirit. And these schools will so often educate the young into the world outside, with its enforcement, denial, bitterness, repression, and, of course, anger. And we will bottle up our young and offer them the world of war and terror and then stand by and wonder why the young attack each other, or, more regularly, attack themselves.Sacrificial children.

We are all still at school, looking at the clock, desiring hometime, or fearing it, wanting to be somewhere else, wanting to be someone else, waiting to explode, like a gun.

The Internet is Supernatural

I’m going to write down some thoughts that have come up around things I’ve read and listened to today. Whether there is a pattern to it, I don’t know, but there are patterns everywhere.

Liz mentioned imaginary friends as we were listening to a podcast. I don’t think I actually had an imaginary friend, as far as I can remember, although I obviously created stories and characters in my head. Imagining the toys on my shelf were real as I lay in bed is probably a common type of child imagining. Or it used to be. Thinking of imaginary friends (and a sudden thought from Liz that these could be re-appearing lost children from the material world) I put the words into the search engine and found this article:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/nov/27/imaginary-friends-decline-ipads-blame

Which refers to a report that found that far fewer children are having imaginary friends than before. Although it is one of those statistical analysis things where you wonder how they actually come up with such arbitrary numbers when they certainly haven’t spoken to every child or parent in the world (or even the country), it doesn’t surprise me that children are losing the inclination, and maybe the capacity, to imagine a friend.

The report cites the dominance of technology in even the youngest children’s lives. So the child is force-fed the garish images of television, computer games and internet and these stories and images appear to take over the child’s mind. It seems that the dominating technological offerings are removing the child’s ability, or desire, to create something from within their own imagination. There has been some perceptive criticism of the ways technology and social media is influencing us, particularly the young (for instance, see https://hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/tech-addiction-the-illuminati-agenda/ )

I think many of us have found ourselves, even as adults, staring mesmerised at a screen, even if there is no volume, and nothing interesting happening. We can be so distracted by the parade of imposed images that we may lose attention in a conversation with a person we are with, even if that person is someone we care about and the conversation is interesting (and the bleak fascination of the blank screen led to Charlie Brooker’s title for his brilliant series Black Mirror). Imagine the effect on very young minds. Or maybe I’ve got this the wrong way round slightly – because we have been fed those images and stories from an early age we have become conditioned to look at them.

Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote many books, including Magical Child and Evolution’s End where he talked of the way television (in the time the book was written, the internet and computer games were not yet a factor) contributed with other factors to disconnect the child from an empathic connection with the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgU3uRWsNYs

Listening to the Richie Allen show a few days ago, when talking with the spiritual healer Mark Bajerski , Richie referred to the drastic cutting of arts teaching in schools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-FCrKeuNIg

This is also being carried out in higher education where the arts now receive no government funding and have suffered as a result. The obsession with making everything conform to a corporate mind-set where it only has value if money can be made from it, is sickeningly taking the creativity from our education system (such as it was anyway). In universities, the humanities are also cut back and seen as expendable. I believe this is all deliberate because our leaders do not want creative and questioning thinkers who may challenge the views they impose on us, and they certainly do not want people with an empathic connection with the world and each other.

In Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, in a scene influenced by Pearce’s theories, it is remarked that the ‘government did not want a magical citizenry’ (McEwan 1987, 78). The innate creativity in a child is regarded as a threat to order and productivity. The psychoanalyst R. D. Laing argues that, if children were truly encouraged to be creative in our education system, to question the foundations of society, ‘there would be such creativity that society would not know where to turn’ (Laing, R.D. 1981 (1967). The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. 60). The child’s creativity is a challenge and makes it a force to be controlled.

And so to another thread which I picked up on: I saw a picture during a discussion on the paranormal and was reminded about the phenomena of ‘black-eyed children’. These unnerving entities have been seen many times around the world, and usually take the form of one or two children with completely black eyes who knock steadily and persistently on the door to a house and ask to be allowed in. The people answering the door have commonly reported experiencing terror, although the children have not made any physical attempts to get in, and no threats of violence.  The children are often wearing old-fashioned or threadbare clothes and have pasty, white complexions.

