Nigel Farage is a fascist. Tommy Robinson is a fascist. Donald Trump is a fascist. This term, among many others, has been shooting from lips like bullets from muskets in the front lines of an infantry. At first, such terms were supposed to fire at volleys, in regimented formation, at the command of the officers. In practice, however, as battle ensues, each soldier fires a musket at their own discretion. Which of course brings total confusion to the battlefield, soldiers being enveloped by the smoke of the discharged rounds, hindering accurate shooting. Fire at will!
Language suffers most of all in this melee because what we are left with is a smoky vagueness. Let me explain. This is the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of fascism:
“An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization”
Here’s dictionary.com’s definition:
“A governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce etc, and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism”
Wikipedia:
“Fascism is a form of radical right-wing, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe”
There’s a great deal of debate in academia over what fascism really means, but the one thing that everyone agrees upon is that it involves authoritarianism. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of authoritarianism:
“The enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom”
The prerequisite to qualify for this description is to either be in power or to advocate for it in a way that will subdue personal freedom.
How can Nigel Farage be a fascist when he is a leader of a minor political party, and is unlikely to be in power for at least several cycles given the fabric of the British political system? How can he be a fascist when his political position over many years has essentially been at odds with a political power which has refused to acknowledge the will of the majority of the British people?
Tommy Robinson has no power and is in fact the subject of power, Big Tech removing him from their platforms under increasingly draconian hate speech laws, which are effectively suppressing the freedom of speech under the guise of “tolerance”. He has also recently served a custodial sentence, being found guilty of contempt of court by the British justice system for exposing decades long child rape gangs, something covered up by other branches of the British justice system, for which he already served 10 weeks in jail.
As for Donald Trump, he does have the power to qualify for the term, but unlike Big Tech, he is not enforcing strict etiquette in the modern marketplace of ideas, nor monopolizes it.
These huge companies have power and they’re exhibiting striking signs of authoritarianism by curtailing personal freedom through censorship. As is the British justice system, which is swiftly prosecuting someone who has exposed endemic corruption within the system, rather than swiftly prosecuting those who were preying on children. These profiles are more befitting of the term “fascist”.
The entire political discourse is awash with insults and accusations. A fog bank of pejoratives sweeps in, blurring meaning and covering up understanding. If those engaged in political debate are using words so flippantly and without context how can anyone comprehend the debate itself?
Indeed, many political words have been so abused by dishonest and slovenly use that they’ve lost their original meaning. Terms like ‘fascism’, ‘far-right’, ‘racism’, ‘nationalism’, have become so broad and vague that they can hardly be distinguished from one another, like the polished stones on a riverbed which have been eroded by time and the torrent of water. As far as I can tell, in terms of use, they all now essentially mean the same thing: “something deeply unpleasant”. But, clearly, it’s those who are quick to use inflammatory labels who are the most unpleasant.
It’s axiomatic that in an intellectual tussle the first person who throws stones always loses. Not that those who try to control the lexicon are interested in winning debates. Their interest lies in suppressing them.
The funny thing about religion is that many of those who seem to be most swept up in it are those who believe it to be a fraud. At least that seems to be the case in our secular society. To be faithful today is to live in a hall of mirrors. For every person who believes their faith to be self-evidently true, in reverse images, there is a multiplication of those who equally believe that faith to be self-evidently false.
“Evidence!” is the cry from the Secularists. “We must have evidence”. This would appear an eminently reasonable demand if the Secularists themselves didn’t believe in a whole multitude of things that have not a shred of evidence. Haughty and muddled, they are like Stavrogin who “if he believes, he does not think he believes. If he does not believe, he does not think he does not believe” (‘Demons’ Fyodor Dostoevsky).
Because they are not commonly anchored by what they are, but unanchored by that which they are not, secular positions can be like shifting sand dunes in a desert. It’s an arid, barren land starved by mere repudiation. Nothing much of value grows there. If it does, it doesn’t survive long. The flowers that do survive tend to be the result of thousands of years of combined thought, not a few decades worth of musings from a sect of secular clerics; they tend to grow farther away from pedants and their explanations, and nearer to the souls of simple people.
