MORDOR

An old one to hold the door open ....

APOCALYPSE NOW SWEEPS THE OSCARS.

Not hard to see why “Lord Of The Rings” commanded attention. The Final Battle between the archetypes Good & Evil, and the subsets Creation & Destruction, Order & Chaos, Nature & Satanic Mills. All pretty damn contemporary stuff.

In each footprint of the Great Democracy you see the spores growing: drugs, pornography, prostitution, civil war, blighted landscapes, depression, poverty, stupidity and ugliness. Any other culture is to be eradicated and replaced by dependence on Mordor – most recently, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Should the US implode, the EU would jump into its shoes. Saruman may find he is not Indispensable.

Unlike The Corporations. In 1830 William Cobbett called them “The Thing”(1); in 1989 Fela Kuti called them “Beasts Of No Nation” (2). Everybody’s Creatures of the Apocalypse. The Nazgul. Consider the Greenhouse Effect, one of the movies now screening at your local Chaos Multiplex. The US, UK and Australian Governments affect a para-scientific disdain for the notion, and hence do nothing. Back at the Ranch however, the Corporate attitude to the G.E. is enlightening and horrific both. Bechtel, Vivendi, and Lyonnaise des Eaux, set themselves for total control, over what they believe to be a dwindling or undependable water resource. Monsanto and Novartis position themselves and their gene technology for control of food production in adverse conditions. The next step in this sequence is interesting. If the vast investments of Bechtel or Monsanto were threatened by efforts to reverse the Greenhouse Effect, they will help the fossil-fuel lobby move Heaven, Earth and the Government to thwart those efforts. They need the Greenhouse Effect. They may well do their best to help it along. The blighted plains of Mordor are central to both their conscious and subconscious logic.

Capital is about as flexible as a brontosaurus, and once it has started to “adapt to changed circumstances”, and throw money in that direction, it will freeze those changed circumstances to the extent that it has the power to do so. The image of Capital bringing technological delights fresh every morning with the breakfast cereal is only cosmetically true. The Thing in its heart is utterly conservative.

When The Observer (UK, 22/2/2004) leaked a US defence chiefs’ report to Bush, “predict(ing) that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy …. cities sunk beneath rising seas … nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting”(3), seasoned observers would have been stifling yawns. In the Feb ’94 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Robert Kaplan made waves by describing exactly the same scenario - “The Coming Anarchy” - which he later blamed on “Capitalism, the bull in the china shop of history”. (4). His analysis was a popularisation of defence and security strategic thinking at the time, making this current forecast the orthodoxy for at least fifteen years now.

Prophecies of Chaos tend, in addition, to be self-fulfilling – in this rather different way: if that is what business and military strategists think is going to happen, then those are the operating conditions they design for. They may then, as a consequence, deliberately create chaos to suit their estimated strategic strengths. (Chorus - “Yugoslavia, Iraq 1, Afghanistan, Iraq 2, Libya, Syria, Ukraine”.) And of course it is a variant of the ever-popular Divide & Rule principle.

All of which explains why, long, long before any Seattles or Oklahoma Cities, the world’s police forces seemed to have come across a job lot of Orc uniforms in some global theatrical costumier. They knew it was going to happen. It makes sense. If you intend to restrict all the transactions and money flow in the game to a microscopic percentage of the players, as well as buggering up the social and physical landscape, then you are going to have to make some effort to control the errant or indignant citizenry, Left, Right and Criminal - 1st World as well as 3rd.

In the mid-90’s our state government here in Australia was proclaiming 7-year sentences for graffiti, and knocking holes in the right to Trial by Jury; in the state next door, the army was breaking into civilian houses. None of this for any overt reason. Shortly thereafter Tony Blair lurched unpleasantly to his feet, defining demonstrators as potential terrorists (6); and had the Ministry of Defence police kick down the doors of Greenpeace (7). “Several thousand new criminal offences…nationwide DNA fingerprinting, compulsory identity cards, unfettered search and seizure powers, an end to the right to silence and jury trials, and near-total TV surveillance of all urban public spaces and major highways” - Larry Elliott, Economics Editor of the UK “Guardian”, (8) on England in 1998 - but, under the centralised choreography of Globalisation, that’s anywhere at all in the 1st World. Certainly the EU has no argument with the principle. Homeland Security has been a long time in the making.

 Mordor has changed the 1st world landscape radically in the last fifteen years. Bush 2 however, unlike some of those behind him, is hardly Saruman material, just the Bad Cop in the old routine. In fact, he’s a blessed relief after Good-Cop Clinton, “with his lingo of Recovery (and) group therapy .. ‘concern’ and ‘healing’ (8). That was genuinely spooky, and whole chunks of the Left, not at its widest-awake just then, swallowed it hook, line and sinker. And what if .. the Corporate Reich found itself a True Charismatic, a new Adolf ? No, I feel positively affectionate towards Dubya. He’s recognisably a Bad Guy of the Old School in an increasingly alien landscape. He can work a room full of drunks; he gives tax breaks to his fat friends; he’s involved in good gross Skull-Duggery.

 It keeps the movie simple - Life on Earth, Yes or No ? The Flora, Fauna and 3rd World are in no doubt; it’s the 1st World – Mordor and its immediate surroundings - that doesn’t seem to care whether it lives or dies.







1. “Rural Rides”, William Cobbett, 1830. Ed. George Woodcock, Penguin, 1981. Effects of early
  Capitalism on rural England.

2. “Beasts Of No Nation”, Fela Kuti, Eurobond Records, 1989. Both sides classic.

3. “The Observer”, UK, 22/2/2004. “Now The Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us”.

4. See also “Pulp Future”, BBC Panorama 1995. Television documentary around the same material, updated to include 1st World scenarios.

5. UK “Guardian”, Sept 11, 2003 “Liberty Goes To Court Over Use Of Anti-Terror Legislation”, et al.

6. House of Commons, Hansard, Debates for 6 June 1995.

7. “The Age Of Insecurity”, Larry Elliott & Dan Atkinson, Verso, 1998. Fundamentalist Capital in the UK.

8. Robert Hughes, “The Culture Of Complaint”, OUP, 1993. How Government gave the US Middle-Class Left enough rope.