Theories on what the children are and where they come from (and go to – they disappear immediately after their appearances) are many, from aliens, to ghosts, to vampires. The apparent need for the person confronted to invite the ‘entity’ inside does recall vampire legends. Elements like this, which resonate with mythic creatures, may lend weight to the assumption by more conventional commentators that this is purely an ‘urban legend’ (as stated by Wikipedia), whipped up by the internet.

However, interested to find out more, I listened to two interviews given by the ghost hunter and ufologist David Weatherly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIKHBxj9LDE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfDpJlIi6JE&t=9597s

While Weatherly acknowledges the part played by the internet in circulating stories and fuelling interest in the phenomenon, he refers in detail to several witness accounts that sound more credible than the glossed over debunking on sites like Snopes (https://www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/blackeyed.asp). The cases I heard Weatherly describe happened to people who did not seem like the archetypal horror geeks who were trying to gain kudos in online communities like “creepypasta”. He notes that a large number of those who have claimed to have seen the black-eyed children are in positions of authority or responsibility, such as law enforcement, doctors or are government officials. Weatherly has researched the black-eyed children in detail, including references to such figures long before the explosion of the internet.

I’d like to offer another theory, not to make an actual claim that I know what the reality of these ‘kids’ is: for the purposes of my argument, I am going to consider them as the haunting, horrific return of the children that were forcefully removed from the world. Children who were ripped from the world by person or persons unknown, often with the permission or collusion of governments and other organisations of authority and supposed responsibility. If they are not actual victims of state mind control or organised abuses, and they are a product of a communal imaginary, then that in itself can be conceived of as a re-appearance of those forgotten, lost children who have been hidden from public view. The return of the repressed – Freud’s original definition of the uncanny.

A similar motif re-occurs frequently in ghost and horror stories, from the earliest of folk tales up to modern films and now internet threads. The wronged, abused, murdered child either returns in monstrous or spirit form to haunt and terrorise the people who tormented them, or just humanity in general, as we are all somehow guilty of allowing the horror to happen. And to be repeated. The repetition is at the heart of any haunting, the trauma gets re-played multiple times, across generations.

Demonic or supernatural children are everywhere, almost in equal measure to the numbers of missing children who are now nowhere. I wrote in my book about the way children are so often portrayed as monstrous: Damian, the Devil’s child, in the Omen film series, The Bad Seed, Children of the Corn, Lost Boys. In some narratives, a child was once an innocent victim until possessed or killed and then returns as evil. In The Exorcist, a pubescent girl becomes the focus for demonic possession, terrorizing her family. Such child figures have been discussed in the books Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema's Holy Terrors (30 Mar 2015. Markus P.J. Bohlmann (Editor),‎ Sean Moreland (Editor)) and Evil Children in the Popular Imagination (2016. Karen J. Renner). The imaging of a horrifying child figure reveals aspects of our fears, whether about the world around us or something that has grown dark within us; the innocent contaminated.

In the 1980 film The Changeling, a house is haunted by the ghost of a murdered child. The title alludes to the legends and fairy tales where children’s abduction or death has rendered them into apparitions or demons. Such representations can be seen in the earliest recorded folk tales. Tales and legends of ‘changelings’, the replacement of human children by elves or fairies, have persisted throughout centuries and in many countries. This is the subject of W. B. Yeats’ poem ‘The Stolen Child’:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

 

The poem ends with the child’s seemingly willing acceptance of the faery’s hand, preferring an uncertain future in another realm to the world of misery that was (is?) the reality for the majority.

Society seems to demonise children in equal measure to regarding them as innocent. In Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk about Kevin, the mother of the boy who will become a killer remarks on the ‘revulsion’ she perceives from people in the street when she is pregnant. She asks why so many films

portray pregnancy as infestation, as colonization by stealth? Rosemary’s Baby was just the beginning. In Alien, a foul extraterrestrial claws its way out of John Hurt’s belly. In Mimic, a woman gives birth to a two-foot maggot. Later, the X-Files turned bug-eyed aliens bursting gorily from human midsections into a running theme. In horror and sci-fi, the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell. (Shriver 69-70)

 

Of course, Rosemary’s Baby was not the beginning but merely an adaptation of ancient legends of succubus and changelings. This passage illustrates that childhood has been reviled and feared at least in equal measure to, and often concurrent with, feelings of reverence and love.

