totalitarian
Israel bans Al Jazeera as attack on journalism goes domestic
Seizure of broadcasting equipment and blocking of Israeli citizens’ access to website as Israel adds assault on dissenting voices in Gaza to its slaughter of journalists in Gaza
Israel has banned Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera from its territory – and blocked Israeli citizens from accessing the station’s channel and website – as it continues its assault on dissenting voices examining its mass murder of Palestinian civilians. The move comes as global support for Palestinians, and condemnation of Israel’s slaughter and maiming of more than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza, continues to grow and Israel’s usual deceits and tactics to discredit opposition collapses. The ban will last for forty-five days initially, but is likely to keep being renewed.
The station showed a pre-recorded announcement from the head of its Israeli bureau confirming the government censorship – and its final live broadcast from Israeli territory was an interview with a journalist from Israeli paper Haaretz, speaking from his car, who condemned the ban and said it was quite possible he would be arrested when he got home because of the interview.
Israel has murdered well over a hundred journalists in Gaza since 7 October and prevents international journalists from entering the territory, apart from a handful who have been shepherded in and out for propaganda purposes. Now its war on journalism, free speech and truth has gone domestic.
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"Plan C" (1979)
This internal council document was only recently unearthed in our archives. It refers to a secret governmental emergency plan to "purify" the town following some kind of "infestation or plague," the details of which have now been lost.
Although we can now no longer be entirely sure what Plan C consisted of, the image of a nuclear mushroom cloud offers us a clear indication of the council's intention. Our archivists have postulated that the council might have thought it simpler and more cost effective to remove all living things than to target specific vermin and/or undesirable microscopic pathogens.
What also seems clear is that an unidentified but enthusiastic council employee took it upon themselves to extend Plan C to almost every eventuality, in effect making the nuclear Plan C simply the only plan.
The notion that the council planned to employ a nuclear option is further supported by a minor story in a local newspaper from the time. In October 1979, seven-year-old schoolboy Nigel Johnson, mixed up his family's contribution to his school's annual harvest festival. Instead of the intended box containing four cans of oxtail soup and spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce, he took a quarter tonne of enriched uranium and other weapons-grade nuclear materials.
The boy's father, a local councillor, when questioned how his son could have found such materials at home, claimed ignorance. "Boys are always picking up things like this in the playground," he said and added "it's the fault of liberal teachers and communist dinner ladies and I firmly believe they should be among the first to be cleansed."
NHS Face Removals (1977- )
While some children were born without faces simply because they didn't deserve them (see the Scarfolk Annual 197X), the government became increasingly concerned about citizens who did have them. They found that people with faces are more likely to have personal desires, hopes and dreams, in short: a will and ideas of their own.
Such idiosyncrasies were not only thought of as needlessly self-indulgent, they were also deemed inconsistent with the smooth running of a successful society. Scarfolk's was the first council benevolent enough to offer face removals on the NHS.
In 1976, the council trialled face removals on stray foreigners, prisoners, children nobody wanted, unsuspecting people who were picked up leisurely walking in a park after sundown and volunteers (see leaflet above).
When the full scheme was rolled out in 1977, the council soon lost track of which faceless citizen was which. By 1978 a new law was passed which dictated that all faceless people were required to have a tattoo of their old face over their lost one to make identification easier.
'Little Lady' Breath Mirror Corpse Detection Set (mid-70s)
Apocalyptic toys were all the rage in the late 1970s, not that they were thought of as apocalyptic at the time. Citizens didn't fear their annihilation; they quite looked forward to demonstrating their 'Dunkirk spirit' with the misguided belief that it would somehow bring the country together. It didn't occur to them that their dogmatic nationalism might instead bring about the demise of the nation.
As the country moved toward collapse, social unrest and inevitable casualties increased. The paranoid state began anonymously exterminating citizens who so much as hinted at insurrection. Average (and the vast numbers of below-average) people were killed in street clashes between opposing factions and there were spates of frightened suicides.
Scar Toys exploited this expanding market opportunity and created a range of toys aimed at the many children in the process of being orphaned. One such toy, the Breath Mirror Set, aimed at young girls, was designed to accompany their more traditional beauty/vanity toys. The deluxe set (see picture above) included one mirror for each parent, colour-coded as per gender convention: pink for girls, blue for boys.
The wording on the back of the packaging encouraged children to use the mirrors beyond the death of their own parents. Included was a little booklet into which little pink stars could be affixed for every corpse that was identified using the mirrors. Highly sought-after prizes were awarded to the girls with the most stars and council archival documents reveal that the police turned a blind eye when gangs of little girls began slaughtering adults in frenzied attempts to accumulate more stars.
The Scarfolk Annual 197X
The Scarfolk Annual 197X.
17.10.2019 (UK) 10.29.2019 (US).
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