Coda

I will now be wrapping up this blog, as I've pretty much said everything I wanted to say. Even when I first started blogging with the "Decades" blogs all those years ago I was kind of aware that the mass culture and mass politics of the 20th Century was at an end, and that popular culture was already a historical phenomenon rather than a contemporary one. This suspicion has only been further confirmed in recent years, and has accordingly increased the feeling I have that the kind of socio-cultural and socio-political writing undertaken in this corner of the blogosphere is pretty much redundant.

So just to set out the main points of this blog for the last time:

1. The expansive era of technological and social progress, together with its darker aspects, that dominated the 20th Century, and which I've termed the Plutonian era, is at an end, and the 21st Century will be very different.

2. The last two millenia of hierarchical social organisation and universalist religion and ideology are also at an end, and we are in the early stages of another two millenia which will revolve around eccentric individualism and loosely aggregated non-hierarchical structures (i.e. the transition from Pisces to Aquarius).

3. The next three to four years are going to be particularly chaotic, more so than the last six to ten years, as this transition intensifies and the future in general is going to be considerably different to anything anyone can currently anticipate.

I'll see you on the other side!

Rittenhouse Rock

I note in passing the death of Mick Rock and the not guilty verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, and point you to the factor that unites them, which is the declining strength of the post-war liberal progressive egregor. As I outlined in an earlier post, as a generation dies off, so does its cultural influence and worldview, thus allowing new and unfamiliar worlds to emerge. Mick Rock's passing represents a grevious diminution of the egregor that blossomed in the Sixties and flourished up until the early 21st Century, as he was such a fertile generator and conductor of that generation's images. And images as much as music were the central mode of transmission for the progressive worldview.

Rittenhouse's acquittal is an example of the real world consequences of this trend, as the combined efforts of the broadcast media, liberal press and civil rights organisations to secure his conviction have spectacularly failed. These institutions are losing their ability to create unstoppable media bandwagons that can generate the momentum to achieve their desired political goals. This weakening will accelerate as the cohort who created the mainstream legacy media continues to die off. So the future of progressivism for at least the medium term will largely consist of the mourning of the loss of iconic individuals and flinching in horror at the sinister political forms emerging in the void they leave.

Anyway, here's some Bowie:

Ageing Rock Stars as Wetherspoons Regulars

Baz, Neil and Kenny are Real Ale fans from Doncaster who are filling in time until the next Beer Festival. Neil will always ask the duty manager to put the horse racing on, although Baz and Kenny prefer the snooker, or BBC News 24:

Derek is a former biochemist at the Environment Agency, who has a regular seat by the window. He used to come in on Fridays with his wife Janet for the fish and chips, although since she sadly passed away he tends to keep himself to himself. People who have spoken to him say that he is "an intelligent guy" who "knows lots of things":

Ian, Geoff and Rob like to take advantage of the cheap Abbott on Mondays, although Geoff's nephew Chris (pictured, left) prefers cider. They know each other from their days as refuse collectors with the Council. Rob is sometimes joined by his daughter Emma, who likes to cause a stir among the patrons with her outrageous clothes:

Keith comes in during the afternoon to play the fruit machines. His wife Judy manages a care home, which leaves him at a bit of a loose end. He is known for his dry sense of humour and as a source of cheap tobacco, which he sources from a bent copper in Barnsley:

Gaz and Pat run a successful scrap metal business. They pride themselves on always giving a fair price, while never being taken advantage of. Pat owns a villa on the Algarve, where he also has part ownership of a golf club. They both lament that Wetherspoons out-competes locally owned pubs, although Pat concedes that "you can't argue with the prices." Gaz's son Liam, also pictured, runs the local branch of SportsDirect.

Solid Gold

This blog has become very focused on astrology of late, which is not what I intended when I started it, but it's always a surprise which direction your own thought will take you. Now I should stress that astrology is of value to me not for its alleged ability to forecast the future (which is itself unfalsifiable) but in the archetypes it provides to model and shape reality. Once you understand these archetypes you begin to see them everywhere, and it is of course the archetype of Pluto that is the most indicative of post-war popular culture. Solid Gold was Gang of Four's masterpiece album, and its power, as with all the most resonant post-punk LP's, is in its Plutonianism, in its depiction of individuals being internally torn apart under the external pressure of social and economic forces. The tracks on the album are not so much songs as case studies, switching between objective descriptions of the drama unfolding (usually narrated by Andy GIll) and agonised subjective expressions of the resulting inner turmoil (sung by Jon King). Paralysed opens the record by recounting that most characteristic of early eighties experiences, redundancy, and the disorientating malaise of suddenly being deprived of a meaningful social role. Note how the music churns away in the background, like the march of progress, indifferent to the souls who are chewed up by the impersonal forces of history.

Why Theory? depicts banal domestic routines under the perpetual Sword of Damocles of the Cold War, and the underlying psychological disturbance that such a contrast must provoke. Once again, the crushing mass of the music, like bulldozers colliding underwater, summons the enormity of the forces involved, always just out of the view of protagonists within the song. "Distant thunder from the East/Won't disturb our morning car wash".

A Hole In The Wallet reflects the contemporary battle between the fading force (at least at this time) of patriarchy, and its substitution not with feminism, but with econometrics, as interpersonal relations become increasingly focused on money conflicts. Here we see the disinterested power of capitalism not just fracturing the individual, but also partnerships, as both men and women become calculating machines, perpetually totting up the costs and benefits of human interaction.

He'd Send In The Army is the album's finale, mainly vocalised by bassist Dave Allen, and is a merciless portrayal of patriarchy as a lingering sociopathology. This is the band at their blackest, heaviest and most Plutonian, the song structure positively creaking under the gravitational mass of that dark, alien planet. Also characteristically Plutonian is the sense of there being no relief or transcendence in the experience, that it must simply be endured, as though existence itself is a perpetual prison. In the archetype of Pluto the only way out is through...to the next Plutonian struggle.

Bonus vid: they could also do it live:

Eminent Aquarians #1: Graham Hancock

In considering examples of how the Age of Aquarius is increasingly entrenching itself, the esoteric archaeologist Graham Hancock is a good place to start. He is a classic example of a disruptive individual who is pitched against a complacent Piscean hierarchy, as he himself delineates in the above podcast with good old Joe Rogan, himself an intensely Aquarian figure. Hancock is disruptive because he has, over several decades and numerous best-selling books, articulated a compelling narrative of human society, in which he posits that the first technologically sophisticated civilisation existed over ten thousand years ago in South and Central America, and that this was prematurely destroyed by the debris from a passing comet. As such, pace Hancock, the cradle of civilisation as we know it was not in Mesopotamia, but in the Americas, and the civilisations of the Middle East were seeded by the survivors of the prior American ur-civilisation, who had scattered themselves around the world with what little they could salvage from their ruined cities.

Hancock cites various similarities between indigenous American and Middle Eastern artifacts to bolster his case that these were not separate civilisations, but merely temporally divergent manifestations of the same civilisation. However, the established archaeological paradigm is that human civilisation in the Americas cannot be older than 2500 years, and Hancock alleges that instead of the archaeological profession being open to refutation on this point, it instead tends to marginalise anybody who contradicts it. As such, despite being in publishing terms a raging success, he is in professional terms something of a persona non grata. His Wikipedia biography accuses him of being a proponent of "pseudohistory" and "pseudoarcheology", the prefix pseudo being one of the classic signifiers by which rationalist-atheist "sceptics" stigmatise anybody they consider beyond the pale.

For anyone outside the hot and sexy world of archaeology, this kind of labelling might seem a bit infantile, but is Hancock really deceitful? In the interview with Rogan he appears to be sane, rational and engaging, and if he is a liar then he must be an amazing one because he keeps it up fluently without contradicting himself for almost three hours. A similar objection pertains to any assertion that he is simply delusional, because if he is so he displays remarkable internal consistency in his delusions. It could be argued that he has followed his line of argument purely because it is highly lucrative, but a counter to that would be that he started his career as a respectable establishment insider (he is a former journalist with The Economist), so there can be little doubt that he could have easily become extremely wealthy without compromising his respectability. Now he might just be wrong, and in fairness some of his speculations, such as that the giant stone roofs of the chambers within the Egyptian pyramids were lifted into place by telekinesis, are too much even for someone as woowoo-friendly as me.

