In "Reactions & Reactionaries-Part Two," from May 3, 2026, I wrote:
By the way, earlier this year a British video game character named Amelia escaped from her creators to become a tempter of young men away from the State that wants to prevail over them. (If the society created by the overarching and controlling state is Eden, then let there be no Eve.) In that way, Amelia plays the same role as Julia in 1984, LUH 3417 in THX 1138 (1971), and I-330 in We (1924). There have since become German, Dutch, and other versions of Amelia. I wish them all success, even if they have faded from the news.
I have done some more thinking since then. Call the following an example of the Wikipedia-zation of research. Take the phone off the hook. This is going to take awhile.
Once Amelia escaped from her creators in January of this year, images of her proliferated on the Internet. These included videos, illustrations, and memes. In at least one of these images, Amelia wears a Joy Division t-shirt. I have written before about Joy Division and related topics. You can read what I wrote in the following two entries:
"Joy Connection" (Sept. 1, 2024)
"Joy Connection Revisited" (Nov. 13, 2025)
These have proved to be among the most popular of my postings in the past few years, if the number of visits to a posting is a measure of its popularity. I'm not sure why they are popular, but I like that they are. It's good to stick your finger in the eye of powerful people, including the entirely too powerful people who promote the cult of global warming. Maybe some of you like that idea, too. There will be more of that here, beginning in mere seconds and mere sentences.
I wonder about the significance of Amelia in her Joy Division t-shirt. I'm not British and never have been, but if I had to guess about any significance, it would be that there is something very British--if not uniquely British--about that group. If that's the case, then it's fitting (no pun intended) that Amelia the digital British rebel would wear the t-shirt of a uniquely British band. Maybe the t-shirt thoroughly identifies her as a Briton.
Another Amelia meme shows her lighting her cigarette from a flaming picture of the current prime minister, Keir Starmer. This was after a real-life woman, also in January, lit hers from a photo of the late Iranian leader, who proceeded in February to go up in flames. (Instead of a voodoo doll, hers was a voodoo photo.) Whenever I hear the prime minister's name, I think of Starker from the TV show Get Smart. But Mr. Starmer is no shtarker. On the contrary, he always seems to have a scared look on his face. He should have, for he's in over his head, I think. (He's more like a hapless No. 2 in The Prisoner. I hope there are plenty of prisoners on his island who continue to get his goat.) If he were an American, Two-tier Kier would be a Baby Boomer. Maybe he is in his native land, too. Like H.G. Wells, he's a Fabian socialist. As we know, there are only two kinds of socialists, the evil kind and the stupid kind. I don't think he's evil.
When I wrote about Joy Division in 2024, I made note of the fact that people have associated the group with fascism. I'm sure those same kinds of people will say that Amelia is also fascistic and that she is being used by fascists for their fascistic purposes. As we know, too, anything we disagree with is automatically fascist--no argument, debate, or analysis required. Amelia's wearing of a Joy Division t-shirt would seem to confirm her fascism.
Joy Division's first chart hit was "Love Will Tear Us Apart," which was released in June 1980, after lead singer Ian Curtis had killed himself the month before. If I interpret a quotation I found on Wikipedia correctly, drummer Stephen Morris said that the band was inspired in the composition of their song not only by Frank Sinatra and the American group Sparks but also by the song "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" by Sarah Brightman of all things. The video for "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was shot in a dark, decaying place. The video for "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" is bright and science-fictional. The reference in the title of the latter is of course to Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers, from 1959. People who see fascists everywhere, even under their own beds, believe that Heinlein was a fascist and Starship Troopers a really fascisticky book. This must be further evidence that Joy Division were fascistic. (1)
Joy Division is considered a post-punk or punk-inspired band. I can't go into punk music here. I don't know enough about it and there isn't enough space. I have already taken up enough in today's entry and will take up a lot more, as you will see. (I could split it, but I would like for all of what I write to be together.) But to me, punk is part anger, and it seems to me that it is descended in part from the Angry Young Men of 1950s British literature. I could be wrong about that. Let me know if I am and how I might better interpret these things. (2)
Keir Starmer was born in 1962, or about the time that the decade of the Angry Young Men ended and that of the unrelated or not-closely-related or maybe-closely-related decade of British New Wave science fiction began. Mr. Starmer seems weak and hesitant to me. Nonetheless, he seems to share in the Angry-Young-Man desire to tear down traditional British society and culture, only in a somewhat slow Fabian way rather than in a fast-motion radical way. He may not be capable of that himself, but he can import people who are, and that's probably good enough for him and his fellow-travelers. If his country falls after he dies--Mr. Starmer is an atheist after all--what does he care? Anyway, what he and people like him fail to understand is the same thing that the Mensheviks failed to understand about the Bolsheviks, which is that less ruthless people will forever fall prey to their more ruthless counterparts. Put another way, once the revolution is accomplished, the man-of-words- or man-of-ideas-type revolutionary is always the first to be stood up against the wall. The ruthless man-of-action-type revolutionary always wins out. The radical always shoots the comparative moderate. In this example, the Green will prevail in the Europeans' perceived Red-Green Alliance, and I don't mean Green of the radical environmentalist type, even if the two Greens are now forming alliances. (3)
Tearing down and overthrowing tradition is of course part of the socialistic or progressive program. But there are those who don't really care about building anything new in its place. Their anger and desire to destroy are everything that they have. Maybe some of the early punk rockers were like that. Angry people can tear down or undermine things in a fierce and angry way. They can also do it in a funny and angry way. The point is that prominent people who were once angry and destructive, or angry and funny, or angry and musically creative have since become what powerful people call fascists if only because they want to preserve their country for their own countrymen and culture. John Cleese appears to be in that category. So does Morrissey. I'm sure there are others. (4) J.K. Rowling isn't in the (extremely) angry or (at all) destructive category, but she has been called a fascist, too.
