Truth can be stranger than fiction

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Saw an episode of Black Mirror yesterday.

It’s some dystopian era in the future. Common people are recruited to become freelance soldiers who get paid to go around killing ‘roaches’.

Roaches are positioned as mutant humans to these soldiers and to their eyes, these creatures look ghastly, can’t communicate in a common language but just screech hideously and are supposed to once upon a time be human who had mutated out of some genetic defects. They are deemed dangerous and are shot or stabbed to death on sight, even the babies or kids. Nobody really asks why they are dangerous; they just accept instructions from the authorities that these ‘roaches’ should be killed on sight.

There is an old man who is considered a weirdo and enemy of the state because he is consistently known to harbour and help these roaches. His house gets ambushed one day and the story focuses on one soldier who encounters a group of roaches hiding in the old man’s basement. He panics and quickly, one of the roaches holds out a makeshift green light that flashes off in his eyes. The young soldier reacts in a frenzy and kills them all in cold blood. The old man is jailed for being subversive in helping the roaches, the young soldier is hailed a hero.

A few days later, the young soldier has trouble in his vision and bearings. The green light has done something – it has freed him from a hypnotism he has been under.

In the next expedition against roaches, he suddenly just sees them as ordinary frightened humans running away and fearing for their lives and trying to just live in peace. He does not see the scary image of mutants as the other soldiers see. That hastily made technology from the frightened roach he had killed earlier was a work of a budding genius to help remove the hypnotism that he realises he has been under.

Disturbed, he saves a roach girl, hides her and he starts talking to her. She explains to him that it is the implants in his head that makes him and the rest see them as roaches. “Because ordinarily, people are decent and won’t kill other people easily,” she says softly with compassion for the young soldier’s growing horror that he had killed innocent men like him, women and children for so long, just because the authorities frightened him into doing so, using the divide and rule weapon of mass destruction.

To get decent people to do indecent things and to willingly abet crimes against humanity, a wicked and corrupt government uses ‘us against them’ fear and repulsion to ensure that ppl can be indoctrinated to constantly hate another group of ppl and kill them without feeling any remorse.

In this episode the reason given for ‘roach’ killing is that these roaches have genetic defects and so the government wants these people removed. The government then finds a way to get citizens to remove other citizens. They imbed implants in young people’s heads and then control them to make them hate some people with much vengeance, while finding a sense of belonging with others. A forced, false brotherhood controlled by the guys at the top who now have unpaid citizen assassins to do their bidding.

In the end, what we the viewer see is that they are all the same. Normal innocent people being torn apart by hatred towards one another by an evil, controlling authority. They kill people who otherwise could just be a brother, sister, lover, son, daughter, if they were freed of the authorities.

The implants in the head are an analogy of indoctrination. The soldier thinks he is preserving his version of humanity. He then realises that he has been lied to his whole life by his government that ‘roaches’ are dangerous, and a threat to him. He also realises that he has been the one who has been killing others like him for no other reason than that the government wants him to.

When he realises the truth, the soldier crumbles. He thought he was killing evil. But understands he was merely the tool, enslaved by the real evil. That realisation breaks him but he is too far gone into the system and cannot get out of it.

The authorities know a rare few people wake up from the implants and have a process to indoctrinate him again.

The episode ends with the soldier being caught, threatened and submitting to being indoctrinated again.

It is an episode that seems hauntingly familiar. During the whole Covid saga people who refused to take the vaccination were vilified like ‘roaches’ by the rest. With new disastrous findings on mRNA (a type of single-stranded RNA involved in protein synthesis) that has come in over the last few years from world-renowned scientists, looks like they were right after all.

The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at [email protected]