" Seen through the lens of this doctrine, the past 35 years look very different. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the intent of terrorising the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for radical free-market "reforms"
Naomi Klein, introduction excerpt from the Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,
Although written more than half century ago, the writings of WIlliam Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg are as true and gripping today as it was prolific then in depicting the hypocrisy of the so-called democratic government to maintain 'world peace' via hard-sell propaganda at home and military operations abroad: only to use liberal market policies to force democracies in the so-called despotic governments and to perpetrate crime against humanity as quoted by Naomi Kelin above. Of course if we include WMD, the jargon of choice by George W. Bush Jr to invade Iraq, what the writings reveal make a lot more sense!
Both William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were contemporaries who form part of the Beat generation in the US and became a worldwide cultural phenomenon in the 1950s. Both showed literary intelligence in their ability to make connections between ancient and religious history and contemporary life. The two pieces of writings share similar themes of linguistic and literary assault on government as agents of control, censorship and promoter of their brand of traditional values. They show their extremely violent personal expression in writing, in very prophetic way. as they felt Both represented a generation who suffered alienation from the dominant economic, political and social forms of Dwight Eisenhower's America While Ginsberg used biblical allusion to show the mythic proportion of his generation's despair and anger, Burroughs compared the authoritarian nature of modern nation states to Mayan ritual calendars. Apocalypse then (mass disappearance and destruction of ancient civilisations) are precursors to contemporary disasters now (world financial crisis and recession in 2008 till now).
The words within the prose and poem explored their cynicism, disillusion and maddening worldviews of modernity, democracy and progress: capital punishment, drugs, good and evil, and the destruction of nations through wars. Although some find them a bombastic piece of drivel and insanity, those who understood the message realise their ability to pull the wool in our eyes and dissemble reality that one does not see: brutal truth about modern society. They provide a kind of collective manifesto to urge everyone to get out of their comfort zone, open their eyes and minds and confront different types of injustice, control and influence that the state, media and corporations impose on us. He pointed to the practice of media virus to spread lies. One gets a strange impression that the writing could only come out from the minds of a schizophenic. Scrape through the maddening imageries, we could make sense of the hopelessness that most people feel as if we are prisoners and meek like sheep trapped in an endless rat race - the current system and mode of living have made us weak, malleable and subservient to authority and global forces.
Burroughs tried to highlight to us the viral effect of language how it is used by the government and media to fabricate a very dystopian future in which the only way to survive is to give in to the powers that be. Similarly, Ginsberg evoked the idolatrous god in the bible, Moloch, who sacrificed children in the fire as a metaphor to describe megalomaniac monster-like machinery produced by modernity such as war, capitalism, mainstream culture, materialism, conformism and authority, to rob us from our youth and the love for humanity.
Although both Burroughs and Ginsberg have brought a uniquely local awareness to both the mainstream media and culture about the need to reformulate traditional ideas of individual expression, identity and human freedom, the impact of these writings have gone beyond American shores. Many people in the developing nations including those that have woken up to the cries in the Arab Spring and Western countries whose lives have been tragically affected by the world wide recession have been united by very similar concerns that the two writers cried out: rejection of censorship, spiritual liberation, environmental awareness, sensitivity towards indigenous culture, world peace and the right to see, hear and speak.
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