So, imagining children as evil and abhorrent is not new, not a creation of the internet. Is the internet robbing children of their imagination or virally sparking a surplus of imagination that damages them?

Another phenomena of internet horror stories which have taken on ‘a life of their own’ is ‘Slenderman’, a child-snatching monster (and think how many of those there have been through our culture, from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to Freddy Krueger) created on the internet forum Something Awful. Initial images, which were submitted as part of a competition to edit normal photos to make them appear supernatural, became an ever multiplying meme as images, stories, role-playing and videos spread through online fiction known as “creepypasta”. The character has found its way into films:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5690360/

Some researchers have noted the similarity to archaic, orally-transmitted tales because the character and stories develop and alter through multiple creators and voices. Also, Slenderman shares common themes with tales about fairies, such as a forest or wild natural setting and the abduction or murder of children (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man ).

In one of the interviews with David Weatherly, he discussed how there has been a number of reported sightings of Slenderman since the stories became widespread. The most logical explanation for this is either that people have deliberately concocted these supposedly real sightings to take part in the ongoing legend, or, possibly, that the frenzy of online creativity has caused people to imagine they have seen the character. The most horrific example of this was the case of two, then 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin, U.S.A., who stabbed a classmate 19 times, allegedly to gain the approval of Slenderman. The victim survived and the two perpetrators were diagnosed with mental illnesses but tried as adults. They were sentenced to 25 and 40 years in a mental hospital.

Andrew Peck sees Slenderman as representing anxieties around the digital age, such as continual connectedness to others and being observed by an unknown third party (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.128.509.0333 ). The multiple, long, tentacle-like arms and the blank, featureless face of the creature could be seen as metaphors of the way the internet pervades our lives, surrounding and enfolding us, and how it also provides faceless powers with the means to watch our every move.

So maybe the imaginary friends of our childhood have been stolen away to become our virtual enemies? The Slenderman internet, or, more accurately, the Slendermen controlling the data and content of the internet, are robbing the imaginary and re-forming them into black-eyed kids who knock on the door and ask to be let in.

Of course, as I have already mentioned, the repeating of stories and images of lost children has happened across centuries and across the world. The stories haunt us, through language bound up in a communal, genetic memory. On one level, Black-eyed children and Slenderman appear out of the same void of loss and fear, the same anxiety about a world that we have little control over. The added element in these stories, I argue, is that the imaginary creations can be seen as a comment on the media through which they are being transmitted as well as the plight of children in our society.

The internet has become a monster that devours all of us. There is much which is good about “it” – it has provided the means for people to connect with others around the world and it has allowed much information which is hidden by the mainstream to be revealed. But, it has also enabled the hidden to observe us all like a phantom, malevolent in the ways it can use the same social interactions and revelations of knowledge against us. And, like the black-eyed children, it wants even more access to our homes and our minds…

The upcoming 5G network, often referred to as “the internet of things” (which, in itself, sounds like some sort of magical, mystical phrase) is worrying a number of people.  Apart from the fact that everything physical, all the buildings and gadgets that we rely on, will be open to manipulation and observation by anyone with access to the system, there is a very real concern about how the waves transmitted will affect human and animal health. Barrie Trower, a former Royal Navy Microwave Weapons Expert, has written and spoken extensively about what he regards as the devastating damage the radiation from 5G will cause:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zGLugGwKAM&t=1733s

Trower goes so far as to call the proposed network a potential “genocide” because, he argues, the radiation will cause miscarriages, and, when children are born, they will pass genetic damage on to successive generations. Maybe, these will become the lost children of the internet?

http://rense.com/general96/trower.html

 

The vast majority of people, however, are seemingly unconcerned about any health issues, let alone about giving the controllers of the internet access to every physical aspect of their lives. They aren’t even waiting for the persistent knocking on the front door, they are so desperate to let the internet monster in that they are bursting with excitement for its arrival, leaving the door wide open and leaving the keys on the doorstep.

Politics, void, and the child in time

(I am reposting this as it connects to my previous blog on Stranger Things...new content to follow soon)

There were a few critical comments from viewers of the recent adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time which was shown on the BBC. Some found the plot ‘baffling’ with the storyline involving Stephen’s friend, the politician/publisher Charles Darke and his regression to childhood a bit difficult to digest. It was understandable that an hour and a half was too short a time to shoehorn all the different threads of the original novel.