Hancock's plight is similar to that of the evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who has spent similar decades touting his theory of morphic resonance to the indifference or even antipathy of his more mainstream colleagues. Like Sheldrake, Hancock harks to Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and its theory that science advances by paradigm shifts, as once-dominant theories increasingly fail to explain new evidence or data. They also invoke Max Planck's aphorism that "science progresses one funeral at a time" as doughty defenders of the status quo yield to new ideas by cocking their toes. In fact, both men are holding onto false hopes in these notions, as they misunderstand their real historical role, and why it is so disruptive. The Aquarian ideas that they proffer are dangerous not because they might upend existing paradigms, but because they undermine the Piscean hierarchies that govern their respective fields. Hancock is subversive because he recognises that only a tiny fraction of the record of human habitation on the planet has so far been exhumed, so that our understanding of human history is liable to become repeatedly overturned every time a virgin area of the planet is excavated. In turn, this will convert archaeology from being a sober, orderly, structured discipline into a wild world of constant turmoil, in which no hierarchy of expertise can be steadily maintained. However, unbeknown to themselves, his Piscean foes can only be defeated by him, as he embodies the Aquarian forces that will come to dominate not just their world, but our own too.

Pluto In Ulster

There was no greater metaphor for the Plutonian experience than the conflict in Northern Ireland in the late 20th Century. Its grim aesthetic perfectly evoked the two sides of Pluto, both schizoidal internal conflict and external oppression.

The alien presence of the British security system evokes the ever-present eye, monitoring everything, revealing nothing. This was perhaps the ultimate Ballardian world, although Ballard himself never wrote about it. It is strange in hindsight how films and television dramas always soundtracked The Troubles with ethereal Celtic folk music from the likes of Clannad, when they should really have employed Chrome or Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft.

Even the euphemistic title given to this conflict, "The Troubles", was suggestive. The central Plutonian experience is The Ordeal, in which we are dragged down into the Underworld in order to be torn apart, experience our most atavistic selves, before being forged anew and lifted out on the other side. Although the Pluto ordeal is agonistic, it is also evolutionary; all that is obsolescent and outgrown is dispensed with, so that a new, higher self can emerge.

All the protagonists in The Troubles descended into Hades. They all performed acts of depravity beyond what they might initially have thought themselves capable. This was the essential nadir of Pluto, and only after this nadir, or series of nadirs, could the journey out of the pit commence. This could also be said about the 20th Century as a whole, that it was one great Plutonian travail in which humanity plumbed the utmost depths of its consciousness, before slowly pulling itself upwards.

At the time, the conflict appeared to be interminable, this being another characteristic of the Pluto experience; that while you are in it there appears to be no end in sight. I remember a Northern Irish comedian being asked what it would take to resolve the differences between the two communities, and his reply was "coastal erosion".

The Pluto experience isn't quite over for the province, although its most intense phase has abated. The older identities of Unionist and Nationalist are still apparent, although they are gradually attenuating, and a singular Northern Irish identity is slowly growing. Although Pluto tears apart, if the individual or society under its influence endures, then it also reconstitutes anew.

Eventually, at least.

An Occult Investigation Into Joy Division - Part 2

The later years of the 19th Century were marked by an intuitive sense among astronomers that there was a ninth planet in the Solar System, which was disturbing the orbit of the outermost planet known thus far, Neptune. In 1906 the American astronomer Percival Lowell instituted a project to discover what he termed Planet X, and, after many missteps, a young astronomer at Lowell's observatory, Clyde Tombaugh, would indeed locate a mysterious body in the early months of 1930. What Tombaugh had found was the most disturbing and destructive astrological force that has ever cast its dire influence on mankind, the planet Pluto. It was suitably named after the Roman god of the underworld, the reciprocal of the Greek god Hades, and like its namesake the new planet would drag humanity down to its most fetid depths as part of its process of transformation. Astrologically Pluto represented Mars, the planet of war, at a higher octave, and was therefore the planet of extermination and genocide, as well as of organised crime and nuclear energy. As part of its Hadean legacy, Pluto also represented the divided self and internal conflict, and therefore psychoanalysis and shizophrenia. It was Pluto that gave the 20th Century its choking, polluting, leadenness and murderous intensity, and tore individuals apart in wrenching soul conflicts.

It is generally considered that the astrological force of a new planet starts to manifest for a Saturn cycle prior to its discovery, this being 30 years, the time it takes for Saturn (the outermost planet visible to the human eye) to orbit the sun. This would place the start of Pluto's influence at 1900, the year that the British opened their concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War. From there the first truly major Plutonian ruptures occurred with the Great War, the Russian Civil War and the Armenian Genocide, although it was only after the planet fully revealed itself in 1930 that its appalling energy manifested to its full potential. It was the Plutonian current that elevated petty criminals and malcontents such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong into world-historical monsters capable of unleashing unprecedented levels of violence and brutality. But these eruptions were merely a calling card, as Pluto's mature phase of governance would commence on 16th July 1945, with the detonation of Trinity, the first atomic bomb, in the desert of New Mexico. Trinity was built around a core of fissile radioactive metal that had first been synthetically produced four years earlier, and had been named, naturally enough, plutonium. The subsequent detonations of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the resulting doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, placed all of humanity under Pluto's oppressive mass, the all-pervading low level psychological terror of the Cold War being the distant planet's ultimate expression.

Pluto's significance would not end here, of course, as its influence trickled into every niche and corner of existence, and even into the apparently trivial realm of popular music. Its arrival can be traced very precisely, to the opening chords of Jumpin' Jack Flash, while the leaden pall of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin would represent its anchoring in the cultural zeitgeist. Although Punk had intially represented a furious rejection of the ponderous sound of these forebears, Pluto would soon have its way with the arrival of post-punk and its perilous plunging baselines, spectral guitars, and infinity-seeking synthesizers. Thematically, Joy Division represented the two poles of the Plutonian ordeal, in both their schismatic sense of internal conflict and in their existential sense of oppressive external force. This was even apparent in their name, with Division marking an internal binary conflict, and the full name deriving from the forced prostitution of concentration camp inmates. Indeed the band's early predilection for Nazi imagery would dog their career, although it was a series of photographs taken by Kevin Cummins that gave the best visual inclination of their proximity to Pluto.

The post-war housing of Hulme that formed the background of these pictures illustrated Plutonianism in its (literal) concrete form. The slum clearance programmes in Britain's major cities were conceived and proselytised under the rubric of social improvement, although in practice they were generally akin to a domestic application of RAF Bomber Command's wartime policy of dehousing workers. The only major difference of course being that in this instance it was close-knit British working class communities that were broken up and peripherally displaced rather than German ones. Hulme was a particularly egregious example of the poor quality of system-built housing, this partially being due to characteristically Plutonian corruption on the part of the developers. The latter half of the 20th Century's fixation on concrete as the preferred building material, often inspired by the bunkers and pillboxes of the war years, nonetheless evoked the alien and awesome mass of Pluto, which was a force that could fascinate as much as it could repel. This dark fascination can be intuited in a track such as Komakino, that perfectly encapsulates the tractive pull and crushing gravity of that darkest of planets:

Post-war Britain was absolutely riven with Plutonian epiphenomena, the conflict in Northern Ireland, with its schismatic sectarian hatreds, and Brutalist British Army watchtowers erupting out of Victorian streets, being a particularly marked example. The Moors Murderers and Yorkshire Rippers who stalked the North and brought horror into the most mundane surroundings were also Plutonian irruptions. Perhaps Joy Division's most salient evocation of Pluto was The Atrocity Exhibition, which fused the Plutonian worlds of inner torment and mass murder together in a tableau of torture and conflagration; of sadism in both its microcosmic and macrocosmic dimensions. There was, however, something purging within this music, as the death of Curtis and termination of Joy Division seemed to take much of Pluto's power with them, such that the darkness and intensity of post-punk would suddenly appear overwrought, or even absurd.

However terrible the power of Pluto may have been, a nonetheless remarkable parallel trend had been working to undermine it. Continuous observation after its discovery had resulted in the consistent downgrading of Pluto's mass throughout the 20th Century. Initially, it had been calculated as being approximately as heavy as Earth, although by 1976 a series of drastic revisions had reduced its estimated mass to no more than 1% of Earth, this in turn still being a gross overestimate. The importance of this was that as Pluto apparently shrank so did its astrological influence. Wars became smaller, monolithic ideologies began to splinter, popular culture began to wane. The dark enchantment of the ninth planet began to dissipate and the world it had created would start to appear baffling in hindsight. In 2006 Pluto received the ultimate indignity of being downgraded from planetary status, and was instead designated a dwarf planet, of only minor astrological concern. The last great Plutonian conflagration, the invasion of Iraq, would mark the beginning of its swansong. As with its discovery, a Saturn cycle of 30 years will have to pass before Pluto's influence definitively fades, and it will not be until 2036 that it finally becomes dormant. Nevertheless, we are already firmly on that path, and this is why the 20th Century, and its artistic and architectural fads, its frenzied wars and Promethean inventions and discoveries cannot, and indeed will not, be repeated. There cannot be another group like Joy Division, because the planetary energies that summoned both them and their world into being no longer pertain.