You don't have to be famous to be labeled a fascist, though. All you have to be is a lover of your own country and culture. (5) All you have to want is not to be deprived of your rights; to have your reputation or livelihood ruined; or to be oppressed, silenced, impoverished, imprisoned, attacked, molested, raped, stabbed, or murdered by the State or its imported myrmidons. If you were anti-establishment in 1976, you might have stomped on, torn up, or defaced the Union Jack. If you are anti-establishment fifty years later, you wave it. That or St. George's flag.
Maybe what we need is for great numbers of Americans continuously and systematically to discomfit, oppose, and offend the British government on behalf of its own people, whom it has silenced and subjugated, and who risk imprisonment just for speaking their minds--or the truth. (6)
We ought to overthrow those who want to overthrow everything--here, in the British Isles, in the rest of the English-speaking world--for the real revolution of the twenty-first century is against the revolutionaries who have finally reached the highest levels of power after so much striving. They used to be on the other side of things, or imagine that they were. Maybe they romanticized themselves that way. Maybe they were once angry young men, filled with punk-era fury. Now they seem tired, but not too tired to oppress the common people who disagree with them. I have read that we live in a post-democratic era in which the people get to vote, and yet their votes mean nothing. Any change cannot be permitted if the governing elite are to retain their power, prestige, and status.
Maybe what we need is a new punk music, a new punk culture, a new punk society, more powerfully anti-establishment than it was fifty years ago. Amelia is calling.
One last thing: Joy Division and New Order have finally made it into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, such as it is. Their induction has been announced in the month that I write, April 2026, the same month in which King Charles III has made his happy visit to our shores. Joy Division was formed fifty years ago, in June 1976, so Happy Anniversary, Joy Division!
Notes
(Including two notes that are essays in themselves.)
(1) According to music journalist Jon Savage, Ian Curtis was interested in "romantic and science-fiction literature." One of the songs on the Joy Division album Closer (1980) is called "The Atrocity Exhibition" after J.G. Ballard's experimental novel of the same name published ten years before. Five of its chapters were first in New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock. The title story "The Atrocity Exhibition" was originally in New Worlds in September 1966, so sixty years ago. Mr. Moorcock's essay in that issue was "Why So Conservative?" That's an intriguing title, given today's topic. Unfortunately, I can't read it in any source available to me.
Anyway, on the other side of things, record producer Martin Hannett described the Joy Division sound as "dancing music with Gothic overtones." And now I think: could there have been a Gothic/science-fictional convergence in Anglo-American culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s? Could New Wave-type science fiction, with its Gothic, Romantic, or weird-fictional tone, themes, imagery, protagonists, and so on have been a forerunner to such a convergence? If there was such a convergence, it seems to have happened not only in literature but also in music. Whatever might have happened, a new sub-genre of science fiction emerged at that time. Named after a short story by Bruce Bethke (1983), exemplified by a novel by William Gibson (1984), and popularized by Gardner Dozois, it is of course cyberpunk, and so now we're back to punk music . . .
I have noticed how romantic much of the British music of the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s is, for example "Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)" by A Flock of Seagulls (1982), "Thieves Like Us" by New Order (1984), "Be Near Me" by ABC (1985), and "I Melt with You" by Modern English (1982), even if the last alludes to nuclear war. (In the video, singer Robbie Grey wears a Nazi-like hat. One of the members of Depeche Mode wears a similar hat in a video for "New Life.") Now I find that there was supposedly a reaction to punk music among musicians and singers called the New Romantics. (I try not to put much stock in what I have called genrefication, either in literature or music.) Their name echoes that of Mr. Gibson's Neuromancer, or vice versa. Spandau Ballet and Roxy Music are associated with the New Romantics. Like Joy Division, the name Spandau Ballet is connected to Nazis and concentration camps. Meanwhile, Bryan Ferry got himself into trouble talking about Nazis. Both he and Tony Hadley, lead singer of Spandau Ballet, are conservative. I guess all of that makes them fascistic, too.
