Prison Island- notes
for a dystopian fantasy novel
By Ruth Skilbeck 9.2.2014
It seem that the refugee camp on Prison
Island, is very fitting symbol – yet a tragic one – of our times.
And the machinery that creates and
maintains, enforces, the refugee camp, and the people involved are like cyphers
and symbols for our society and the “roles” of the people, in modern society,
in Australia Prison Island.
There are the refugees, the majority,
visible yet invisible, kept in a state of enforced limbo by unseen forces of
administration, always in a state of need, and wanting, of longing and constant
frustration of their needs and desires, by the machinery of the camps,
The machinery which is enforced and
maintained by the guards, those who are paid, a just about (or perhaps just
under) livable wage to maintain the privation of the refugees, and also keep
them in a state of need so they have to do this to get the money they need to
survive in a better way than the refugees.
There are the managers, in the
administration who oversee the camps, from their distance, of authority – and
they are well paid to do this, they will live at a distance from the camps, and
will be protected by their own guards, and the allocated guards of society,
from the misery and privation, and the machinations of the day to day
administration and the chores of enforcing order in the camps.
Then there are the private contractors who
profit from the camps, the service providers, contracted by the government, and
their shareholders who share in and enable their profits, the ones who make
money from the camps, and the misery of the refugees. The financial profits are
enormous.
At the top of the “game” is the authorizing
body (Body) that puts into place the policies that create these camps, and
enforce their existence, that provides and writes the script that is followed
to make the theatre of the camps, and the roles, and scenarios of the drama
that is enacted there. This authorizing Body also benefits financially,
enormously for their efforts in creating this dystopian drama, which is a
morality play of a small group profiteering from the misery of the ones
oppressed by them. They are paid in the taxes they impose on the private
contractors and service providers; these are large, as the contractors make so
much money from the Body – given to them by the Body- that they give back to the
Body- in tax. (This is how the Body
makes the Camps pay back more than what they spend on them to make them in the
first place- they become a self funding money making machine). At the same time,
the Body uses this as a symbolical means of asserting power in the region, and
in the nation, a symbolic way of showing the citizens that they are a bit
better off than the refugees (at least most of them are) and as a moral tale,
to show the citizens that if they do not conform they will be banished to a
camp like the refugees, or they will be imprisoned where they are and never be
able to ascend to a higher level of life and treatment in society than the
refugees, they will be kept in a state of constant hunger, need and longing,
and their basic human needs will be
frustrated, like the refugees. They will do this through the means of
the Thanks, the Utility Squeezers, the Public Eye Program, and the Machinery of
Institutional Control CentralTank, of financial welfare control. They will
grind those citizens into the ground just like the refugees.
This is the story of…a refugee camp on
Prison Island, and a drama that happened within and outside it.
Notes:
The Big Thanks – take – make-, or citizens
are forced by CentralTank to store all their Z in the Big Thanks, which charge
them for using their Z.
How citizens are kept “in place” they are
reminded that they were all once refugees, and that if they do not act in a way
that is approved of, they will be either banished (if they are recent arrivals)
or if long term, they will be branded as traitors, (called un-Prison Islander)
and consigned to a life of privation, imprisoned where they are.
How they “get ahead” they have to take on
the roles of the enforcers and they treat the ones below them, as refugees, and
make Z from them.
WHAT IF THEY DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS IF THEY
HAVE MORAL OBJECTIONS, THEY ARE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS, ON PRINCIPLE?
See above Notes.
No comments:
Post a Comment