Who Really Runs the World?
The war between globalization and democracy
Thom Burnett and Alex Games
New York: The Disinformation Company, 2007, p/b, $13.95
Who’s Watching You?
The chilling truth about the state, surveillance and personal freedom
Mick Farren and John Gibb
New York: The Disinformation Company, 2007, p/b, $13.95
Two more from the Disinfo people. At first glance these didn’t look very promising – no documentation, to start with – but they’re decently written, shortish (230 pp.) accounts of big subjects. And this is no easy trick. Who Really Runs The World is marginally the better, I think, mainly because its subject matter, its target, is more stationary (though it could just be that I’ve never been terribly interested in the techie end, espionage/surveillance).
After briskly explaining then rebutting the loony fringe – Masons, Illuminati etc. – Who Really Runs the World moves onto the Round Table and thence into the CFR, Trilateralists and Bilderberg. The authors’ positions are very similar to mine: CFR, Trilaterals and Bilderberg are important but they are not the executive committee(s) of global capital. From here we get a brisk and decently written account of some of the shitty/stupid activities of the big corporations, Enron, WorldCom, BCCI etc. – the real movers and shakers in the authors’ opinions – an account of some of their critics’ views, and a critical analysis of globalisation.
Who’s Watching You? seems pretty current as of mid-2007 – and pretty comprehensive, encompassing the entire range, from big hardware stuff, like Echelon and Carnivore, and satellites hoovering up the world’s babble, to the big private data collection agencies, such as Choicepoint; recent developments such as RFID chips and readers and gene data banks; thence into the really big one, the Net and all its incomprehensible complexity, and, in particular, Google, including a couple of pages on Dan Brandt’s Googlewatch. If I knew some of the historical stuff, lots of this was either new or barely familiar.
The authors are pessimists – they would say realists, I expect – and conclude:
‘What we must now accept is that we lost our privacy years ago. No conscious decision was ever made to abandon the right to a private life without government or commercial intrusion, it simply happened.’
Of course the authors are talking about America and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe; but they are surely right. At any rate privacy defined as life ‘without government or commercial intrusion’ has gone for many of us if we use credit cards, the Internet or a computer. As I write these words they could be intercepted without a great deal of trouble by anyone who wanted to do so. But this does not mean that we are inevitably drifting into a kind of hi-tech fascism. As the globalised world has become more and more chaotic, states have used all this technology to try and keep track of things – and have manifestly failed. The British and American states have no idea of basic data: for example how many illegal immigrants there are in their countries. For Big Brother to succeed in London he will need to speak over two hundred languages. Britain may be covered in surveillance cameras but to what effect?
Both books have the same flaw: no documentation to speak of; and both raise the same question: to understand them you really have to know something of the subject matter already. This being the case, who are they aimed at? They are too complex for the beginner in these fields and not detailed or documented enough for the academically-inclined; but for the readers of this magazine, for example, with a general interest in the subjects, these would be worth a look.
And yes, the co-author of Who’s Watching You? is the same British Mick Farren who in the 1960s/early 1970s was a ‘White Panther’ and the lead singer of the band The Deviants, arguably the world’s first punk band (rock and roll, high on energy and low on technique). He now teaches at University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). Strange old world!