 

I am pleased that the political focus of the novel was not ditched entirely. McEwan used his novel (published in 1987) as a critique of the Thatcher government. The ‘Prime Minister’ is always referred to by this title, the author deliberately avoiding any reference to the incumbent’s gender (gender itself being another prominent subject debated within the novel). The novel is set in a fictional near future, extrapolated from the social policies of the Conservative government in the 1980s. The opening pages follow Stephen as he weaves his way through busy London commuters, on his way to participate in a government enquiry, supposedly contributing to the formation of a new ‘Childcare Handbook’. A young beggar draws Stephen’s attention, makes him think of his own lost daughter, and also the moral degeneracy of the government (which has introduced licensed begging to replace social security benefits payments):

 

To give money ensured the success of the Government programme. Not to give involved some determined facing away from private distress. There was no way out. The art of bad government was to sever the line between public policy and intimate feeling, the instinct for what was right (The Child in Time, McEwan 1987, 8-9).

The loss of a child is clearly a metaphor for a governmental abuse of innocence. This opening scene establishes the interconnectedness of the plot themes: politics, the state of a nation and different concepts of time, all passing through the spectre of a lost child.

 

However, although Stephen’s missing child is often described in ghostly, uncanny terms, sweeping down to inhabit any child on the streets of London, the possibility that the child has been killed is never broached. Indeed, neither the book nor its adaptation mentions even the possibility that Kate could have been abducted by a paedophile. Instead, like the public pronouncements of the McCanns, Stephen imagines his daughter growing up with another family, taken as a surrogate daughter, ageing like the computer-aged images of Maddy.

 

The absence of any mention of child murder and paedophilia is itself a haunting omission from the story. The current Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is due in 2018 to investigate allegations of child abuse and ‘exploitation involving people of public prominence associated with Westminster’.

 

https://www.iicsa.org.uk/investigations/allegations-of-abuse-by-people-of-public-prominence-associated-with-westminster

 

The Inquiry stems from the belated public exposure of the widespread abuses of Jimmy Saville. Allegations of high-level paedophile rings have persisted over decades. Many of these allegations are still derided as ‘conspiracy theories’ but, it must be remembered, Saville’s crimes were also confined to the realm of supposition through decades when he was a high profile celebrity. More significantly, his horrific, systematic assaults were carried out while Saville was a close friend to both politicians (most notably Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) and members of the British Royal Family (including Prince Charles). One of the intentions of the Inquiry is to uncover evidence of institutions covering-up or conspiring to enable such abuses to take place. For those members of the establishment who have recently reacted with outrage at investigations into former public figures and politicians, it must be remembered that Saville was allowed to destroy young people’s lives for the whole of his life, without anyone in authority questioning his behaviour. Allegations only seem to be taken seriously when the prominent person is dead, or very close to it, such as the investigation into the former Prime Minister Edward Heath:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41503143

 

At the time of writing, the IICSA was hearing evidence that the late Liberal MP Cyril Smith was known by security forces such as MI5 to be an abuser of boys. MI5 were aware that the Department for Public Prosecution had lied to elements of the press, denying having been sent reports of investigations into Smith’s crimes. A detective superintendent at Lancashire Police had actually made a damning report that stated

 

‘It seems impossible to excuse his [Smith’s] conduct over a considerable period of time whilst sheltering behind a veneer of respectability.

 

He has used his unique position to indulge in a sordid series of indecent episodes with young boys towards whom he had a special responsibility.’

 

This report was written in 1970, the year he first ran for office as an MP. The Inquiry heard that Margaret Thatcher would have been aware of the allegations prior to awarding Smith a knighthood in 1988. This was the year after The Child in Time was published. Although Smith himself was never in Government, other investigations and reports are uncovering strong evidence that so much abuse was known about during the years in which McEwan was writing his novel, and the decades leading up to it. The Conservative government Chief Whip during the leadership of Ted Heath in the 1970s, Tim Fortescue admitted in a national BBC television interview that they would help MPs who came to them with problems, including with ‘small boys’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwkOWPauu_A

 