Our ancestors instinctively understood that the soul of discovery is a story, and the soul of a story is a personality. It was inclusive. Narratives and evocative stories are much easier to follow than, say, the existential phenomenology of Heidegger or the deconstructionism of Derrida. But in the same way the longshore drift at a coastline is constantly changing the fabric of the environment, rationalism eroded religious beliefs in proportion to the new secular illusions that took their place. Instead of warm metaphorical treasures it has left us with cold abstractions.
Many come to cherish them, holding them to their hearts as their forefathers did with their own foundational tales. And since they have a thirst for Truth, this is also a thirst for God, so they too have had their reward of illumination. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophers that reward is the completion of the incomplete. Because it doesn’t consider what Camus noted as the absurdity of the human condition. These truths are therefore no more eternal than those they dethroned. And they are no more objective. Because we can’t separate ourselves from the meaning of the universe any more than a dramatist can separate themselves from the meaning of a play.
If you want to learn about somebody’s morality, you’d do better to watch them in their private moments than to study their public pronouncements. Similarly, in the quest for Truth, I should think you’re more likely to find it in the unconscious conduct of simple people than you are in textbooks. More in the fables, which are the unconscious masterpieces of humanity, than in academic definitions. Those may be, on the face of it, of a more exceptional character, but by putting a premium on the exceptional, in terms of Truth, we grossly underestimate the unconsciousness of the normal.
For example, if Moses had said he saw God as infinite energy, I should think words were being put in his mouth. As he said he saw a burning bush, the event has more resonance. It also seems more reasonable that Moses found the one true God on a mountain, than if he had said: “Energy is eternal; it’s a pervasive and impalpable essence which connects all things”. If he had said this, I’d think it more probable that he had taken a lecture in quantum physics than conversed with God.
Bronze age stories are quickly dismissed for being the crude imaginings of simple folk. Yet despite their seeming improbability they stand the test of time. And are even, in some respects, reinforced by the sophisticated cogitations of advanced science. I wonder, will Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity stand the test of time?
Religion is criticised by Secularists as being an archaic method of population control. Yet they would have to admit that there are certain views of certain things that they must take, even if their private thoughts happen to conflict with convention. Which is a set of beliefs in the same way religion is a set of beliefs. As ever, the more diffuse the belief, the more likely it is that it derives from or is buttressed by that class of persons with the greatest reach. So, in the interests of fairness, are we to criticise notions like “diversity is our strength” and “the war on terror” as being methods of population control?
There are many mutually incompatible religions, say the Secularists, so what does that incompatibility say about religion? There are many archetypal stories. If they were more unique, they would be less archetypal. One example would be two brothers fighting over a woman; another, lovers separated by Fate. Are we to suppose that because these stories are common to Legend, brothers were never estranged over a woman or lovers parted by circumstance? These stories are surely not made more improbable by their recurrence; rather, point to a hidden truth about what it is to be human.
There are a variety of theories for an ideal society. From Plato’s Republic to More’s Utopia. And on the most equitable distribution of power. From Hobbes’ Leviathan to Rousseau’s The Social Contract. They all share certain themes – the desire for the betterment of the social condition – and oppose each other in certain others – the elusive formula in how we are to reach this standard. But surely the abundance of mutually incompatible theories is not preclusive of society ever improving social conditions. If anything, like the Bible, they suggest the human tendency to yearn for a better condition.
The Three Wise Men’s Hope for something better was embodied by an eternal and majestic light in the dusk, which they followed to Divinity, but many Secularists fall under the influence of that starry impulse which leads people to take a great deal of trouble about quite useless and passing things. As society is itself predominantly secularist this impulse has become quite feverish. In fact, opinions often read like a list of symptoms. As if we were all huddled together like inmates on Poveglia island, people do not form these opinions; the opinions form themselves.