I tell you, once you make a start in the Wikipedia-ziation of your research, you'll find that there is no end. And once you start calling people fascists, there's no end to that, either, because nobody is ever going to agree with you on everything, and like I said in a previous paragraph, anything we disagree with is automatically fascist.
(2) There are lots of confluences between punk music and things about which I have written lately, including 1976 as "year zero" in punk music, as well as anarchistic, nihilistic, leftist, and utopian strains in that music and culture. Remember that Michael Moorcock wrote an essay called "Starship Stormtroopers," dated 1977. If it had been a punk song instead of an essay on science fiction, "Starship Stormtroopers" would have come to us from Year One.
(3) At a march of the religion of pieces in East London late last year, a young leftwing British numbskull said to one of the marchers, "We're on the same side, bro." The man, dressed all in black, including a mask, replied, "No we're not," and marched on.
(4) I don't know anything about the politics of Pet Shop Boys, if they have any politics, but their song and video "West End Girls," from the mid-1980s, seem impossible now. That world from only forty years ago has disappeared as if it never existed. The video seems to have come from another planet. Any of the concerns of the pre-invasion 1980s--the concerns of British singers, musicians, and fans; of all of those East End boys and West End girls; moreover of every young Briton of the past, including of the punk scene--have been completely wiped away, displaced by new concerns, that is if young people are aware enough to have them, which is what Amelia and her appeal are all about, I think. Maybe the young people of today have been called to action against the betrayals of the older generations. And, yes, Boomers, you're among the older generations now, and, yes, many of you have betrayed young people in the worst way.
The music of the past is still young and new. The records and photos and videos from those times are like the figures on Keats' Grecian urn:
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
Ian Curtis and the voices and images of all who lived on will be "for ever young" and they will be forever for the young. In contrast, the image of pudgy leftist Boomer Anthony Albanese in a Joy Division t-shirt is comical, ironic, and cringe, all at the same time, especially considering that he is now powerful, now part of the establishment, now an oppressor. Amelia wears it much better. She may be made only of electrons, but she represents real human beings. She represents youth. For older people to wear youth like a costume is an offense. In the language of the left, it's an act of cultural appropriation. Wearing youth like a costume is an especial offense considering that the establishment is against youth, for it wants to take away young people's freedoms. In 1981, Triumph, a Canadian band, sang, in the voice of the listener, "I'm young now, I'm wild now, I want to be free." A half generation before, The Monkees, an American band, sang their part: "We must be what we're goin' to be/And what we have to be is free," and: "(In this generation)/We gotta be free." Both songs link youth to a yearning to be free. Young people will forever sing such songs, and too many older people will forever do their best to deny them. When you're a traitor to youth, you don't get to claim youth. Take off your Joy Division t-shirt. It's not for you. Once you begin oppressing, brutalizing, exploiting, mutilating, raping, and murdering babies, children, and young people, or once you countenance those things, you have given up on your youth. You have thrown it behind you in rags. You are undeserving of everything that rightfully belongs to the young.
By the way, some people describe Amelia as "goth." That fits in with what I have been writing about and will write about in terms of Gothic and Romantic reactions. Look for more of that in the series to follow.
Update: After I wrote this entry, above and below, the United Kingdom had its local elections. Labour was pretty much slaughtered. Amelia made another appearance a couple of days after that. In a video, she has Prime Minister Shtarker dressed up like a British schoolgirl and delivers him to the type of men who have preyed upon British schoolgirls for many years now, the same type of men who are protected--if not encouraged in their predations--by the British establishment at its various levels. I don't like AI anything, but sometimes it can be useful.
I write these things and Americans talk about them not because we are against the British people but because we are for them. They--you--have given us so much and have so much more to offer the world, not least of which is your music. We do not wish you to be destroyed or for you to destroy yourselves. We want you to turn back another invasion from the Continent. We want you not to make a shameful conquest of yourselves. We want your history, culture, and nation to be preserved and to thrive. We want you here with us instead of our standing alone in the world. We want you not to become Airstrip One or a new caliphate.
(5) If you think that culture is a Nazi codeword, please get a grip, and I don't mean on your revolver.
(6) Update: Now I find that the U.S. government is setting up a website for just that purpose. We'll see how it goes.
Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
