Turns out I’m an apathetic non-voting scumbag
I want to vote, I really do. Unfortunately, like a lot of the apathetic bloody populace these days, I don’t. There was a load of local and European elections in the UK recently and I just couldn’t bring myself to vote for any of the main parties. I actively distrust them all and don’t want to risk voting for a lesser political evil when the party involved might actually win and then invade an oil filled country a year later or starve pensioners or lead us to a scenario where no one will ever be able to afford a house ever again or… you get the idea.
I think everyone should have a vote – that’s a given. Everyone who chooses to side with a party and wants them to lead their country should be able to have a say. Democracy is a pretty bollocks system really, but it is by far the best we humans have come up with and I will fight for people to able to have their say. Probably not to the death, but pretty damned close.
I think I just increasingly dislike the generation of politicians who have made politics their career. They rarely seem to me to be arguing for what they genuinely believe should be happening in the country, they seem more concerned with getting one up on their rival politicians and furthering their career. They are more concerned with the politics of government than actually governing.
I don’t know why I have strayed from my usual inane fun this entry. I apologise. I think it is a combination of all the shiny politicians on TV, the fact that it is my birthday next week and I am getting increasingly grumpy, and a concern for all my friends and family in my former home of Thailand (and future) where democracy is really going through the ringer. In Thailand various failed power plays have caused people become so entrenched in two opposing political parties that the army staged a coup to try and get everyone a fair vote. On the same day in the UK, UKIP suddenly made huge gains because people were so fed up with the similar shite spouted from the main two parties that they either voted for UKIP or lay in bed in resigned apathy. In both cases, people in power craved more power and it backfired. Which is a good thing if it then leads to change. Sadly I don’t think that will happen.
The final reason is that I was reminded of a superb quote from George Orwell’s 1984. One of my favourite books. It got me thinking in a pointless and futile way and also gave me an excuse for a great quote on power. I shall stop whining now and leave you with Mr Orwell.
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” ? George Orwell, 1984