Is there a Future in England's Dreaming?

There's a notable interview with Elton John in The Guardian, in which he lambasts the Conservative Government's apparent neglect of the performing arts during the negotiations around Brexit. According to Elton:

"People like me can afford to go to Europe because we can get people to fill in the forms and get visas done, but what makes me crazy is that the entertainment business brings in £111bn a year to this country and we were just tossed away. The fishing industry – which they still fucked up – brings in £1.4bn. And I’m all for the fishermen, but we’re talking about more than a hundred billion pounds of difference here, and we weren’t even thought about! 'Oh well, the arts: they don’t matter.'"

Now I think that Elton is a little mistaken about what is going on here, because I strongly suspect that the Government are tanking the arts quite deliberately. And, if they are, it demonstrates that the Tories are belatedly exhibiting some political nous. The first and most obvious point is that the British culture industry is generally very strongly anti-Tory, and in funding the arts what the Conservatives have actually been doing is feeding their enemy, and indeed shoring up one of the most implacable cadres that oppose them. For purely opportunist reasons it would suit the Tories to torpedo the culture industry no matter how much revenue it brings into the country, and it amazes me that they have taken this long to apparently figure this out.

However, there is an added benefit for the Conservatives in hobbling the arts, and which I referred to at length in a previous essay. This is that the culture industry, and popular culture in particular, have since the 1950's been one of the primary motors of British national demoralisation. This has not necessarily been ideological in character, but rather derives from the only future that most contemporary artists find Imagine-able - the peaceful world-utopia where there is nothing to kill or die for, and above us only sky. In opposition to this, the state and society that has been inherited from the past can only be viewed as outmoded and oppressive. Naive optimism and jaded cynicism are the two sides of the same nihilist coin, and this is why Give Peace A Chance and Holidays In The Sun are both essentially the same song. As a consequence, popular culture and especially popular music have tended to portray Britain, not inaccurately, as a spent and decaying former imperial power, lost in illusions of former glory, and internally riven with divisions based on race, class, and much else besides. Just spend five minutes perusing John Harris's Twitter feed, and you will get the picture.

This outlook has never been seriously challenged by the British state itself, mainly because most politicians, including even Conservative ones, basically agreed with it. When the Sex Pistols snarled that "there is no future in England's dreaming", or when The Waterboys trilled that "Old England is dying" they were, despite their apparent outsider status, merely reiterating the common sense of the ruling class. Unfortunately for Britain's creative artists, the one politician who now appears to stridently disagree is the current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. In a recent interview (of sorts) in The Atlantic, Johnson was prompted to hold forth on the subject of the author John le Carré, as follows:

'He told me he’d taken a completely different lesson from the novelist. To Johnson, le Carré had exposed not the fakery of the British ruling class, but its endemic passivity, and acceptance of decline. “I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at school,” he said. “It presented to me this miserable picture of these Foreign Office bureaucrats … For me, they were the problem.” Johnson told me this was exactly what he was determined to fight.

"You lump me together with various other people—and you say we are all products of these decadent institutions and this culture, an inadequate and despairing establishment. That’s not me!" He said he was trying "to recapture some of the energy and optimism that this country used to have."'

Now it could indeed be the case that the likes of Roger Waters, Joe Strummer and Thom Yorke are absolutely correct, and that Britain, or at least England, is definitively clapped out and cannot be revived. It may also be the case that any attempt at national renewal is wrong in principle and that it is through international collaboration and transnationalism that the future beckons. It is nonetheless definitively the case that if anybody was to attempt a serious project for national renewal, the very first obstacles that would need to be swept aside are the creative artists and performers. This is why the arts and creative industries will need to ready themselves to meet, for the very first time, a government that will be happy, and perhaps even eager, to see their demise.

Where The Mana Flows Like Water

Stumbled across the Alan Lomax Archive, a film-maker who travelled through Mississippi, the Appalachians and Louisiana in the late 1970's, producing a record of the music of these regions, such as these fine gentlemen, the Heavenly Gospel Singers:

The impression these clips give is of a skein of spiritual force that these performers, who are, after all, mostly amateurs, can effortlessly plug into. And when I say spiritual force, I am of course not talking metaphorically. There's an ease here in channelling spiritual mana that would necessitate gut-wrenching exertions from professional musicians if they attempted its replication. This also gives an insight into the sheer artificiality of the music industry, of how it is very much a soiler and a spoiler.

There's also an archaic aspect to these performances; they seem as though they could equally have been recorded in 1958 or even, but for the electric instruments, in 1928. The mass culture ploughs insanely on through its countless mutations, while in the back country the culture remains timeless.

It's amazing to think that this was filmed in a country that had only just finished visiting the moon and was still immersed in the space race. I like to think that you could see similar scenes in the more neglected regions of the USSR, only with the guitars replaced with balalaikas and the root bear substituted with vodka.

I do wonder to what extent this kind of music has persisted into the present day. I would guess the two main threats to it have been rap culture and middle-class hipsters co-opting it in their eternal search for authenticity. I expect the level of poverty is still the same though, or possibly even worse.

One string guitar = me when I get on the subject of Spengler or Jacques Ellul.

An Occult Investigation Into Joy Division - Part 1

"A sense of fear and oppression is very characteristic of occult attack, and one of the surest signs that herald it. It is extemely rare for an attack to make itself manifest out of the blue, as it were. We are not in our normal state of mind, body and circumstance, and then find ourselves suddenly in the midst of an invisible battle. An approaching occult influence casts its shadow on consciousness before it makes itself apparent to the non-psychic. The reason for this is that we perceive subconsciously before we realise consciously, and a line of creeping shade indicates the penetrating of the subconscious censor from below upwards.

As the attack progresses, nervous exhaustion becomes increasingly marked, and there may, under certain conditions, which we will consider later, be such wasting of the tissues that the victim is reduced to a mere bloodless shell of skin and bones, lying on the bed, too weak to move. And yet no disease can be demonstrated."

- Dion Fortune, "Psychic Self-Defence"

There is no musical group more puzzling and disturbing than Joy Division; that both invites and confounds curiosity, and prompts the deepest attempts at analysis that yield almost nothing. Joy Division are both profound and impenetrable, such that any intiative to explain them is invariably diverted into panegyrics dedicated to the surface of their sound, which is a modernist hall of mirrors. But is there another means of approach that might yield more? Perhaps not, as I suspect that Joy Division will forever remain obscure, but it is maybe worth making the effort. However, just such an effort will require taking a different tack to all previous analyses, and viewing the world through a different lens than that previously accorded to any study of the band. In this instance, we will attempt to study them from the perspective of that school of occultism known as the Western Mystery Tradition, whose most notable contemporary manifestation is the Golden Dawn system of magic.

The first two concepts that we will employ are in fact almost ubiquitous to all esoteric and occult systems, whether they originate in the Occident or the Orient. These are the concepts of reincarnation and of karma. The Golden Dawn magical system, and its offshoots, posit that each human soul is made up of two major components, which are known as the Individuality and the Personality. The Individuality is that part of ourselves that is eternal, and is reincarnated from existence to existence, while the Personality is that part of ourselves that is unique to each particular existence. The Individuality is also known as the Higher Self, and is a part of ourselves that is only very rarely encountered, if at all, during our entire lifetime. If it briefly emerges, it is usually at a time of great stress, or distress; if, in the middle of a crisis, you have experienced the phenomenon where a single wise voice enters your head, and gives you absolutely the correct advice on what to do, then you have encountered your Higher Self. It follows then, that the Personality is also known as the Lower Self, and the divide between these two selves is called The Veil, the purpose of much occultism being to cross this veil and unite the lower and higher selves.

The Lower Self is the part of us that we experience in our day to day existence, and which encompasses all our personal qualities, both good and bad. The purpose of being born into different personalities is to learn the lessons that each particular personality, with its strengths and weaknesses, has to give. From an esoteric point of view, there is no point having the same personality forever and ever, as our inherent limitations and biases, not to mention our varying physical and mental abilites, will always restrict the knowledge that any one personality can accrue. As such, in each personality we grow, (hopefully) mature, and (sometimes very painfully) learn as much as we can, and then we die, and the knowledge accrued is retained by the Individuality ready for the next incarnation. The memories of the previous incarnation(s) are rendered inaccessible, although the skills, talents, and lessons learned are retained by the Individuality. This is the root of apparently innate talents, or abilities to comprehend particular facets of existence with unusual alacrity. As the Individuality accrues knowledge and experience, so each incarnation becomes easier to navigate at the most basic level, and the soul turns itself towards spiritual growth. Eventually, all the lessons of material incarnation have been learned, and the soul continues its journey removed from any physical constraints, this basic orientation being known as destiny.