Disavowing religion as dogma, the modern world, the product of the enlightenment, ridicules the ascetic monk in a monastery as an eccentric madman; but as the whole modern world would now seem like a lunatic asylum, one might almost be driven, in the pursuit of sanity, to take refuge in a monastery.
We rightly shudder at the blood-soaked religious fanaticism of the past. Many of us think that religion must be bad because it leads men to do wicked things. But causes are of a different nature to results. It is perfectly possible that the cause was just and the effect unjust. After all, people commit crimes for good and bad reasons. The peasants of France, who had liberté, égalité, fraternité upon their lips, a motto inspired by the likes of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, were full of good reasons for social reform in the run up to the French Revolution; but the eruption of anger and violence that ensued, less so.
Fanaticism has nothing to do with religion. There are philosophical theories which can produce enough fanaticism to fill the world. Over 100 million people were slaughtered by their own governments in the 20th century, more than all the wars combined. You would think the philosophy behind this carnage would be renounced by all and sundry; but many Secularists, though they will be quick to denounce religion as harmful nonsense, are equally quick to approve the varied produce of this philosophy as anything but harmful nonsense.
Perhaps it would be erroneous to distinguish religion and philosophy in many instances. Most sincere attitudes take on a religious bent. Indeed, in many cases the complete loss of religious belief has made political positions become quasi-religious. Frequently, these are not arguments about society. They are statements about absolute values. They are ideals about how we should live our lives. This is not a debate where evidence is adduced – if you disagree you are considered fundamentally wicked. Because people are now treating their political opinions as though they were creedal formulations; to dissent from them is heresy.
Much of this is done under the banner of “tolerance”. While some people really are tolerant, clearly others are fearful and tired. How many is hard to say. Since alternative views are rarely given a significant platform, nor expressed. But judging from a strong undercurrent of online frustration, it appears modern tolerance is as deaf as intolerance.
But all this is very familiar. When something is put before enough people that seems enormously valuable, the chance of having it, the chance of losing it, can drive them quite mad. It has a similar effect in the moral world as pursuing gold in the economic world. It can create a kind of gold rush. People want to reach Nirvana ahead of their fellows. And are extremely disdainful of those who don’t want to reach it at all.
Though this story is as old as the hills, its age doesn’t make what it reveals about human nature any less true. We have an innate need for justice and meaning. A need for purity and perfection. A need to transcend the limitations of self. A predilection for in-group conformity and out-group belligerence. We are predisposed to crusade for these things. But while the ancients had the humility to supress their ego, the wisdom to not put themselves at the centre of the drama and to be subordinate to something much greater, the gold hunters of today seek wealth in their own name, not His; they don’t do it for His glory, they do it for their own.
This is a huge difference and one I thought that was worth mentioning.
The One Thousand and One Nights is framed by the story of Scheherazade, the beautiful daughter of the vizier to the Sasanian King. The King’s heart has been darkened by his wife’s infidelities. He’s concluded that if she was so pure and still betrayed him all women must be incorrigibly wicked. After sentencing his beloved to death, the King, Shahryār instructs his vizier to provide him with a virgin to marry, only to have her executed the morning after their wedding night. What follows is a succession of marriages and executions in the same vein, bleeding the kingdom dry of young women. In a bid to save the remaining maidens, Scheherazade decides to marry the King, to which her father reluctantly agrees. She has a plan. On their wedding night she begins to tell a rich and imaginative fable but does not end it. This forces Shahryār to postpone her execution if he wants to hear the end of her story. The following night she ends the first story, then starts a second one, again stopping halfway through to trigger Shahryār’s curiosity. This goes on for one thousand and one nights, hence the name. All the stories of the Arabian Nights are housed within this tale with Scheherazade as the narrator.
