Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero: A Post-Iran War American Dystopia Set in 2020

From Jonesreport.com "I thought about what was at the forefront of my concern...the state of being an American citizen, a lot of concern about the direction our country is headed in. Kind of the erosion of freedoms that it seems like we're experiencing and the way we treat the rest of the world and our own citizens felt like something I needed to comment on." -Trent Reznor Best-selling industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails' latest album, Year Zero, delves into new ground. For the first time, the group's front man and primary writer, Trent Reznor, focuses mainly on politics. He seems to be jumping headfirst into a game of politics with the resistance party. However, he does so not just with the album's music, but also numerous accompanying multimedia-- Reznor has thrown a private concert, scattered random tracks in random locations, made websites, all above and beyond the album itself. And it’s all about his message of resistance. Reznor covers nearly all the bases: The war on terror, the military industrial complex, the death of America from the loss of liberty, and the resultant New World Order. Reznor even had a flag made to represent the resistance against the NWO (see top). The video to the album's first single, Survivalism, shows, in all its Orwellian glory, cameras in black and white strategically located around town displaying people in the bathroom, watching TV, having sex, preparing to vandalize a wall with graffiti, and finally, there’s Nine Inch Nails performing the song in a dingy room. There are CCTV cameras everywhere now, not just in public places. What should be private is public and worse, the people either don't realize they are being watched or have become accustomed to living without privacy. The video to the first single-- Survivalism-- featuring a dystopic world viewed through invasive and completely pervasive CCTV cameras (note: this external link contains some graphic imagery and that of a nightmarish police state) It seems that in this world-- projected 15 years into the future, in 2022-- the USA has turned into Nazi Germany and privacy is a thing of the past. After a minute into the video, a police force wearing all black uniforms can be seen working their way around town, as if they are preparing to foil some terrorist plot. Meanwhile, a group of vandals can be seen, slowly working out the details of their plan, each step recorded on film. It seems the graffiti artists have it coming to them. When the Gestapo force finally counters the insurgents, it turns out it was actually NIN the police were after. The video concludes with a member of the band dragged out with a line of blood following him. The cameras in the room the band was playing in have been destroyed or shut off. This is the way this dystopia deals with insurgency and resistance. It’s how the USA might deal with resistance if we ever start enforcing the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act. Some people may say that it will never get that bad. People would start listening before it got too bad. I’d have to disagree. Most contemporary news reports concerning some kind of defeat of the Constitution or liberty either side with the government or take a neutral stance. Groups that speak out about liberty such as the ACLU, CASPIAN, and the EFF are routinely labeled "privacy advocates" and written off in a paragraph or two, and a lot of the time it’s near the end, after most people have either stopped reading or already made up their minds. The mainstream media acts as if only certain groups of people care about privacy and freedom, like it’s not what the USA was founded upon. This is their way of filtering and spinning a report to make people feel that the ‘normal’ or ‘sober’ approach is not that of privacy, a way of alienating Americans from the essence of what it means to be American. Loss of Liberty This opensourceresistance image shows how America is dying and that loss of liberty is the key to one-world government. Now looking at the album itself, the lyrics seem to be obsessed with premonitions of the future and Reznor's resistance to it. The setting is the USA, in the year 2022. As evidenced by the video for Survivalism, the Constitution has been eviscerated and a new dark age of oppression has emerged. In My Violent Heart, Reznor defiantly screams, “on hands and knees we crawl, you scan not stop us all,” and in Survivalism, “I got my propaganda, I got revisionism, I got my violence, in hi-def ultra-realism. All a part of this great nation; I got my fist I got my plan I got survivalism.” Translation: the constant lies fed to the people by the media are devoured by the masses and you have to fight it just to survive. Reznor forecasts the year 2022 seemingly in an attempt to make people aware of the end point. The incremental, systematic collapse of our Constitution today makes it difficult to see what is happening. Just do a search on Google for “population reduction” or “echelon” or “Patriot Act” and you’ll discover Reznor is not dreaming too deeply. The album is dark with a grinding, synthetic industrial sound-- typical of Nine Inch Nails, yet it is full of substance and energy. It has its highpoint with Hyperpower!, a progressive chant that grows and grows until it roars like millions of screaming people, and its low point with Another Version of the Truth, a melodic and calmingly enchanting piece with simple sounds of a piano and a synth. There is a consistent underlying theme maintained throughout the record of a gloomy future dystopia and all its minutiae. Songs are rife with sentiments long held by 9/11 truthers and anti-establishment types, such as Capital G: Don't give a sh*t about the temperature in Guatemala Don't really see what all the fuss is about Ain't gonna worry bout no future generations and a I'm sure somebody's gonna figure it out Here Reznor marginalizes global warming, stating that if and when a real problem develops, we'll take care of it. This is very contrary to articles like those in the Washington Post forecasting , “…global temperatures will probably rise 4 degrees Celsius over the next century. If so, catastrophic flooding, famine and water shortages may follow, along with the extinction of up to half of existing animal species...fortunately, there is such a solution…It’s called a carbon tax, and it should be applied across the board to every industry that uses fossil fuels, every home or building with a heating system, every motorist, and every public transportation system.” How dare Reznor defy the mainstream media? It’s not like the global warming scare is torn to shreds in films like the Great Global Warming Swindle or anything. No, people should believe the nightly