Morlock Elloi on Sat, 18 Feb 2017 00:39:59 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Ubik 2017 |
... During 1974 we who opposed the Nixon tyranny here exhausted ourselves in forcing that tyranny out of office, only to discover, the next year, that underneath it lay an even greater abuse of power and threat to freedom: a secret police apparatus that had worked since the forties, completely invisible in terms of its lawless acts against Americans. In fact, something much like the police state that I depicted in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said has come to light, and really to the astonishment of us all. I recall that back in the fifties, about 1953, two FBI agents came to visit me and asked me to spy on my wife, who at that time was attending the University of California at Berkeley and knew people -- students -- who were politically active. From then on, the secret political police apparatus grew. And yet it was a thrilling year in 1974 when we began to dislodge what we thought was the tyranny... but then found the greater one, the intelligence community one, which really we cannot dislodge. The American people have lost the will to combat this tyranny; it has lasted too long, and we are tired. I am tired. As the disclosures came about the CIA and FBI, I could not believe them. What could I do? What could anyone do? It was not a question of one particular evil president, but all the presidents starting with Franklin Roosevelt: even our heroic ones, such as Kennedy. Freedom won only a limited victory in August 1974 when Nixon was forced out of office; the political police apparatus remains and will remain, and we cannot vote on this issue. I myself have given up, as our newspapers say most Americans have, with a sense that we are helpless. ... Philip K Dick, "The Short, Happy Life of a Science Fiction Writer" (1976) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: