In 1939, Hitler wanted to create a pure Germany; a Germany for German people. This we know lead to the persecution and deaths of thousands, if not millions of the Jewish population. No exceptions, no non-conformists; a stereotypical and perfect Germany… Everything and everyone for the Party.
In George Orwell’s ‘1984’, the Ministry of Truth is assigned the task of producing the latest Newspeak Dictionary, reducing the English language to the bare minimum, depleting the use of adjectives, reducing the risk of human thought and expression, enhancing conformity, totalitarianism and ultimately control and the prevention of ‘Thought crime’… Everything and everyone for the Party.
‘It is a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good” for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use these forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness with be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?'
Here in Britain, disturbingly, the same Fascist ideals and principles are ripe. The British Nationalist Party embarks on its own mission of creating a ‘Britain for British People’. No-one ever really speaks of them. No-one ever really sees them, but they exist in the shadows of our little island, slowing ‘picking away’ at the threads that holds the patchwork of our beautiful land together; the sense of community fraying at the seams.
Is this not the same as what Hitler was striving for?
Do we actually know what that means today – a Britain for British people?
Be it the cancerous ‘Hoodies’ of our land that speak in a semi-Jamaican tongue leaving them with no identity, or the ‘Church’ or ‘British Gas’ as Institution robbing the land and making it poor, our island is becoming what once described as ‘a green land made only grey as we charge towards an uncertain future’.
Even more disturbing are the icons and emblems used to promote such a movement as the BNP. Everything that we once stood and fought against manifested into a ‘New flag’ showing our ignorance and endorsing Fascism.
‘Recently the BNP have changed their logo to a patriotic heart, but its sketchy lines could equally resemble the outlines of a coiled snake on a slope or partially rubbed windscreen.
The British National Party has circulated its latest logo around the media in a determined attempt to present a new image’.
My work to date has engaged in my love and my sad hate of England; my imagery reflecting English Heritage, English Culture, the Knights of Old, Honour, Chivalry and the deep inextricable, yet now questionable bond of the English during troubled times. I have spoken of England as a ‘beautiful land found only in the ‘cinema;’ films that would project an essence of what it is to be British, an England that we want to believe in and hold true, but know can never really exist.’
In this set of images, there is a simple juxtaposition of family days out in England with the absolute horror of war and how a Party with extreme visions can damage the human soul, body and spirit in ways the world should never witness again. My Nana Milly (Mildred), when she was alive spoke endlessly about the war. Not so much about the bitterness of the time and the lack of comprehension of a man such as Hitler, but of how great those days were and how everyone just went about their lives the best way they could, enjoying each moment to the full as it may be their last.
Whilst ‘affordable housing’ springs up from ‘Zombie-Land’ almost overnight, we clutter on the banks of rivers or in small pockets of grass that remain amongst the factories and industrial skyline. Like the towering ominous angular shapes in Arthur Millers’ ‘Death of a Salesman’ that surround the centre stage, we sit overshadowed and imposed upon by the creation of our own design, the plight of our own technology. Scale and form suggesting how small and insignificant we are, whilst the de-saturated and muted colour adds a sense of age, lending itse3lf to a ‘Britain of Yesteryear’.
Children in their innocence slide down into the death pits whilst the dead and dying sunbathe amongst the pale bodied living. The starved eagerly wait at the BBQ or queue for ice-cream, whilst the overweight child shoves another cheeseburger into his mouth. The gas-BBQ and the tall gas cylinders in the background become an obvious symbol for the German death camps. A human body barely alive, lays rotting in the sun, as do two plates of unwanted lunch – just out of reach.
In post-war Britain, holiday makers would flock to the coast to locations such as Brighton or Blackpool, where donkey rides and the familiar cries of ‘naughty, naughty, naughty’, from the Punch and Judy man were commonplace. Here the puppeteer practises his show just before the crowds arrive, but not with any Punch and Judy or Monkey or Policeman; he uses the corpse of an infant Jewish child.
In a year where England has seen a horse meat scare and also evidence revealed that ‘our cod is not even cod’ we witness the piles of bodies behind the burger and kebab van. How often we have seen that hunk of flesh that slowly drips by what looks like an electric fire in the Traditional English Fish ‘n’ Chip shop managed by the Chinese. Do we really know what we are eating? Can we blame the increase in cancer on the use of pesticides and consumption of ‘processed foods’?
The humour in these images is sickeningly ridiculous, poignant and as powerful and accurate as a ‘snapshot’’ of Britain can be.
In every image we witness a small child with her back turned to the audience. Sometimes obvious, sometimes not, her Goldilocks mop of yellow hair maybe representative of the shape of the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb that has been detonated across the lake from where the families eat their picnics; images of a war past, or of wars that are sure to come in the future. We can draw a parallel between this young girl and the child in the red raincoat/dwarf in Nicholas Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’. She is ever present, an omen of disaster, until the final image where she confronts the viewer with her true identity and her Deaths-head is revealed.
These collages portray an apocalyptic vision of my ‘Beloved England’, Orwell’s ‘1984’ even closer to the mark. We communicate by text, or email, twitter or facebook, more silent and lonely than perhaps ever before. Is this the Newspeak about which Orwell wrote?
Winston Smith, in the novel, remarks that he cannot remember a time when there was not war; the notion of propaganda and the Party a foremost theme in the narrative. The image of Big Brother dominating the stairwell, the facades of buildings and the tele-screens, the epitome of the concept of control reduced to a ridiculous programme on television where non-persons are elevated to Gods by the British public.
In the film ‘JFK’ by Oliver Stone, it is suggested that the principle power of any government over its people is in the war effort.
The more I dwell on the fate of mankind, the more my thoughts drift back to ‘The Planet of the Apes’ and how it should hold its place in our history, not only as a documented concept on celluloid, but as a statement and testament to the demise of Man. Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘ Mysterious World’ always suggested that our culture had reached a point of civilisation crisis and dissolved itself. This was shown through the craftsmanship of a glass skull that was seen at the beginning of each programme and found in some remote location, estimated some thousands of years old. Contemporary workmanship with contemporary tools and technology were unable to match, to any degree, the high quality of the artefact!
In my last book , ‘Hoodies & Hastings’, I made reference to the Terminator in James Cameron’s film of the same title, whom speaking about humans remarks, ‘It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves’.
I fear for the future. I fear for the children I know growing up in this land. How was the world in my Nana Milly’s lifetime, especially before the war? And how much of it did change?
I am 46 years old now and have already had half, perhaps even more of my life. By 2060 at the latest I will be dust. How exciting and how frightening it would be to be given the opportunity to come back to this little island in say, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years and see, at first hand, what the fuck is going on!
Mark S. Masters - August 2013