THE GREAT ESCAPE IS OVER

 

"...don't it always seem to go - that you don't know what you've got till it's gone - they take paradise and put up a parking lot "  - Joni Mitchell (Big Yellow Taxi)

It seems like only yesterday that travel was a mysterious joy. An unknown world was waiting out there, where the weird and wonderful could and would happen. Practically anything seemed possible and indeed it was. Here is one example of a great everyday adventure...

Back in 1984 (the real 1984, not the current dystopia) me and three other guys drove across Europe from London to West Berlin. This was no small thing -a journey that took us behind the Iron Curtain into the Communist Bloc controlled by Russia, the sworn enemy of the democratic western alliance. At that time,the capitalist stronghold of West Berlin was a city surrounded -marooned within the tyrannical Socialist regime of East Germany. A huge militarised barrier -the Berlin Wall- seperated the Communist East from the Free West.

We approached West Berlin on an enormous, largely deserted highway originally commissioned by Hitler to accomodate Tiger Tanks. The road took us past nuclear misiile silos surrounded by huge fences and heavily armed troops. Ukranian soldiers stopped us on the final border, took our passports away, ordered us out of the car at gunpoint and searched the contents of the boot. 

As our mission was to deliver multi-media entertainment, the contents were custom clothes, casette tapes, art videos and some duty-free booze we'd bought on the cross-channel ferry. The soldiers joked and laughed (with each other) as they rifled through our stuff, while we shivered and stamped our feet in the snow. It was about ten below zero. When one of the leather-and-fur clad officers finally returned our passports I smiled in relief and mouthed "Thanks". He looked at me -expressionless- with eyes like a dead shark. I got the impression he figured we were heading towards a lot more fun than he'd ever had.      

Once inside the fiercely-controlled perimeter of West Berlin, you realised how hopelessly surrounded you were. No matter which direction you walked, sooner or later you found a fence complete with razor wire, a minefield, and sinister guard-towers with machine-guns. Or else you walked right into the Berlin Wall itself. Every hundred yards or so along the wall was a viewing platform -steps you could climb to stand and look over at the East. What you saw was razor wire, minefields, guard-towers and machine-guns, guard-dogs, ditches and more of the same. I thought, Bastards! You need all this to force people to obey you. I felt proud to be young, western and free.

Our gig was a sell-out success. The young Berliners were friendly, clever and extremely talented party animals. Most had been seduced into this surreal political oasis by generous government grants intended to maintain a population in what was, on its face, a rather inhospitable environment. Following an after-show party lasting about two days, I managed to miss my flight home from Berlin Tegel airport (the car we arrived in had died) and found myself trapped and penniless. 

I stayed a month in the end. With typical nonchalance, the Berlin kids organised me a room in a flat, a job in a bar, and a non-stop social whirl. By the time I'd saved enough to buy another plane ticket I could serve customers and tell a joke in crude German, albeit with a strong Berlin accent (the equivalent of Cockney, I later learned). Frankly, I didn't really want to leave, but I bit the bullet and flew back to the relative peace and quiet of London.

Understand, in London I was, at the time, officially unemployed. Yet I had crossed the channel to France, travelled through Belgium, skipped over the border into communist East Germany to enter West Berlin, lived and worked for a month, and flown back to Heathrow. Nobody batted an eyelid. With the exception of that one sub-zero stop-and-search, no-one in an official capacity showed the slightest interest, anywhere, least of all in Britain.

Of course, the reason no-one was interested was that nobody knew. Four kids crossed the channel in a car and vanished. No big deal. We could roam the continent, free as birds.

