The New Dark Age

Sunday, 27 April 2025 — Dot Commie

with a vengeance.

By William Bowles

Like a really bad meal and you think, I’m not going to that restaurant again. Yet here we are, eating the same, poisonous food and the same horrific consequences play out all over again. And in an irony of ironies, the victims of the past, return as the persecutors of the present. So I could say, surely, we saw this coming didn’t we? When Israel was created in 1948 on the stolen land of Palestine, Western, racist colonialism drove the entire enterprise and that’s why, we, in the West, never recognised it for what it was. We were too busy doing phony mea culpas for German Fascism–at least that’s how it seemed at the time–to recognise that the racism that played such a central role in the slaughter of WWII, is the same racism that drove the creation of Israel and drives the slaughter of Palestinians. It explains why white, European capitalism, applauds, encourages, finances and arms the Zionist monster, itself a creation of 19^th century European imperialism. So really, nothing has changed, not a damn thing!

Furthermore, it’s was the crisis of capital that produced the rise of Fascism in the 1930s that now drives the reincarnation of present-day Fascism as yet another crisis of capital drives its reemergence and once more, we stand by, mute witness to Zionist, Fascist genocide and the commensurate dismantling of our hard-won rights of freedom of expression and protest in the West in order to defend Israel. It was, after all, the governments of Europe in the 1930s that did nothing, that stood by as Franco’s Fascists, armed by German Fascists, used Spain as a testing ground for the war to come, just as Israel uses the genocidal war unleashed on Palestinians as yet another testing ground for the latest wave of killing machines. So truly we can say that this is, in every respect, a repeat performance, and that we in the West, have learned nothing from our past.

The Big Seven

There is, however, one difference between then and now and that’s the reimagining of the capitalism that was central to Mussolini’s Italian fascism, the merging of the capitalist state and Big Business, the Corporate, Security State that has been transformed by the computer revolution that has made possible the construction of the total surveillance society. This is the world that the Big Seven have created, the world of algorithms that filter, censor, make invisible anything that interferes with the Big Lie, that has disappeared the Palestinian Holocaust. Without this total censorship, I doubt that it would have been possible to exterminate the people and culture of Gaza and the West Bank and most definitely, not be able to hide it. The security state has taken on an omniscient form when merged with a totally complicit state and corporate media. The circle is complete.

So while the punters have gotten addicted to Facebook and mesmerised by online shopping, they’ve constructed the total security state around us and we inadvertently helped them to build it! We’ve even financed our own prison of the mind! And no matter how many times I protest the world of Facebook or Youtube or Google or X (formerly Twitter), I hear ‘Yeah but…’, ‘Yeah but Youtube is sooo cool’, ‘Yeah but all those free how-too videos’ or ‘Yeah but all my friends are on Facebook that I chat to every day’. ‘Social media’ is the totally addictive drug of the Information Age. I feel some responsibility for this because I was intimately involved in its construction back at its genesis in the late 1970s. The minute I stumbled over the online world, I saw its potential to change everything. At the same time, I also saw the potential dangers if this new technology was to become the property of private business and fall under the control of the capitalist state. But I too was mesmerised by its potential, by its power to transform the means of communication. If only I’d known the full implications of it.

As early as 1980 (perhaps even earlier) AT&T was already automatically monitoring and recording telephone conversations through an intercept office in its downtown office in Manhattan and no doubt at other locations and it was only possible to do this because the telephone network had been digitised. And the inventor of the language of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, also saw the danger but again, nobody listened. All it took was was for Big Business and the state to realise what had been created; the physical infrastructure had been built by the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, some by computer students, some by academics and some by the computer industry itself. But serendipity also played a significant role as my early experiences illustrated as the ‘Captains of Industry’ are not known either for their imagination or their creativity. Indeed, when it came to the potential of the computer and the Network, even by the mid-1990s the Captains were still mostly clueless.

So the question, the dilemma, the situation we find ourselves in, is two-fold; given as how the surveillance state is now totally integrated into the capitalist state itself, it’s no longer a question of dismantling the surveillance infrastructure, it’s now a question of dismantling capitalism at the same time as they are now one and the same thing because the state is now a literal extension of Big Business itself. This is a unique situation for which there is no precedent. In past revolutions, the state’s infrastructure existed in its civil service, its bureaucracy, which could be commandeered, transformed. This is no longer possible as the state has been outsourced to the Big Seven.

The obscenity that is Israel and its mentor, the USA has brought this reality into sharp relief, as only the Corporate-Security state could succeed in executing the abomination that is Gaza and do it in full view of the entire planet and at the same time, make it invisible. This is mass manipulation not just of opinion but of reality itself. But it also explains why the state has had to bring the full force of its repressive laws into play as the entire ‘enterprise’ balances on a knife edge, it only takes a wrong move, a misstep for it all to unravel. The cold-blooded slaughter of the medical workers by the IDF is but one example. It took the full force of the propaganda machine to contain it. What nearly did it was the exposure of the lies, the burials, the videos, the lies and yet more lies. Another one like it, might well expose the entire nightmare for what it is; Fascist extermination.