When this principle is applied to the personality at the heart of the great drama that was Joy Division, we should think then not of Ian Curtis, but of the soul that was temporarily incarnated as Ian Curtis. And it is at this juncture that the concept of karma assists our understanding. The term used for karma within the Golden Dawn system is fate, although karma is the term that has become more colloquially common and readily understood. It should be noted in passing then that fate is a very different concept to destiny. In esoteric terms, karma is a neutral, unpersonified principle in which the results of any action or deed are returned to the person who enacted them, the purpose being to serve as a lesson in conduct. Karma, the results delivered by our actions, is how we learn in each incarnation, should we be alert enough to recognise it. However, the fact that karma can span incarnations also means that it cannot be evaded; as we sow, so do we reap, and as all of us are flawed and prone to foolishness, so we all reap in abundance.

This is particularly pertinent with regards to Joy Division, as they give every impression of having been a vehicle for the working out of karma. Although the allusions are always vague and indistinct, the overall sense that they convey is that many lifetimes previously, the soul that was temporarily incarnated as Ian Curtis made some terrible, fateful error, that unloaded a crushing burden of karma that has pursued and harried it ever since. What this mistake may have been is impossible to ascertain, but it would seem to have been spiritual and/or religious in nature, and was accompanied by a deep sense of betrayal, thus indicating that the protagonist may have been tricked into making it. Although karma itself is neutral, the means through which it is enacted can be very active indeed, and whatever error Curtis' antecedent made, it seems to have unleashed furies that have pursued it relentlessly, possibly for centuries. So what could these furies be? Some insight may be gleaned from Dion Fortune's invaluable guide to such phenomena, Psychic Self-Defence, in which she outlines, amongst other ailments, the problem of psychic attack.

Psychic attack is probably the most common form of occult disturbance, its origin essentially lying in a suggestion made to the subconscious mind. which acts as the seed for an acute mental complex, filled with double binds, that will eventually erupt into consciousness. Such a suggestion is usually made by a person we know and can be made deliberately or accidentally, and acts on a vulnerability or fissure that is already apparent, but dormant, in the subconscious. If you know somebody, maybe at work, who acts pleasantly towards you, but nevertheless makes you feel uncomfortable or energetically drained, then you will have some idea of the kind of process at work. Nevertheless, Dion Fortune also pointed out that:

"It happens sometimes, however, that a rapport has been formed with the attacking entity in a previous incarnation, and therefore it holds, as it were, the key to the postern. Such a problem is a very difficult one, and external assistance is needed for a solution. The difficulty is increased by the fact that the victim is often disinclined to allow the break to be made, being bound to the attacking entity, whether discarnate or incarnate, by bonds of fascination or even genuine affection."

These latter kinds of psychic attack are essentially karmic in nature and tend to pursue the individual who suffers them from one incarnation to the next, the means of manifestation in each life essentially being the same. There are strong suggestions within Joy Division's music that such psychic attacks afflicted Ian Curtis, although it is doubtful that they were the most frequent, or most pernicious, of his woes. Nonetheless, what makes a song such as Digital so remarkable is that it is an almost perfect evocation of how a psychic attack operates, from a vague sense of disquiet, to increasing dread, and then to panic and full-blown immersion. There is also the sense of personal invasion, the word "digital" indicating a double, and repetition, the sense of the attack happening again and again with ever increasing force.

Another principle of Western occultism is that each of us exists on a series of planes, which can be allocated in a number of ways, although the usual schema is to posit five basic planes, these being the material, the etheric, the astral, the mental and the spiritual. The first three of these planes pertain to the Lower Self, the material plane obviously corresponding to our physical body and physical surroundings. The contemporary Western worldview generally maintains that this is the only plane that really exists, the other planes being either epiphenomena or wholly imaginary. Nonetheless, the etheric plane refers to an animating general life force that is known in Eastern systems under such names as qi and prana, while the astral plane is the realm of dreams thoughts and emotions. The other pair of planes, the mental and spiritual, pertain to the Higher Self and are thus generally inaccessible to our normal consciousness. Dead Souls recounts an irruption of unbalanced and hostile psychic energy on the astral plane, dreams being a common arena for the staging of psychic attacks. Once again there is the sense of repeated assault, in Curtis' insistence that he is being continually called for. There is also the intimation that some kind of karmic account is waiting to be settled, that a debt is due. Possibly, even, that a sacrifice is expected.

If The Principle Dies, You Don't Have A Chance

There can be few groups more thoroughly, remorselessly forgotten than Easterhouse. This is especially ironic given that the title of their debut album was Contenders, although at the time of its release this name was far from anomalous. Having been endorsed by Morrissey, a dubious honour even back then, Contenders was released by Rough Trade in the same week in 1986 as The Queen Is Dead, and only The Smiths' release held it off the top of the independent charts. It was a record that embodied the band's deep contradictions, which were reflected in both their towering strengths and chronic weaknesses.

Easterhouse were as musically conservative as they were politically radical, their outspoken revolutionary socialism framed by what initially sounded like the most pedestrian strumming imaginable, like The Smiths without the cutting-edge effeminacy. On Contenders this was further immersed in multiple layers of production lacquer, such that you could almost smell the varnish when you cupped an ear to it. However, the record also showcased Easterhouse's tremendous strengths. The first of these was that although even at the time their politics verged on the anachronistic, their world-historical vision had an epic grandeur, such that their apparent muscial ordinariness could nonetheless evoke colossal vistas of torment and resolution. Perhaps the group's greatest boon was singer Andy Perry's voice, which I personally think was the finest male voice of the Eighties. Finally, their songs were just really, really, good, being ambitiously structured and featuring memorable and penetrating lyrics. Lenin in Zurich is, quite simply, a great, great song:

Easterhouse's weltanschauung hinged on two of the great revolutions that had convulsed the early part of the 20th Century, and their consequent impact on the British working class. The first of these was obviously the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, whose tenets the Perry brothers were still openly loyal to. Indeed, Get Back To Russia, the band's anthemic paean to the land of the Revolution, is remarkable in hindsight mainly for demonstrating just how much confidence the Western left still had in the USSR, just a few years before its demise:

The other land of revolution revered by Andy and Ivor Perry was Ireland, and Contenders was replete with Irish Republican folk songs and hymns to the Easter Rising. Perhaps the best song on the album that dealt with the travails of 20th Century Ireland was 1969, their chronicle of the genesis of the Troubles in the North, this again adopting an unashamedly pro-Republican standpoint:

However, these sentiments would also date quickly, as even at this time the fire within Irish Republicanism was starting to abate, as the movement inevitably became domesticated by moving further towards practical, pragmatic electoral politics. Furthermore, Easterhouse had strongly backed the recently defeated Miners' Strike, and had even featured Arthur Scargill on one of their record sleeves, so if the intention of Contenders had been to raise consciousness and inspire action, it instead resembled a lament for a worldview that was fully in retreat.

Nevertheless, if the revolutionary socialism that Easterhouse espoused is unlikely to again be the engine of global change that it had been at the beginning of the 20th Century, it has at least endured, and is in many ways in a healthier state than the various unlovely models of liberal capitalism that once threatened its complete annihilation. And, as the wheel has turned (almost) full circle, so too has Contenders aged surprisingly well, its incongruity to its era having been its greatest strength of all.

That was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

One of the persistent tropes of the late 1960's, along with "Flower Power", was the notion that the world was entering an "Age of Aquarius", which was to be a time of universal love and understanding, in which peace and harmony would reign supreme. This was famously given voice in The 5th Dimension's paean to the coming age, Let The Sunshine In, itself taken from the counter-cultural musical Hair, which celebrated the demise of the old era of organised religion, authoritarianism and racial oppression, and the immanent rise of:

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation

All this suggests that these people actually knew very little about astrology, for whatever the zodiacal sign of Aquarius represents, it has very little to do with love and understanding. So what exactly does the Age of Aquarius represent? It is in fact a product of a natural process known as the Procession Of The Equinoxes, in which the Earth's axis of rotation gradually shifts over a 26,000 year cycle. Its astrological effect can be visualised by looking at the wheel of the zodiac, and imagining a horizontal line being traced from its centre directly left to its circumference. Where the line meets the circumference is our current position in time, and the wheel rotating anti-clockwise is the Procession of the Equinoxes. Each 30 degree portion of the zodiac that represents a specific sign takes 2160 years to pass our point on the circumference, this of course meaning that every astrological age, including the Age of Aquarius, lasts for 2160 years.