news. They are not fear mongers. They have “top” scientists. The continual warfare of Orwell’s 1984 is alive and well in Year Zero. In The Good Soldier, Reznor sings about his terror-filled vision of America in the future: Gun fire in the street Where we used to meet Echoes out a beat and the bass goes Bomb right over my head Step over the dead Reznor also imagines a Bureau of Morality, a branch of the government that will monitor behavior and thoughts to a whole new level. With this new Bureau, imagines Reznor, the government will truly begin to act as the parent, telling citizens what is right and wrong, especially concerning thoughts about the government. Ironically, Reznor has put a warning from the "USBM" mocking the FBI’s anti-piracy warning on the back of the Year Zero CD case: Interestingly, the number actually dials, connecting to a recording: “This is a message from the United States Bureau of Morality, pursuant to statute 24-12-2, Disclosure of Surveillance. Citizen: by calling this number, you and your family are implicitly pleading guilty to the consumption of anti-American media and have been flagged as potential militants. The United States Bureau of Morality has activated the tracking system embedded in your personal media, and initiated citizen surveillance. United States surveillance law gives us the right to search and seize information relating to subversive activities from your person, vehicle, workplace or home. Any attempt to hinder or prevent our investigation will be met with all necessary force. You are now part of the problem. Your reeducation is about to begin. God bless America.” But everything up to this point is soft compared to the website that the CD links a buyer to, exterminal.net. The consumer incentives are chocked full of artsy gimmicks-- the CD has a special thermo-chrome heat-sensitive coating that changes its face when heated (see video demonstration), displaying binary code that translates roughly into exterminal.net. The website contains lots of political tidbits about the hellish future where everyone is a terror suspect, and people who have alternative viewpoints are criminals. It also talks about Guantanamo Bay or, as it calls it, "the Extrajudiciary Federal Detainment Camp, Guam." Police and surveillance state Interrogation sessions are on the site as well, chronicling what it would be like to be sent there. The interrogation for J. Markakis refers to a drug put into the water called Parepin, alluding to the Soma tablets in a Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. For those not familiar, Soma was the drug distributed by the government to ensure people kept in line with the system, the opiate of the masses. Exterminal.net also includes random documents, such as a letter from the Bureau of Morality, notifying Elliot Carraig that his "citizenship total" has been decreased and that he has lost his "credit." It seems that Reznor envisions a world in which the government can take anything away from you at any time for any reason, and that everything will be connected by a points system. This could be a possible cashless society. All in all, Reznor seems to have taken the world from Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World and modernized it with things like the internet and Guantanamo Bay (Ministry of Love anyone?). If there is any doubt up to this point that Reznor is serious, let the website http://opensourceresistance.net/ be examined. True to its name, much of the content is user generated, and the band's concept album seems to support the content more than the other way around. Filled with posters and slogans about freedom and resistance, there is a video available in QuickTime or streaming flash formats, “rescued raw footage,” in which around 50 people are brought into a warehouse setting wherein a man gets up on stage and schools the people about the Military Commissions and Patriot Acts. Then he tells them to "wake up," which is a phrase distinctly 9/11 truth (and lifting imagery from the equally dystopic A Clockwork Orange). What does this have to do with Trent Reznor? After about 20 minutes or so, the people are whisked away and then music starts playing. Suddenly, a stage can be seen and the wall opens up to allow for a private concert by Nine Inch Nails, which is eventually broken up by police. Let it be known this is not a coincidence; this is clearly orchestrated largely by NIN. There is no denying the message of opensourceresistance.net: the government desires to take our freedoms away supposedly to fight terrorism, but they are not trustworthy. Really, it’s about the introduction of the terrorism concept to then expand on it until it replaces the concept of crime completely, turning everyone into a terrorist, ushering in new treatment of would be criminals, in that all of their rights are lost and everything is a privilege arbitrarily given by the government, not God given and government protected. Posters can be found in the broadcasts and submitted sections that delve further into the sentiment of the Year Zero project. One poster demonstrates how an idea can be spread by just one person, infesting the entire world. This example shows the New World Order, the one-world government idea. Information is Infectous There are 10,000 (as of 2005) of these in London's central business district alone and about 4,000,000 in the UK. This means many Londoners are taped up to 300 times a day whether they are aware of it or not, like it or not. This site is just replete with evidence of anti-NWO sentiment; there is no way to cover it all. Just this one website covers many of the issues that Americans should be concerned about: the loss of privacy thru the use of cameras, government propaganda, America's death, the birth of the NWO, warnings from history and dystopic novels, the paranoia of the US citizens and their government, China's one-child policy, freedom of speech and religion, nonviolent resistance, prisoner abuse, and making a difference by waking up and voicing concerns. Please join the war on tyranny. Please “wake up and give a sh*t.” Reznor's Nine Inch Nails are commendable for speaking out-- as few truly huge music acts have been doing in this era. Other such mainstream music groups in this vein include Muse (who have stated their belief that 9/11 was an inside job) and Radiohead's Thom Yorke, who has not been quite so explicit, but has called for Tony Blair's immediate resignation. Perhaps NIN's interactive method of disseminating relevant info will help fight the New World Order before our world meets this grim vision-- perhaps as soon as 15 years into the future. While there have been talks of a movie, a follow-up release, tentatively titled Year Zero Part 2, is due out sometime in 2008.

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