Hello everybody,
our site is updated and still on our new
address. It is www.dissidence.org.
Dissidence On the Web provides news, information, opinion and debate from an
anti-authoritarian and non-mainstream perspective, promoting strategy of resistance as a theoretical and practical weapon confronting the challengies of our time.
Sub-coordinator for english section,
Andrej Grubacic
Story from our author, Scottish political poet Lucy Johnson:
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Well, the Millenium happened and there were no catastrophies. Most
disappointing. The Anarchist in me was half wishing that the White House
would blow itself uip or something, but my fantasies go unrealised. I
spent the Millenium with my best firend and a columbian refugee, watching
the world go mad on the television from the relative saftey of my parents
farm. What struck me was the frantic futility of the whole thing.
At Greenwich the government wasted millions upon millions of pounds erecting
the Millenium Dome, which the majority of the people in this country are not
interested in and will never go and see. Meanwhile, in a housing estate
next to my home in Glasgow the death rate is four times the national average
and 40% of the school children use drugs. We have the worst health in
Europe, and one in five women in Scotland live with the threat of domestic
violence.
Yet the British Government still saw fit to squander its money in trying to
work people in to some sort of saccharine-induced frenzy by creating the
biggest firework display in the world ( in London ) and having a hidiously
expensive and very tacky cabaret show ( in London ) in order to celebrate
the fact that we can now have three rather cool zeros on our cheques.
Had the Governement decided to have a Millenium Housing Project, or Anti
Drugs initiative, or sponsored the dying arts in Britian, or given the
health service more money, or done any of the countless worthwhile things
possible to usher in a bright new future, then I might have been convinced
that they really meant to change things for the better, and that the
twenty-first century would be better than the twentieth. I belive that they
have started as they mean to go on, though. Century number twenty-one will
be as tacky, kitchy, decadant, and as culturally starved as its
predecessor. The Millenium celebrations have set the tone for the next one
hundred years.
On January the first, 2000, we woke up after the whole of the industrialised
world had spent the night trying to climax, but couldn't quite manage it.
And we awoke spent and grey and hungover and frustrated, to find that the
world was exactly the same. Did we really think the world was going to get
better just becuase we partied hard? The same rules apply, the same
struggles exist, the same arseholes are in power, and we still have not
realised our dreams. Nothing has changed. Apart from Fireworks merchants
everywhere being a good deal richer than they were last century .....
Lucy Johnson
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