Like all good stories the Arabian Nights embodies more than just its internal structure. For instance, Scheherazade’s plight is a metaphor for life: without change life’s not possible. And it’s noteworthy that all the stories, which characterise the vast ambit of human experience, are contained within this truism that life must be in a state of constant renewal and rejuvenation to stave off stagnation and death.
To stay enthralled we must seek new experiences, for what is new is already gathering up dust, and what is gathering up dust will soon be replaced by the new. Life is motion and change inevitable. To live a happy and rewarding life is rather like a riding a bicycle. It’s much easier to remain seated on a moving bicycle than it is a sedentary one.
In order to truly be alive there must always be enthusiasm for the new, the modern; there must be incessant excitement about what’s around the corner; about new shoes, new dresses and shirts; new trinkets, new styles, and new ideas. Enthusiasm is the winepress of the soul, without which we can sink into despair. Like Scheherazade, if we don’t tell a new story every day we’ll perish; we’ll lose our vitality and freshness because a fast-flowing river has fresher water than a bird bath.
Fashion is the fetishization of change. For the aforementioned reasons, there’s an instinctive pull to drink from the fountain of youth; but most of all, it’s because fashion carries social distinction. To be fashionable implies a certain amount of wealth and privilege, as it is an abiding feature of the downtrodden that they are too often submerged under a flood of toil to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily struggle for air. People who have been chopping wood all day, or cleaning floors, don’t have the energy to explore new fashionable ideas on gender identity, nor the wealth to buy the latest threads from Milan. But those who can proudly pour forth torrents of song, showing off their virtuosity with rhapsodies of new-fangledness.
The one essential of fashion is to be ahead of its age. That is, there must be something new known only to a few. It must be modern. To be admitted into its great hall of distinction there must be a password that can’t be easily obtained or deduced. And the password must be in a state of flux, lest the uninitiated rapidly become the initiated. Because when the age fully catches up what was once fashionable ceases to mark initiates out for distinction.
Fashion’s race is over when the greyhound catches the hare. In order to avoid slipping back into the great body of humanity, the propelled mechanical hare must always be in advance of the greyhound. Which is to say that a key component of what is fashionable is its artificiality, for naturality might rapidly be caught; it must be somewhat irrational, for if it were rational it would be too easily calculated; and it must also be impractical, for if it were practical it would be altogether common. There are ironical fashions but the sole qualifier of these is the irony. Because the whole point of fashion is to not be of low status; it is to not be poor, economically or socially. There’s a similar dynamic going on in the quite arbitrary and mystifying rituals of the upper-class, which are intended to confer selective prestige and social importance.
Societal problems start to occur when the balance between structure and change is disrupted. Too little change is suggestive of an oppressive society; it is stifling, crippling. Too much change is suggestive of a decadent one; it is muddled, chaotic. Presently, our secular liberal society fits snugly into this latter category.
In the past a small caste of eccentric Bohemian types, whose long leisurely hours combined with substantial wealth and privilege, were a driving force behind many new fads and philosophies. Today’s consumer society has provided the conditions which has engineered a much larger class of would be Bohemians.
Essentially, in our industrial age the increased capacity for production has demanded increased consumption. Because economic expansion entails the increased freedom of how to make your money and, crucially, the increased freedom of what to spend your money on. Moreover, technological advances, and civilisation’s dominion over the world’s resources, means that, in most cases, people are consuming far more than they are producing.
A very rudimentary understanding of economics will inform you that unhappy spendthrifts create employment and growth, and contented misers, unemployment and decline. Thus, in order to remain economically competitive, liberal society has had to largely obliterate timeless wisdoms, such as prudence, temperance and responsibility, replacing them with desire of the flesh, idolatry and a whole litany of confused causes. Which is why the Gods worshipped by societal planners of this age lack the metaphorical vison of their predecessors. They are as bland as the market efficiency principle and as sterile as cost-benefit analysis.
This unbridled consumerism has created in a large enough pool of society a corrosive mixture of indolence, extravagance and entitlement to precipitate a tumult of social reform. People have more time and energy and means to consume more and, thus, change more. And so, out of waste and luxury and lethargy, the sickness they call Progress came into the world.