Each of these ages in turn takes on the characteristics of the zodiacal sign that governs that particular Age, while the signs themselves are influenced by what are known as their ruling planets. Aquarius is ruled by the planet Uranus, which was discovered by William Herschel in 1781. Uranus had previously been unknown as it is not visible to the naked eye, and the fact that it had to be observed by the artificial means of a telescope means that it is strongly associated with technology. It is also an unusual planet in that its axis of rotation is not longitudinal, as with all other planets in the solar system, but rather latitudinal. As such it rotates "horizontally" rather than "vertically", and is thus also associated with eccentricity and individualism. Finally, Uranus is considered by astrologers to be "Mercury at a higher octave", and so amplifies those characteristics already associated with Mercury, which include communication, deceit and theft. As a result, the Age of Aquarius can broadly be defined as the era of technology, mass communication, eccentricity, mass deception and globalised fraud.

The Age prior to Aquarius was the Age of Pisces, this being the 30 degree segment that abuts Aquarius in the anti-clockwise direction. Pisces is governed by Neptune, another previously unknown planet, which as its name suggests is associated with an endless oceanic formlessness. Neptune is also considered to be Venus, the planet of love, at a higher octave. As a consequence, Neptune is considered the planet of universalism, humanitarianism, helplessness, and addiction, amongst other things. Perhaps the archetypal expression of the Age of Pisces is Christianity, which emerged at the beginning of the Piscean era. Prior to the birth of Christianity the majority of religions were polytheistic, each with a pantheon of gods that competed and fought and loved and deceived each other, their struggles mimicking the chaotic forces of nature. As polytheistic religions innately fail to posit a single truth or litany of truths, religious strife in the polytheistic world was rare, and it was possible for faiths to live alongside one another, and for gods to "drift" from one religion to another. However, a monotheist religion such as Christianity, with its one God and single source of knowing, had by its very nature to be a universalist faith, banishing and destroying all those creeds that contradicted it. Equally harsh treatment had to be meted out to heretics and sinners as to infidels, as there could be no deviation from its edicts.

This in turn implied that the Age of Pisces was to become an era of totalising conflict over belief systems, and when Christianity encountered its first universalist rival in Islam, the result could only be war. Another by-product of universalising monotheism was that as a creed expanded it required an increasingly complex system of bureaucracy in order to maintain it, and thus it birthed ever more rigid hierarchies. As such, the Age of Pisces effectively became the age of universalism and hierarchy. This also applied to those conflicting Piscean civil religions that gradually supplanted Christianity following the Enlightenment, such as Marxist socialism, liberalism and conservatism. In each case Jehovah was superseded by a remote and unquestionable arbiter of godlike truth (Dialectical Materialism, "progress", "The Market") with sinning non-believers being subjected to such scornful of epithets as "reactionaries", "luddites", and "protectionists".

The actual start of the Age of Aquarius is disputed by astrologers, although the most commonly quoted commencement date is 1879, when it began to gradually eclipse the Age of Pisces, its establishment being heralded by those three clarions of atomisation: Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. One of the most fascinating insights into the emergence of the Age of Aquarius was during that great clash of universalisms, the Second World War, as recorded in the book The Magical Battle of Britain. This documented the symbolic battles against Nazism conducted by one of the 20th Century's greatest occultists, Dion Fortune, as she outlined in a series of communications to her magical group, the Fraternity of the Inner Light. However, Fortune's letters to her fraternity also contained her premonitions of the world that would emerge from that great conflagration, such as her Letter 77 of 15th June 1941, in which she commented that:

"The Piscean Age has passed and the Aquarian Age is drawing away from the phase that astrologers call the cusp, or sphere of mingled influences, and beginning to show its true characteristics. Not only are the conditions of life changing, but its moral standards also. This does not mean that there will be no standards of conduct in the Aquarian Age and that freedom will be extended into anarchy; there are certain standards that are eternal, such as truth and honesty, but there are others that change with the changing age".

This statement confirmed the principle that there is no "hard edge" between astrological ages, but that they gradually blend into each other. In her subsequent Letter 118 of 31st May 1942, Fortune expanded on her theme, as:

"I have stated that the old order has passed away and a new phase of evolution is already with us. That it is the Age of Aquarius is an astronomical fact, calculated mathematically. Basing my conclusions on the occult teaching concerning the nature of Aquarius, I have tried to indicate how the New Age may be expected to work out. When I say the old forms of social organisation will break up and everything will be in a state of flux, that racial and social barriers will be eroded and a general intermingling take place, I am not enunciating socialistic doctrines but astrological ones."

This mixing and intermingling would be a result of the breakdown of the racial hierarchies of European imperialism, and the cultures of deference that maintained class divisions in the metropoles. Fortune anticipated the erosion of the "colour bar" that denied positions of responsibility, or even entire careers, to non-whites both in the colonies and in Britain, and they would indeed disappear, although some would linger in place even up to the late 1970's. From the ruins of the old order, Fortune imagined a new economic order, governed by "neutral" trans-national organisations, and based on free trade, that would expand across the whole world, as:

"It is the men and women of the New Age who must make contact across national barriers as soon as the fighting is over, and they must meet as Aquarians, not as English, French or Germans. They must bring in the New Age for all men, not for their own people only because the New Age is an age of co-ordination of the whole earth, and it cannot be brought in piecemeal. Those who share our ideals are on our side, whatever language they speak, whatever may be the colour of their skins, or the shape of their skulls, or by whatever name they may call their God or gods or no-gods."

This world would require the dismantling of colonialism, and so:

"The rightful owners will resume ownership but there will be strategic points all over the world which will be held by the United Nations for international commerce and international policing and they will be mandated. For the whole of the New Age turns on the concept of the ownership of the land by the people versus the ownership of the people by the land. So you will see a great many places hitherto under English ownership reverting to the original owners.

Dion Fortune's vision was remarkably prescient, and it indeed guided much of the self-declared "enlightened thinking" over the long post-war era. However, what was also notable about it was that in its positing of a single, peaceful, harmonised world of multi-cultural liberal capitalism, it was actually rather universalist. This in turn implied that the Piscean energies that she thought had already largely dissipated were in fact still strongly in force. As a result, what Fortune was predicting was not the forthcoming Age of Aquarius, but an interregnum in which the Aquarian energies were still constrained within a Piscean framework. This was the world that most of us grew up in, and mistook for the permanent shape of the future; a world in which a musical like Hair could erroneously be considered prophetic. The neoliberal unipolar moment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union perhaps marked the zenith of this premature Age of Aquarius, before the real Aquarian energies pressed in with Brexit and the election of Trump. That the Chinese, on whom the hopes of a New World Order were effectively based, had not actually bought into the notion was perhaps the most unwelcome surprise of all.

The Age of Aquarius as it actually is, with its socially mediated mass deceptions, eccentric populist insurgents, fragmenting established institutions, and emerging civilisation states with incommensurable values, is not proving accommodating for the universalist idealists. But this is the future, and its most disorientating qualities are only going to intensify, because it was the utopian visions of a harmonious global order that had actually constituted the interregnum.

The Shadow of Aquarius

There's a fascinating (although annoyingly advertisement-heavy) interview by Aris Roussinos with the Cornish hotelier and QAnon advocate John Mappin below:

Mappin, a character I had never previously heard of, is one of a plethora of charismatic individuals from both right and left that seem to be constellating around a genuinely novel and perplexing worldview that not only refutes established political conventions, but also the consensus of what constitutes reality. Other figures either embedded, or being drawn into, this field include the likes of James Delingpole, Jordan Peterson, Piers Corbyn, Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald and Joe Rogan. Perhaps the two great fathers of this tendency (I hesitate to use the word "movement") are David Icke and Julian Assange, while both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are the nearest it comes to having a political wing.

The most striking aspect of the interview from my perspective is Mappin's allusions to spiritual forces guiding his work. This tends to confirm my suspicion that we are witnessing the early stages of the breakdown of the materialist-rationalist-atheist model of reality that has guided politics for at least the last century, and it is fringe figures like Mappin who are leading the attack. One of the reasons the "radical" left are struggling so much nowadays is that their claim to be the ultimate refutation of the status quo is undermined by the fact that they are fully immersed in the current, but fragile, materialist consensus reality. This makes them particularly incapable of processing the weirdening that the collective Western worldview is currently experiencing, their only recourse being to plunge into ever more fanatical and abstract forms of identitarianism.

