The Spies: a fictional organization in George Orwell’s novel “1984” responsible for (among other things) indoctrinating young children with the belief that Big Brother is benevolent, necessary, protective.
Blue Peter: a British children’s show (running since 1958), which I recall from my childhood as including arts, a garden and annual charity appeals, which (still) invariably have something to do with recycling and/or raising money for a popular cause.
MI5: Her Royal Majesty’s Secret Service made famous by 007 films but – in reality – implicated in renditions to torture, concealing murders in Northern Ireland and widespread child sex abuse by political elites, as well as spying on human rights workers, lawyers, union leaders, and climate activists.
Project Petra: A spy competition for eight to fourteen year olds launched on Thursday 15 January 2015 by Blue Peter in collaboration with MI5 to find the next generation of spies. Those that are selected to compete will be led through a series of observational and analytical skills challenges over a period of weeks. Three winners will be selected and have the opportunity to visit MI5’s offices in London. It will be the first time TV cameras will be allowed inside MI5.
How do we create spaces for young minds to imagine a world without poverty? Where they have decision making say in all the things that will affect their lives? To reimagine and deepen democracy? To imagine a world without terrorism, whether committed by drones and occupations, or psychopathic individuals? A world with racial justice, and egalitarianism between men and women, girls and boys, and those that choose not to be defined by their gender? Where health is put above profit (“IMF Policies Blamed for Rapid Ebola Spread in West Africa”, teleSUR)? A world in which we protect the environment, rather than destroy it, and create spaces for our true – free and autonomous – expression so that we may realise ourselves in a just community?
This space clearly does not exist in the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corporation. This month, the BBC announced that it would be collaborating with MI5 in a children’s competition to find “the next generation of spies.” Clearly a propaganda exercise to win the hearts and minds of the next generation, having disenfranchised so spectacularly the current young people ready to vote, many for the first time, at this May’s national elections in the UK.
The Project Petra propaganda exercise comes less than a year after it was revealed that MI5 and Special Branch officers put pressure on police to drop investigations into child abuse by elite politicians in the UK. It comes less than two years after Edward Snowden leaked information that the institutions responsible for “protecting” us, were surveilling – and putting at risk – human rights workers and journalists.
These institutions – supposedly working to protect us – have a history of shadowy work to prevent social progress for a more just world. From the 1930s until late in the Cold War, MI5 closely watched prominent historians and Marxists Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill, along with other academics, writers and philosophers.
According to the Guardian newspaper, Hill, moral philosopher Mary Warnock and others landed on the MI5’s watch list for signing a document supporting calls for nuclear disarmament in 1959. They have also been responsible for monitoring anti-fascist groups in the UK, as well as climate activists – together with multinational corporations (including, for example, MacDonald’s), and encouraging neighbours to “report” libertarians who dare dream of a better world.
How can we create spaces to let our children imagine a more just world? Rather than make manifest the dystopia portrayed by Orwell?
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it… All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.” Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell (Chapter 2).
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