Excessive consumption, in all things, is the hallmark of liberal society in the industrial age. Hence, people will take good ideas and will stretch them to their implausible extremes. Such ideas, on account of feeling modern and progressive, will quickly take on the tint of fashion. They’ll carry social credits.
But to invoke the God of Progress as a reason for reform, without fully anticipating the consequences, is to brag about the mere fact that today is not yesterday. To declare that today is better than yesterday is like sneering at a lady because of her age. An ideal which is simply modern is already becoming ancient. Death is staring at it in the face. Because new philosophies come and go like the clouds in the sky. Iridescent ethical systems come and go as often as the fashionable change their shoes. Simply because iridescence happens to be the defining characteristic.
Unless society is built on truisms it is not built at all. Clearly, there would be little safety in a society in which the remark that murder was wrong was open to debate. Similarly, there would be little certainty in a society in which every truth is enveloped in a subjective mist; in a society where there’s an insistence that no objective or absolute truth can be affirmed; in a society that isn’t even too sure what a man or woman is, so leaves it to individual men and women to define. But there can’t be a multiplication of personal truths for the same reason there can’t be a multiplication of the earth and sun and moon. Truth is eternal otherwise it’s not Truth.
Certainly, an idea is no truer for being modern than it is false for being modern. To wed truth with change is dangerous because every age has its follies, spurred on by forces inimical to reason and sound judgement. To wed truth with change is to not fully grasp the blinded fate of Progress to which every age unwinds.
Liberal consumerism undervalues moderation. Indeed, it can even be paradoxically immoderate when claiming to be moderate. But moderation and stability are not necessarily a limitation but a liberty, for they provide the structure and discipline to be able to hit out in all directions. Moderation acts as a reliable barometer which can measure extravagance. It will reveal a light if only in the long fantastic shadows that it throws from common things. Immoderation, however, leaves us only in a gloomy vagueness of shifting shadows. It will nurture a cultural stampede akin to wild buffalos on the western prairie.
Society will always grow riotous in a long period of decadence; a hurricane of change will sweep all before it, laying havoc on the very foundations upon which it was built. But at some point, the liberal economic clock, which has hitherto had such a mechanical influence on the minds of its members, will be wound back. Because tempests don’t go on forever; they blow themselves out, and usher in a period of calm. Like the perfect stillness of a morning after a ferocious night-time bombardment.
On this front, the conclusion to Scheherazade’s tale on the one thousand and first night of the Arabian Nights is, I think, most instructive. Having exhausted her reservoirs of imagination she enters the bed chamber with trepidation, fearing for her life. But Shahryār has long since fallen in love with her and spares her.
The meaning? With age we grow accustomed to the world, while some are young enough not to have grown accustomed to anything. We slow down, while younger generations are forever in a spin moving from one thing to the next in eager anticipation. The old are closer to death and are resistant to change because it starts to remind them of their own mortality. Whereas the young think themselves immortal and are resistant to structure because they are restless.
What is true of people is certainly true of epochs. Long periods of change incubate structure; long periods of structure incubate change. As sure as trees shedding their leaves in autumn and the flowers blossoming in spring.
We are approaching the one thousand and first night.
I expect many people won’t agree with what follows. But there seems little point in writing if the only objective is to imitate those around us, as if we were shadows on walls aping others’ movements. So much harm can come from this shadow dance. Not so much from what is said, but what is left unsaid. Because if we merely repeat what we consider to be the popular response, we will become a people who will be silent about many things.
It seems strange that I should have to qualify my support for the practice of rule by majority verdict. That it wouldn’t be the popular thing. Except it is. Our view of popularity is warped by the losers being much louder than the winners. By them thinking that they know better. But unless we respect other people’s opinions, we disavow our own, because in a democratic system neither can survive without respect, and they of course have no future without survival.