 

In January 2019 my partner and I travelled to Portugal for a bit of winter sun. Naturally, this began like every modern "holiday": the endless queue at check-in, the swiping of boarding cards, the scanning of passports, the second needlessly long queue, the humiliating removal of shoes and belt, with its calculated echo of the prison camp. The plastic tray of posessions, the jacket, the laptop, bits of this and that falling out of pockets, the drooping jeans, the same expression of tongue-bitten submission on the face of every nervous, shuffling citizen. The steely glare of the security chiefs, the false smiles of the security gofers, loafing in their plastic gloves, poised to prod your armpits and crotch if you failed the electronic walk-through. The hurried re-dressing on the other side, the compulsory march through the compulsory shopping-mall, the endless corridor to departures, the stairs, the lift, the omnipresent CCTV cameras, the pop-up robo-cops with jackboots, machine-guns, tasers and dangling cuffs. Have a nice holiday. I thought, Bastards! You need all this to force people to obey you. I was not at all proud. 

But we grinned and bore it, because, well...security. And I took it -I took that much.

But that's all over now. I won't wear a mask, you see. Nowhere. Not for Boris Johnson, nor Chris Whitty either. Never. You can line up the entire holy, sainted angels of blessed martyrdom who staff the NHS but I won't wear your filthy mask. Not for "science" or  British Airways or Easyjet. Not for "health" or "security" or Portugal or Timbuctoo. That's the line, right there. I draw the line and so should every last one of us.

I saw the whole damn thing coming in Glasgow last year, the week they said "face coverings"  were "compulsory" in supermarkets. It was one of those things you don't forget. Compulsory masks? I thought yeah, right, good luck with that and went to Aldi with my brother. I literally  could not believe it. Old ladies, young girls, parents with children, big guys humping trays of beer and schoolkids nicking sandwiches : all mumbling like apes in their ugly, stupid blue muzzles.      

I couldn't help myself: I exclaimed aloud "Are you all fucking crazy"?"  My brother tugged my sleeve. "Ignore them," he said. I shut my mouth. I realised this was his local shop; his neighbourhood. I was leaving town the following day (the end of lockdown#'1). Let it go, dude.

And that's how it works. I shut up for him, he shut up for them, and the whole town muzzled up for the government. Multiply by every brother, sister, friend and foe in every shop in every town, every city. Nationwide, worldwide.  

We're all in it together, say the politicians . No we're not, scum. I'm not in it and I never will be. You've taken my job, taken my business, smashed my future and I guess you can pen me up in this open-prison from here to the grave. But I'm not in your herd. I'm not wearing your muzzle. The air is free and the air is mine and you don't come between me and the air. 

Of course, I'm just one more individual who got speared on the 2020 lockdown skewer. This kind of oppression has been tried (and beaten) before. To see why it failed,we need only read

this superb summary by the legendary black author, orator and statesman Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Maryland USA in 1836: 

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. 

And these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Your government,Bill Gates, the WHO and the World Economic Forum are just four faces of our modern tyranny.They think they have "found out"  what we will "quietly submit to" :i.e.  masks, lockdown, house-arrest, isolation and social destruction. Be assured, al these will will continue "till they are resisted with either words, or blows, or with both." 

 

In his later years, Frederick Douglass visited both Ireland and England, where he expressed his joy at the complete absence of racial segregation or prejuduice. One wonders what he would have made of UK 2021, with its BLM theatrics and a neo-fascist government savagely oppressing its own people 

THE WALL WILL FALL

 

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 when the Russian Communist Empire collapsed - because the people trapped in that system refused to go on accepting the Police State that had ruined their lives. It's our turn now.  The same tyranny is happening here. It used to be called Communism, now they call it Covid. It's just an excuse for the same tyranny. The Police State has forced us into masks and unnecessary vaccines, separated us from family and friends, forbidden us to gather in groups and crowds, destroyed thousands of jobs and wrecked our free society. Freedom to travel is for the elite. For you, travel will be a very occasional luxury -a reward for your sheep-like obedience. 

Thow the mask away and start saying no. Today. And the Wall will fall.

Ian Andrew-Patrick      

Please explore this site -there's plenty of great stuff going back to 2019- and share any posts, links or info you find with anyone who needs that wake-up call. Let's not kid ourselves - winter will see another full-on attempt to pen us up like farm animals and this time we need to be prepared. Many thanks to everyone supporting this site and the struggle that we cannot afford to lose.