So what's going on? I've been meaning to explain this for a while, but alas I am very busy these days, and have not been able to devote the time to this blog that I had hoped. The short form, however, is that a 2000 year old pattern defined by the twin forces of hierarchy and universalism is coming to an end, and we are entering an Aquarian realm defined by individualism, eccentricity and synchronicity. That is to say that figures like Mappin, and the worldviews they espouse, are likely to become the norm, and that politics will become less about contested values and more about incompatible realities. This ultimately means that politics as we have known it, in which there are at least some shared assumptions that we all accept as a basis for contest and debate, will become impossible, with the result that it becomes increasingly ad hoc and geographically limited.

The Rock'n'Roll Years

The Rock'n'Roll Years was one of the most curious television programmes of the mid-1980's. Each half-hour episode was a mix of news footage and pop music from each individual year of the post-war era. The only "commentary" was the occasional subtitle to give context to a particular event, these being as mordantly non-committal as possible. The episodes were all shown at prime time on BBC 1, and no doubt constituted pretty cheap television as the BBC could compile the greater portion of them from their own archives. Despite this apparently unpromising formula, it was surprisingly compelling viewing, and still is so even on the scraped-from-videotape remains that have been loaded onto Youtube. The first series was aired in 1985 and started, naturally enough, in 1956:

The unspoken premise of the programme was that the Rock'n'Roll years were effectively over, and this is certainly how I interpreted it at the time - the era of tumultuous social change was over, and hey, this is what it was like. The comparatively pedestrian first series wound up at 1963, and it was in the second series, aired in 1986, where the meaty period of 1964 to 1971 was covered. The episode for 1968 is particularly exciting, as I'm sure you can imagine:

The funny thing is, this footage looked as ancient in 1985 as it does now. Perhaps more so. For me at the time, the clip of the Rolling Stones performing "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was akin to watching footage of the D-Day landings. The sense of the past being irretrievable was much stronger in those days, before the pick'n'mix technologies of the digital era permitted it to haunt us. The years 1972 to 1980 were covered in the third series, which was aired in 1987, and 1977 starts off on exactly the right note:

This still felt old, old, old at the time though. It's impossible to express in hindsight how different 1987 felt to 1977, and watching this episode was like looking at the polaroid photographs of a party in the cold light of morning. This sense of disconnect was no doubt accentuated by the callowness of youth, as a decade feels like an eternity when you are still in your teens. One thing that comes across is how much more intense this period was than nowadays. For all the contemporary hysteria about populism and wokeism, I still think we live in a much calmer world. Perhaps it's the ghettoising effect of social media, where the different tribes of political obsessives can engage in endless symbolic battle outside the purview of the average person. At the Twitter coalface a person can feel that they are in a war for the future of civilisation, while offline the world plods on regardless. A fourth and final series of The Rock'n'Roll Years was aired much later in 1994, this covering 1981 to 1989:

This didn't make much sense at the time as almost nothing musically world-shaking happened during the mid to late eighties, and I don't think I even bothered to watch this series. That said, the big events had continued to occur, such as the miners' strike, Chernobyl, and the fall of the Berlin Wall; and there was the final tying of the post-war knot with the end of the Cold war. Also at this time Live Aid was very much a part of the official narrative of popular music; of Rock'n'Roll finally growing up and accepting its responsibilities. In hindsight, Live Aid was the release that signalled that the pressure was off, that history was already coming to an end, despite the tragic events that had prompted it.

That there was no fifth series of The Rock'n'Roll Years merely confirmed this.

From Suez to the Falklands - Part 5

Perhaps the first victim of Margaret Thatcher's rise to power was Punk itself, which deflated at almost the precise moment of her infamous recital of St. Francis of Assisi's Prayer outside 10 Downing Street. Rather than offering a restoration of the old order of deference, the new regime intended to liquidate what remained of the old world to an extent that the punks had not even begun to comprehend. First to go were to be the old nationalised industries, which were deemed to represent an inefficient sop to socialism, and incubators for the trades union militancy that was anathema to the new economic order. The withdrawal of support for both public and private industry coincided with a worldwide recession, itself prompted by that familiar bugbear, a sharp rise in the oil price. The result was an alarming rise in unemployment, which was to reach a hitherto unprecedented three million. It initially appeared that Thatcher, her popularity plummeting amid vistas of urban riots and dole queues, was yet another dud, as the malaise contined much as before. Indeed events got so bad that the pulse of popular culture briefly revived, most notably in the form of The Specials' "Ghost Town", the most acute musical appraisal of the early Thatcher era. If the energy from Punk was still extant, however, it was confined to a rarefied form. Having failed to kick down the front door, the clarion call for many of the remaining punks was "entryism"; an attempt to package subversive content within an "aspirational" commercial form. This had very brief success in the pop charts, although most of the alleged subversion went over the punters' heads, and its very existence was a de facto acknowledgement of defeat. Although it is retrospectively viewed as forming a seamless continuity within a singular Punk moment, the New Pop was ultimately an inadequate response to an earlier failure.

Despite its apparent struggles, the Conservative government did have one asset that had been far less available to its predecessors, and that was the burgeoning production of its own source of oil, thanks to the exploration of the North Sea over the two prior decades. As the revenues from this source began to accrue from the beginning of the 1980's, they would form a stable floor on which all other economic policy could be built, and permitted a degree of risk taking not previously permissible. Initially, a good portion of this money would be spent mitigating the appalling levels of deprivation that the Government's parlous industrial policies had generated, as entire regions suffered economic devastation. The evisceration of domestic industry was also enabled by British membership of the European Economic Community, which had been negotiated by the earlier Heath government. This effectively allowed the relocation of the locus of south-east England's industrial supply from northern Britain to Germany, a scheme that would simply not have been possible if the UK had remained outside the bloc. As such, London and the south-east would become a consumer fringe of the greater Continental economy, rather than being the nerve centre of an industrial economy of their own, with all the effort and strife that implied.

Nonetheless, it was clear that two years into her premiership, Margaret Thatcher was no less vulnerable than her predecessors had been, and just as her policies were being viewed as unnecessarily harsh and extreme, so the opposition Labour Party were emboldened to combat them with increasingly radical proposals of their own. However, it was seven thousand miles away, in the South Atlantic that the critical event of the era would unfold. This would focus on a neglected imperial possession known as the Falkland Islands, which the British Government had been quietly attempting to cede to Argentina over the objections of its inhabitants. The latest attempt to palm off the islands to the Argentinians had been a leasing scheme, which had been rejected by the military junta in Buenos Aires due to what they perceived was its excessive length of 99 years. The Argentinians had been emboldened further by the British Government's 1981 defence white paper, which had recommended swingeing cuts to the Royal Navy's surface fleet in order to redirect spending towards shoring up the "main front" against the Warsaw Pact in Europe. The Argentinian junta, under the hapless General Leopoldo Galtieri, had at least as many domestic problems as Thatcher's administration, this intensifying their inclination to resolve the issue of "Las Malvinas" once and for all. As a consequence, on 2nd April 1982, Argentian forces seized the Falklands in an amphibious operation that appeared to all the world as a fait accompli.

Once again, it appeared that a British prime minister was being presented with a humiliating ejection from an imperial possession. However, on this occasion the defence chiefs were surprisingly optimistic that the situation could be reversed, and, for once, they found themselves serving a Prime Minister who was prepared to countenace an unusually high degree of risk. A naval task force was accordingly assembled, and the islands were retaken by what would subsequently be recognised as the narrowest of margins, as the operation had faced disaster on numerous occasions. But far more notable than the military aspects of the Falklands campaign was the symbolism. This was addressed in a remarkable essay by the US naval historian Norman Friedman, who observed that:

"In 1982, many in the Soviet leadership believed that the West had lost so much of its morale that its end was inevitable, and perhaps even near. The Soviets themselves were in trouble, but they thought they could survive. The Argentinians clearly thought much the same thing about the British. Initially many in Britain seem to have assumed that Argentinian seizure of the islands was just another unavoidable step in the slow decline of the British Empire."

Although small in scale, the Falklands War was probably the most consequential and far-reaching conflict of the second half of the 20th Century, simply because it demonstrated an apparent resolve that had previously been considered lacking. As Friedman further explained:

"The Soviet leadership was shocked. The West was still a serious threat. The Soviets found themselves taking Western initiatives, such as Reagan’s “Star Wars,” very seriously indeed. Thatcher’s was not, of course, the only demonstration of Western resolve; at about the same time, the Russians found it impossible to intimidate NATO governments that had decided to accept the deployment of U.S. Pershing and Tomahawk missiles on their soil. They, in turn, were probably much encouraged by Thatcher’s example."

