Podcast: Locked & Loaded, with Rick Munn
‘You must take one side or the other, or you’re but a fucking romantic.’ — from the poem ‘In Memory: The Miami Showband — Massacred 31 July 1975,’ by Paul Durcan.
‘The theatre is the West, and the future of the West.’
‘Do the authorities of the world now, from the invisible summit — wherever that is — of the pyramid, right down to the bottom, [to] the functionaries what we have to deal with in our own countries: Are they all dedicated to fooling the people up to their eyeballs, all the time, with a view to destroying the lives, and the way of being that they had in the world hitherto? . . . That seems to me to be the agenda, And I’m afraid that, whatever the gravities that we observe in any particular episode — and we can’t verify them because we’re dependent on an entirely mendacious media to tell us things — and here we are, floundering, in a world that is falling apart around us, that is being demolished around us, really. It’s quite mind-boggling and despair-making when you reflect on it.’
In much the way that we once might complain about buses — that we waited for an hour in vain and then five or six came together, so it is now with pandemics, and wars, and emergencies, and crises of all kinds. Pandemic gives way to climate crisis, which gives way to quasi-global conflict, which brings with it threats of nuclear annihilation. No sooner has one episode begin to taper off than another kicks in, clearly with the purpose or effect of furthering some deeper narrative, which appears to have something to do with with the establishment of a form of neo-feudal oligarchy in the world. In pursuit of this, the general populations of multiple countries are recruited, hearts and minds and souls, as useful idiots in a process designed to take the simmering state of conflict and division towards some timely and orchestrated crescendo. It is as though no one is permitted to remain neutral, or uninvolved; all must pick a side and agree to assist in the orchestration of a fear-driven consensus, the compelling of mass obedience, and the marginalisation of dissenters. Each apparently discrete episode is yet another part of the same orchestration, all tending in the direction of a final objective of total control of the human race. All this is discernible, though disguised by the constant insinuation of pseudo-realities, constructed by the setaside media, seeking from morning till night to normalise the extraordinary and make the bizarre seem everyday.
‘This is a way of thinking that is unfamiliar to me, because I grew up assuming that what I was told by the authorities, by the government, was true. But in the last few years I’ve come to realise that you have to start from the assumption that nothing is true, nothing is real, nothing is as it seems to be. Because they can construct realities right in front of your face, and make them seem real.’
My conversation with Rick Munn begins at 16 minutes in: