You are here: Home / BM / Black Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans and White Americans: Orwellian Echoes and Kafka’s Shadow – A Modern-Day Tale of Power and Control.
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(ThyBlackMan.com) Two words provided to the world from the annals of literature that could not be more prescient and frightening are ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Kafkaesque.’
The first, adopted from the writings of George Orwell, particularly his novels 1984 and Animal Farm is used to describe all aspects of activities detrimental to existing in a free society, and the latter is derived from the works of Frantz Kafka and is used to describe the frightening and oppressive world depicted in his writings like The Penal Colony and The Trial.
I first read Kafka when I was in junior high school. It was hard to understand but at the time, I was unaware that what I was reading, The Trial, was incomplete and was not published until after his death. I would read it again after being required to read his short story ‘Metamorphosis’ as a freshman at Morehouse.
The book tells the story of a bank clerk named Josef who has been accused of a crime, and put on trial but never informed of what crime he has committed. In addition, he is not informed of who his prosecutors are. Thus the plot starts, with him trying to find his way through what seems to be an unworkable and treacherous legal apparatus to save himself.
In short, the story is a metaphor for a world in which we have lost all control of our lives and are at the mercy of unseen forces of a high-powered elite. It is reminiscent of what we have seen with respect to the treatment of the January 6th detainees and more importantly the 45th President of the United States. And if we take Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum at his word when he said ”We have to prepare for a much angrier world,” then we as a nation and a global populous of regular folk should expect things to get a lot worse.
Already, if we use the mainstream media as an experimental petri dish, it is apparent things are not well across the country. Cashless bail, unsecured borders, hyperinflation, and a broken-down education system are just a few of our national concerns. We incessantly wait for things to happen while crazy things are happening left and right. War in the Middle East, mandates for vaccines, school lockdowns, empty store shelves or shelves locked behind glass, and supply chain disruptions seem to be the tip of the iceberg. Like Josef, we have become lethargic in our response to all this which is what we should fear.
The Trial, although published more than a century ago, describes a similar form of psychological ordnance used against the people by totalitarian regimes. Machiavellian regimes via fiat, can sanction what people can say, write or think. Regimes that can implement legally sanctioned death in the form of abortion, civil unrest at the hands of roaming street thugs, or euthanasia. This is where we have come.
Kafka wrote of this in his fiction but never lived to see it as we bear witness presently. While most liberal voters get their messed up and inaccurate worldview from cable news and TikTok, those of us who have more than one brain cell understand that the modern media is not to be trusted or believed. Not only do we see this in the manner in which Kafka presents Josef and his trial, but equally what the elitist know-it-alls are putting us through.
What owning nothing and being happy all comes down to is this: do we want power in the hands of ordinary, everyday people as the Constitution proscribes, or do we want all power concentrated in the hands of very few people who believe they are better than everyone else and deserve to rule, without regard to any kind of ethics or morality, and who desire to destroy the constitution and all Judeo-Christian values.
First, they create unrest and depict it as merely random acts of violence happening nationwide. Next, they begin to control or completely obviate communication to engender a fear response from the multitude. This is followed by establishing martial law via proxy (see the SARS?CoV?2 response). Martial Law is the beginning of control. Finally, they divide and conquer to separate family members from each other and people from the concept of ownership. If you tell them the truth they claim it’s just ‘right wing talking points’.
Kafka’s protagonist appears to be so wholly apathetic, that when he’s killed by court in the last chapter, he is relieved and even displays signs of happiness and appreciation.
I advise that anyone with an attention span longer than 140 characters revisit this book. Josef is just a simple ordinary successful man when out of nowhere, the mechanism of the state throws him into a world of chaos. We all have butted heads with a political system that has no concern for our interests. Frankly, this is one reason this book is so spine-chilling: it deals not with the supernatural, but with things that are possible and so unpleasantly palpable. Do not take my word for it, just look at policies and retribution for violating said policies put in place by the likes of Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, and Kathy Hochul.
In New York, the governor is now allowed to put you in a quarantine camp against your will, even if it means breaking and entering into your residence without a warrant and taking you by force. Gavin Newsom instituted a ban on indoor and outdoor dining in California threatening small business owners with arrest if they did not follow his orders. In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau froze personal accounts of anyone linked with the anti-mandate protests. In Ireland, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has his sight set on criminalizing any speech that is perceived “likely to incite hatred or violence” against protected (subjective) classes of people.
So much of what is written in the Trial is overtly observable and conceivable presently. In one part of the book Josef sees two policemen being beaten in his bank yet he does nothing to assist them, similar to how many act today when they observe people being assaulted. One may even think if available at the time, Kafka would have said he just pulled out his phone and started recording.
His was a world of backrooms and secretive decision-making without oversight and transparency and continuous social monitoring – a world without due process where trials are remote and obscure and crimes are not defined. It is a dark place where people have no recourse or capability to deny anything or even call witnesses.
The Trial is a scary book, because of the manner in which it shows what can happen when a government operates without accountability. As we see with Biden’s Justice Department and the FBI, the consequences lead to a deceitful society where all citizens operate under fear and secrecy and trust no one.
It’s what has transpired in all civilizations when they go too far. We have seen this before in history and now we have reached a breaking point in the U.S. The Roman Empire, Greece, Rome, Cuba, Iran and North Korea showed us this.
The query for the American citizen is what will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Personally, if this class of people does not like America, they should just leave or even better, leave us alone. I would rather die fighting for my freedom than be a slave to the predator class that self-report themselves as being elite.
Staff Writer; Torrance T. Stephens
Can also purchase any of his books over at; Amazon – TTS Books.