The Soviets' appreciation of declining Western resolve had been partially based on its popular culture, which they had assessed as being both the source and the product of its demoralisation. The famous aversion of the Soviet authorities to the music of The Beatles was believed in the West to be due to its potential to grant Soviet citizens a tantalising glimpse of Western freedom. In fact, the opposite was the case, as the Soviets believed that the music was just one more avenue for social and cultural dissolution; that it was as effective a route to demoralisation as opium. If the Soviets could take some satisfaction from what Punk demonstrated about the wretched psychological conditions in the West, they were absolutely determined that it would not be allowed to affect life behind the Iron Curtain. However, if, contrary to all cultural indications, the West was not as weak as it appeared, then the fate of the Soviet Union was sealed.

However, the Soviets had essentially been correct. The explosion of British popular culture had been totally dependent on the collapse of national morale and the consequent malaise within the ruling class. Post-war popular music was like a flourescent lichen that could only grow on rot. And in its display of incontrovertible ruling class competence, the Falklands War effectively broke the back of post-war popular culture, and it would never fully recover. Following the Falklands, the last big punk bands, The Clash and The Jam, would split up, along with numerous of their peers. Those bands that stuck around invariably softened and slicked-up their sound, in anticipation of the unsympathic commercial environment that they would soon find themselves in. The result would be the infamous musical desert of the mid-Eighties, in which commercial brashness would contrast with the feyest and most colourless "indie" music, with little of sustenance inbetween. The sense of danger, revolution and infinite possibility present in the beat boom and Punk would never fully return. For her part, Thatcher would take the antinomian energy of Punk and direct it against her internal enemies. If the Queen could be dismembered then so could the National Union of Mineworkers. If the Union Jack could be torn up, then so could the regulations that restrained the City of London. What the punks had failed to understand is that once the most sacred national symbols are defiled, then nothing is sacred and anything goes. All Margaret Thatcher ultimately did was confront the rebels and revolutionaries of pop culture with the logic of their own desires.

From Suez to the Falklands - Part 4

"The British love of Queens does not seem to be based merely on the historical commonplace that 'Britain is never so properous as when a Queen is on the Throne': it reflects, rather, a stubborn conviction that this is a Mother Country, not a Father Land - a peculiarity that the Classical Greeks also noted about Crete - and that the King's prime function is to be the Queen's consort. Such national apprehensions or convictions or obsessions are the ultimate source of all religion, myth and poetry, and cannot be eradicated either by conquest or education."

- Robert Graves, "The White Goddess"

The long hot summer of 1976 was notable for two particular events, the first being yet another currency crisis, with a dip in the value of Sterling and an incipient budget shortfall precipitating the Labour Govenrment, now under the unsteady stewardship of James Callaghan, to ask the International Monetary Fund for a loan. Although in itself a relatively prudent measure, this was perceived by the public and press as a further national humiliation, as the United Kingdom plied the global financial circit for alms. The parade of fumbling that had characterised the leadership of a series of almost identikit leaders in Heath, Wilson and now Callaghan had led to a general impression of a confederacy of grey men, all equally lacking in vision, ability and nous. The second noteworthy occurrence of that summer was the stealthy but irrepressible emergence of the latest model on Hebrew trickster Malcolm McLaren's Golem production line, the Sex Pistols. This extraordinary group specialised in a kind of incendiary vapidity, its singer and lyricist Johnny Rotten (née Lydon) having an uncanny ability to find exactly the right national taboo to point and shriek at, without saying anything profound or useful in consequence. However, this very incoherence was the source of their brief but efflorescent power, as it ensured that their grievances could barely be comprehended, let alone reconciled or resolved. Whatever the Sex Pistols may or may not have wanted, it was non-negotiable. Equally impossible to assuage was their music, which was the most conventional riff rock possible, but so insistently single minded that it adventitiously sounded explosive.

As the year progressed, the band gradually built up accolytes and notoriety by word of mouth, and racked up their first television appearances, while their debut single, "Anarchy In The UK" grazed the Top 40 at the end of the year. This record would be the template for their subsequent output, being both shocking and invigorating as long as you didn't look at it too closely, and realise how silly it was. Despite the tremendous effort that went into this recording to shock, the Sex Pistols would burst into the public consciousness accidentally, and in the most quotidian format possible. A cancellation by EMI labelmates Queen led to their invitation onto the Today show, a normally staid teatime television programme hosted by Bill Grundy, who was the kind of mildly dissolute but avuncular host that was typical of the era. Apparently inebriated, and obviously not briefed on his substitute guests, his attempted inteview with the band and their cohorts quickly degenerated into puerile name calling, which appalled the show's more delicate viewers, as well as the wilting violets of the tabloid press. The result would be sensational, with the band being catapulted into a maelstrom of media controversy that wouldn't fully abate until years after they had split up. In truth, the scenario was one that most younger viewers would have recognised instantly; that of the out-of-depth supply teacher employing increasingly desperate bonhomie as they lost control of the class.

The controversy around "Anarchy" and Grundy would be eclipsed in the spring of 1977 by the release of their second single, "God Save The Queen", which their latest record company, Virgin, decided to release on the eve of the Silver Jubilee that marked the monarch's 25th year on the throne. The release would be accompanied by a characteristic McLaren stunt, when a boat was chartered on the Jubilee weekend to cruise down the Thames so that the band could play the song in front of the Houses of Parliament. This intiative was duly intercepted by the police, producing another avalanche of publicity. Nonetheless, in impugning the current Queen, the Sex Pistols had, advertently or inadvertently, identified the epicentre of Britain's post-war malaise, and that was the failure of the monarch herself, Elizabeth II. As Robert Graves had noted, the Queens who had preceeded Elizabeth Windsor had been extraordinarily powerful matriarchs who had inspired their subjects to exploration and expansion. In particular Elizabeth I, Anne and Victoria had been icons, the former and latter even being instantly recognisable to this very day. Elizabeth II, however, was a mousy, modest figure who dressed like a suburban housewife and who had presided over an era of retreat and retrenchment. As a result, the current Queen was a present absence, the void at the heart of the British establishment. The Pistols' "God Save The Queen" is usually misunderstood as a modernist excoriation of a deluded Ruritanian idyll, of the refusal of a nation to recognise its true station in the modern world. In fact, it is a personal attack on the vacant occupant of the throne, and on the notion that such a vast celebration could be accorded to such a non-entity.

There is an unthinking prejudiuce held among atheist, secular humanists that the monarchy is an outdated remnant from a bygone era, an inconvenient anachronism that has somehow, temporarily, escaped the inevitable fate of being swept away by progress. Nothing could be further from the truth of course; monarchism is one of the most durable human institutions, and the world will be full of monarchs long after our scrappy, decaying liberal democracy has been forgotten. There can also be no doubt that despite their separation from the levers of government, the current British monarch holds enormous moral, spiritual and political power. If Elizabeth II had voiced any public doubts about the intervention at Suez, say, how could the government of the day have done anything except stay their hand? Elizabeth's reign was marked by excessive political caution, as it was her belief that the monarchy rested on such fragile foundations that it could not afford to embroil itself in the slightest political controversy. She was so fixated on the long term survival of both herself and her family, that absolutely no political policy or social trend, no matter how disastrous, could draw from her the slightest public comment, let alone disapproval. If the Government had mandated the compulsory eating of babies, Elizabeth Windsor would not have piped up. All her subjects could expect was a few bromides once a year at Christmas. She had even failed the most basic prerequisite of being Queen, which was the capacity to look formidable, to inspire fear and devotion by her very appearance.

The result was that John Lydon would now accuse her of being an imposter ("Our figurehead/is not what she seems") whose timidity had turned her family and nation into a voyeuristic tourist attraction ("'cause tourists are money"). However, Lydon was not the only person who had noticed the gaping void that Elizabeth II had opened up with her diffidence. The new leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, had become increasingly regal as she consolidated her position as leader of the opposition. She had begun to style her hair in an extravagant bouffant that emulated, and indeed mocked, the style of Elizabeth herself. Thatcher's voice had also become increasingly lofty and regal; she no longer spoke but declaimed, as though like a true monarch she was receiving her instructions directly from God. It was clear that if Elizabeth Windsor could not be an imposing Queen, then Margaret Thatcher would be. This granted the Conservative leader access to an almost bottomless reserve of power, because the archetype of the female monarch not only encompassed Elizabeth II's none-more-illustrious predecessors, but also the very deepest national archetypes of Britain, notably the chariot-riding warrior queen Boadicea, and the very protector of the nation herself, Britannia. What Thatcher's political opponents failed to realise was that when they attempted to refute her, or point out the harmfulness of her policies, they were not debating with a mere person; they were confronting a 2000 year old archetype. In turn, this meant that she was to all intents and purposes unbeatable.