I don’t believe McEwan had any notion of there being hidden paedophile rings within circles of power within Westminster. But, the narrative refers to child abuse of a different kind, with the Government creating their own ’Authorised Childcare Handbook’ which promotes an authoritarian, disciplinarian approach to bringing-up children. The author of this handbook is discovered to be Stephen’s friend Charles Darke. His retirement from politics to live in the countryside, where he can play at a ‘Just William’ cliché of childhood, symbolises the conflict within individuals and society about what childhood represents. But, in our current society, a man re-living his childhood would involve simply playing computer games and immersing themselves in a virtual world – which is how many men now continue living their lives into adulthood, which is an interesting, possibly depressing, thing to contemplate in itself. At one point in The Child in Time, Stephen watches a new Government endorsed, all-day television channel. He despairs of the childishness of the contestants and audience on a game show. As other critics have noted, McEwan was anticipating our current obsession with multiple channels, satellite and digital, and the domination of reality television.

 

The fictional storyline is a commentary on the way politics rejects those qualities that are romantically associated with childhood: a freedom of spirit and unfettered connection with the natural world. But the television adaptation introduces a darker suggestion of conspiracy within government: Darke is found dead in the woods, dressed in his schoolboy clothes. He has apparently committed suicide, unable to reconcile the differences in his “nature”. However, an earlier scene where the Prime Minister discusses with his colleague the inconvenience caused by Darke’s actions, combined with mentions that Charles is under surveillance, suggests that he was actually killed by security services and his death made to look like suicide. At least one of the public comments I read after the Guardian online review of the television adaptation likened this apparent suicide in the woods to the death of the government scientist Dr David Kelly. Perhaps, in symbolic terms, the ‘murder’ of Darke in his short trousers represents a child sacrifice.

 

Believers in Satanism view their practices as influencing or even controlling events in the physical world. It has been alleged that Satanic paedophile rings use children to tap into a youthful energy which will confer on them an increase in power. In the final episode of the first season of the HBO series True Detective, a series which features such rings, the half-sister of the principal abuser, when asked where he is, says he ‘is all around us, before you were born and after you die’.  This concept of timelessness is one of the principal themes of The Child in Time. Although the television adaptation omits the references to quantum physics, it retains the scene at ‘The Bell’ pub. Stephen stumbles upon a pub while on the way to see his estranged wife. It seems familiar although he cannot remember ever being there. He looks in the window and sees a woman apparently arguing with her partner. Later, his now ageing mother reveals how she contemplated aborting Stephen before seeing a child through the window and realising that this was going to be her son (the adaptation diluted this to avoid mention of abortion).

 

In the novel, Stephen collapses after seeing the vision, temporarily falling into some sort of time warp. It is unsurprising that many viewers of the television adaptation were confused about the portrayal of a mixing of past and present in an otherwise “realistic” narrative, without the context of the discussions of different concepts of time. McEwan himself seemed conflicted over the scene, having his neurosurgeon hero of the much later novel Saturday despair of magic realist novels, particularly one where ‘One visionary saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him’ (McEwan 2006, 67-68). The neuro-surgeon, Henry Perowne, argues that, as a brain surgeon, he knows ‘for a quotidian fact, the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs’ and ‘the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible’ (McEwan 2006, 67-68).  The scene seemed to offend McEwan’s self-professed love of science.

 

But, perhaps, the uncanny and imaginary must break the conventional veneer of a rational, logical society which has been built on abuse and deceit. The trauma of the lost child is a cause of social breakdown and it is also a symptom of a crisis within humanity. The final episode of the first season of True Detective had a similar break with realism. There had been earlier signposting to enable viewers to process Rust’s vision of a whirlpool-like void above the head of the child-sacrificing villain. Rust mentioned several times that he experienced occasional hallucinations as a result of his previous time undercover with drug gangs. However, the visual presentation of the void is so striking and “real” that it should be considered as something more than mere hallucination. This is emphasised by Rust’s final speech at the end of the series. He tells his partner that when he saw the void, at the point of what seemed like his own imminent death, he felt the presence of his dead daughter. She brought with her an overwhelming sense of love, a love that was outside of the material corrupted world. Rust ends by saying that light seemed to be winning its battle with the dark. This may be a statement which is overly optimistic in view of the depths of depravity which our world is full of. There can only be hope that by letting light and love come through the traumatic void which our lost children leave behind, the material world can fill its own hole.