Justin Williams, the guy behind Operation Blackjack

Amongst all the hype over Operation Blackjack, has anyone thought of actually contacting Justin Williams, the purported actor behind it all?

[link to www.google.com]

Here he is, ask him:

[link to twitter.com]

Based on this post from his blog, I'd say he's conducting a study in mass hysteria (Cue Orson Wells).


[link to blogs.telegraph.co.uk]


The darkness that lies behind our obsession with doom
Posted By: Justin Williams at May 5, 2009 at 08:56:51 [General]
Posted in: UK Correspondents
Tags:collapse, Doom, pandemic, Swine Flu

My colleague George Pitcher argues that our collective over-reaction to the outbreak of swine flu is a form of Biblical masochism brought on by the financial collapse. We are gripped, George says, by the psychology of the End Times, the scriptural Last Days Before Armageddon. Our Judaeo-Christian heritage teaches mankind in all its wretchedness to expect retribution for sin and heresy. The wrathful and vengeful God of the Old Testament visits plagues and pestilence upon the Earth to punish man for his misdeeds.

The sin de nos jours is, of course, financial recklessness - the worship of a false idol by another name. So in return we get a dose of plague. Except we don't, as George points out: we get a dose of unjustified hysteria about swine flu. This hysteria manifests itself in newspaper headlines, in web forums, on Twitter and in the resurrection of the wartime Keep Calm and Carry On poster.

The argument is, unsurprisingly given George's position, generous. But it is not the whole argument. The unpalatable truth is much less charitable and much, much darker. So many are obsessed with the apocalypse and fancy they see it in every bug, every conflict and every economic hiccup because they equate the destruction of civilisation with the End of All Our Problems - global, local and personal. Plunged into negative equity by the house price slump? How about a wipeout at the hands of some crazed bioterrorist to end your mortgage nightmare? Staring redundancy in the face? A spot of global thermonuclear war ought to loosen labour conditions. Tired of queueing in the post office for your child benefit? Heh, there's always catastrophic global warming or the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012 to trim the numbers.




Survivors: A new version of an old and dark obsession

The last time we were this hysterical was in the mid 1970s: Britain was broke, America had been humbled in Vietnam, the West seemed to be in retreat before the mighty red machine, the oil was running out and scientists were warning us that the world was on the brink of new ice age. Doom was de rigeur: Terry Nation's Survivors was on the television, the British were inspired by Tom and Barbara Good to grow their own vegetables and a busted Labour prime minister was preparing to go cap in hand to the IMF.

Today, the BBC is busy making a second series of the reimagined Survivors as well as a resurrected Day of the Triffids, the waiting lists for allotments stretch to years, the oil is running out again and Gordon Brown has reduced Britain to sub prime status. That so many hanker for the simpler pastoral existence that would surely follow a truly Biblical outbreak of megaflu is, at the very least, explainable.

This is not just some collective unconscious hangup from the days of fire and brimstone: it is modern meme brought on and transmitted by reaction to the sheer unpleasantness of the here and now and a fear that a future of austerity after so many years of plenty would be a grimness too great to bear. For many people, particularly the fortunate ones outside of our towns and cities with access to land, provisions and shotguns, doom is just the logical development of self sufficiency and green thinking. Some believe that the only way to save the Earth is to cull the population; others believe that the Earth will do this for herself. Spend any time on the forums and counter culture sites that these doomers, as they call themselves, gather and you will have read the almost gleeful anticipation of the early swine flu developments and the prospect of many millions of deaths and the palpable disappointment that accompanied the inevitable downgrading of the threat.

The hysteria has been whipped up by the governments of the West with their constant drumbeats of doom: doom from terrorism, doom from global warming, doom from pandemic viruses. The bad guys are going to get us with their germs, their chemicals, their carbon emissions and their dirty bombs. Forget that we've debauched your pensions, your currencies and your financial futures, you must sacrifice your remaining civil liberties and your final shreds of dignity so that we can save you. Is it any wonder that so many Americans believe in the imminence of the Second Coming, the Day of Judgement and that their government is stockpiling plastic coffins and planning to herd the populace into concentration camps?

Thanks to the web and to our increasingly authoritarian governments, doom is no longer the preserve of the Branch Davidians or the Rapturists. It has gone mainstream and infected millions of middle class citizens. Many apparently sane people are preparing three-month food stockpiles in their larders. Applications for firearms licenses are up. The talk in the suburbs is of the coming die off. This is not just an age-old fear: it is a modern reaction to the mess that we now find ourselves in and the messages we are being fed by our leaders.

Our war- and austerity-scarred grandparents and great grandparents - the ones who came up with Keep Calm and Carry On - would be ashamed of us.