And so, when Margaret Thatcher inevitably came to power in the spring of 1979 after a Shakespearean Winter of Discontent, the British public had not elected a Prime Minister, but annointed a Warrior Queen: icy, formidable, decisive, divisive, and destructive. If "God Save The Queen" had been the symbolic execution of the monarch, then the election of Thatcher was a symbolic rebirth. And in the elevation of Thatcher, the movement inspired by the Sex Pistols had played no small part. In many ways Punk had been conceived by Malcolm McLaren, and accomplices such as Bernie Rhodes, as the consummation of the counter-culture, as "one last heave" to unseat the old order and produce the conditions for a new society to flourish. However, in trashing the monarchy and amplifying the sense of decay, they had merely paved the way for a new and unprecedented revolution that would be unleashed by Margaret Thatcher and her advisors, for she was not like the hapless Butskellite leaders of old. As such Punk, far from being the voice of the street, and the clarion call of liberation that its proselytisers liked to depict it as, was merely the birth pangs of Neoliberalism. Punk was ultimately a total social, cultural and political disaster, and its protagonists would witness the full scale of the resulting devastation in the decade ahead.

From Suez to the Falklands - Part 3

The controversy and media swirl that surrounded "Mad Mitch" and the withdrawal from Aden was in many ways deceptive, as it helped to obscure a far more important and consequential conflict further to the east; one that was being prosecuted by a character who was very different in temperament and style to Colin Mitchell. This was the secret war against Indonesia that was colloquially known as the Konfrontasi, after the strategy of brinkmanship implemented by the Indonesian leader President Sukarno to destabilise Malaysia, which itself was an amalagamation of former British colonies, and which Sukarno viewed as a British puppet state. Major-General Walter Walker had commanded the Brigade of Gurkhas in the long, grim campaign to eradicate the communist insurgency in Malaya, and his response to the Indonesian infiltrations into Malaysian territory from the beginning of 1963 was charaterised by both its unobtrusiveness and its restraint. Like Mitchell, Walker understood that the Western media were as much of an enemy as the people he was fighting, but whereas Mitchell had attempted to overcome this by sacrificially offering himself up as the charismatic focus of attention, Walker instead kept a low profile and shrouded his operations in a cloak of secrecy.

The most notable example of this was the two year long Operation Claret, in which Walker turned the tables and authorised the British Army to cross into Indonesia and break up enemy troop concentrations by ambush before they could penetrate into Malaysia. The anti-Western character of the mass media, although pervasive, had many forms. In some, albeit relatively rare instances, journalists and reporters were overt or covert Marxists whose deliberate agenda was to expose and therefore implicitly condemn what they saw as imperialist or colonialist depredations. Somewhat more commonly, journalists simply embodied or reflected the antinomianism and rejection of deference and duty that pervaded the wider popular culture, this being expressed in a general sympathy for what was popularly known as the Third World. However, the most prevalent case was that the very structure of the media tended to generate a passively condemnatory account of Western actions, even when journalists attempted to be sympathetic towards them. The sight of bristling, well-armed Western soldiers brushing through villages marked by abject poverty brought home to the nation's living rooms the uncomfortable reality of a harsh and brutal world that existed beyond the horizons of Western affluence.

Nonetheless, Walker's strategy would pay off, and by the middle of 1966 the Indonesians had agreed to end the confrontation at the negotiating table, this in itself being facilitated by the removal from power of Sukarno by the right-wing Suharto, after an extraordinarily bloody purge that had in part been facilitated by the British. From the domestic point of view, the most important lesson of the Konfrontasi was that it demonstrated, for all the apparent evidence of terminal decline, that there were still elements within the ruling class and the British state that were capable of acting effectively and decisively. Indeed, it supported the view held by more sceptical observers on the Left that the British Empire, rather than disappearing, had merely transmuted, its form having changed from one of territorial governance to one of networked influence; a "skeletal" empire for the communications age. This was, coincidentally, one in which the "soft power" of its delinquent popular culture might even prove to be useful.

However, by the time the last substantial British forces had withdrawn from Malaysia, this popular culture had effectively imploded. After the giddy optimism of 1967's Summer of Love, the counter culture had been subsumed in a deluge of violence and paranoia, most famously iterated in the twin horrors of Altamont and the murders conducted by the Manson family. The dream of a new world was further eroded by the deaths of such luminaries as Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, and by the arrival of essentially cynical conservative governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Whereas the most daring and visionary music of the Sixties had been imbued with an almost spiritual sense of new possibilities, the emergent music of the new decade of the Seventies would be marked by three characteristics - bombast, glamour, and nihilism.

The bombast was most apparent in the music that had directly evolved from the beat music of the first wave of British rock bands. This was the hard rock of groups such as Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Free, which was ultimately an over-amplified and frenzied version of the Blues that was marked by its technical accomplishment and high standard of musicianship. Although this music would give birth to perhaps the most durable of all popular music genres, Heavy Metal, it was incapable of embodying or transmitting the intertwined utopian and antinomian sentiments of the Sixties counter culture. Led Zeppelin were particularly characteristic of this predicament; their music was vast and yet remote, gargantuan yet hollow; devoid of any yearning except perhaps for individual self indulgence. The characteristic that would erupt most evidently within the public sphere would be glamour, as evidenced in the emergence of Glam Rock. In many ways this was a retrograde movement, as it looked back to the "heart throbs" of the late 1950's, and indeed in the form of Alvin Stardust it literally facilitated their return. However, the more sophisticated proponents of Glam also drew energy from the sexual revolution, with gay liberation and feminism being subsumed within a miasma of double entendre and gender confusion. Glam was also partially a response to the introduction in Britain of colour television, which warranted the gaudy, glittery clothing and pancake make-up that were so essential to its disorientating shock effect. Nonetheless Glam, with its artificial teenage rampage, suffered from the same drawback as bombast in its lack of sincerity and spiritual content, in its inability to give political voice to the tumult of the times.

This was because the vertiginous sense of national decline had, if anything, accelerated as the Seventies had progressed. The Conservative government of Edward Heath was engulfed in economic turmoil which culminated in 1973 with an oil crisis, as the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargoed those countries, including Britain, that had supported Israel during its victorious Yom Kippur campaign. The resulting surge in an already perilous inflation rate spurred calls for industrial action from workers who were experiencing an effective cut in their purchasing power. Most critical of all were the miners, and at the end of 1973 Heath implemented a disastrous "three day week" policy in order to conserve coal stocks ahead of an anticipated strike, and to ensure that any available oil was diverted to transport stocks rather than power generation. The ensuing Miners' strike duly commenced at the beginning of February the following year, this being the third major episode of industrial action that the increasingly powerful and successful National Union of Mineworkers had undertaken in five years. In turn, Edward Heath called a General Election in order to obtain what he could declare as a public verdict against the strike, but the result was inconclusive and allowed Labour's Harold Wilson to instead form a weak minority government.

The sense among some elements of the ruling class was that the accumulating power of organised labour represented only one tendril of a nebulous "enemy within", which was being organised and directed by professional Soviet agitators. The intimation of impending collapse was only intensified by the increasingly violent and chaotic campaign of the Provisional IRA, whose Balcombe Street Gang would cause mayhem in central London. As a result, a number of disquieting right-wing pressure groups began to come to prominence, these having an explicit anti-communist and anti-trades union stance and nebulous links to the military. Such groups included the Freedom Association, the Economic League, and Civil Assistance, the latter of which was founded by none other than Walter Walker. Ostensibly conceived as a strike-breaking organisation, Walker's idle boast of it having 100,000 members sparked one of the more notable anxieties of the era, in the rumours of the mobilisation of private armies. As British politics appeared to be heading inexorably to a febrile climax, so the third major characteristic of Seventies popular music would come to the fore. The nihilistic response to the collapse of the counter-culture had hitherto been confined to a handful of cult American bands such as the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and to the most proletarian and unfashionable strand of British heavy rock in the form of Black Sabbath. However, by the mid-Seventies some of the sharper minds in the British music industry had started to conceive of the possibility of packaging nihilism for the mass market. Most prominent of these was the agitator and entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren, who had attempted a trial run with the prematurely clapped-out New York Dolls.

The Conservative Party was also in the mood for experimentation. Walter Walker had formed Civil Assistance as a substitute for what he saw as the gaping absence of leadership within Britain's political class. This chasm would be filled to his great satisfaction in February 1975 by the accession to the leadership of the Conservative Party of Margaret Thatcher. Carefully nurtured by the party's most fervent economic ideologues, the icily determined Thatcher would prove to be a marked contrast to any of her predecessors. The stage was therefore set for the denouement of the post-war era.