The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 97 of 125
Europe has only one political party
And from the kaleidoscope of contributions, a crude but effective analysis not only of the invasion of the Middle East, but of the political situation of England and Europe as a whole was spreading through hundreds of thousands of people: The various European governments couldn’t give a flying fuck what their electorates wanted. The democratic system had long since been meaningless; Europe-wide there was only one political party, had only been one political party for decades, and the various purportedly national media had been in its pocket all along. Nobody but idiots voted. If you wanted to be emotional about it, you could say that the Third Reich had never been defeated; on the contrary, it had been installed universally and was functioning—functioning far better, in fact—as an economic system than it ever had as a political one. So far as a more restrained, and specifically British, analysis went, the most influential book going round the park (certainly the one I saw the most dog-eared copies of) was George Monbiot’s Captive State. It’s a harrowing picture of contemporary Britain that Monbiot’s left-wing best seller paints, of a country eaten up from within by giant capitalist corporations: corporations interlocking more and more tightly as the months went by, eliminating every trace of quality, variety, and intelligence as they did so. Who was behind big business? Not only were the key executives of the transnationals unelected, nobody even knew their identities. Who were the new ruling classes,