In recent times bashing democracy has become a popular pastime. Not a day goes by without the majority’s judgement being questioned, and without their choice being attacked. Many do so by invoking the spirit of the high ideals western civilisation has been built upon, including democracy itself. But in affirming democracy, it appears as if millions of people are actually rejecting democracy, without knowing the difference.
Democracy can’t succeed unless the losers concede defeat. What we have seen from some quarters is an increasing unwillingness to do so. A multitude of excuses have rained down on proceedings like a monsoon.
We have had personal scandals, Russian conspiracies, Ukrainian conspiracies, character assassinations, violence on the streets, rent-a-mob protests. And much else besides. We are led to believe that all of it is justified; that the establishment’s lamp is shining a light on corruption. But it’s as if the devil himself is lighting the lamp only to make everything appear as it is not. Because on both sides of the Atlantic nothing has come from these attempts other than an ongoing obstruction of government. In the US the failure to bring an administration down has certainly not been through a lack of will. In the UK efforts have been every bit as desperate, if only more civil.
In both countries what can only be described as the weaponisation of the legal system has been an unwelcome development. And for what? Either the winners’ heinousness is somehow escaping eagle-eyed justice, or the losers are emptying their arsenal of bad faith. But I would tentatively suggest that if these frenetic efforts had as much substance as billed, they would have met with more success than just the vitiation of democratic will.
Many have welcomed these interventions. Their bias has afflicted them with a feverish misapprehension that the law is the last bastion of justice; that it is the guardian of public interest. But anybody with a trace of common sense must know that legal processes will probably work against democracy, but quite certainly in favour of an oligarchy. In a society where power goes with wealth and where wealth is in an extreme state of inequality, extending the powers of the law means something quite different from extending the powers of the public.
If those with material wealth or position can muzzle those they disagree with in an electoral system, the public become little more than chimpanzees at the ballot box. As it is the vote is reduced to scrawling an illiterate X in one of two boxes. But now it appears as if it’s effectively an X in one box. Because if we so much as dare to put an X elsewhere we are treated as primates who are not able to follow simple instructions. Not only are our wishes not respected, we’re insulted for having them.
This has a destabilizing effect. People don’t like to be treated as fools. They prefer their abjection to have the character of self-determination.
Put simply, we either have a democracy or we don’t. If we desire a system that is genuinely democratic, public choice must be the means as well as the end. Otherwise we live in a system quite different. One in which people are told to keep their minds on their work, pay their taxes and leave matters of the state to the state.
It requires tacit and explicit consent for a small class to rule over a much larger class. The democratic process is part of that consent. When you toy with it, you toy with the very basis of the social contract itself. A house with rotten foundations will eventually crumble, for we should always remember that there is a marriage that cannot be endured by anybody or anything: to be overworked and neglected.
Neither can a house at war with itself survive. Indeed, the constant barrage of negative, sensationalist media coverage has achieved little but impede governance and inflame tensions. Every stone thrown has disrespected the vote of hundreds of millions of people. And more troublingly, its long-term effect will be to threaten salubrious dialogue. I think it’s no coincidence that society has become more polarised since electoral results started to go against the established order.
As for those presently siding with an anti-democratic power smarting from electoral defeat, they may get what they prefer in the short-term, but in the long-term the surrendering of popular consent to the expertise of a ruling class is very dangerous. Because what happens when it is their democratic wish superseded by ‘expert’ edict? It’s surely foolish to think that it won’t be. To forgo your democratic say for favoured short-term results is akin to wanting to trade real beauty in exchange for its appearance, like gold for bronze. One principle is ageless, the other will only have its moment in the sun, before it’s lost to Time’s Caprice.
“The democratic tendency… leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the rights of private persons… often sacrificed without regret and almost always violated without remorse… men become less and less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
If we want to retain our rights and freedoms, we must keep one eye open like a watch-dog and keep guard even when rested; we must remain ever attentive to the ruses of those who wish to subvert them; we must never grow complacent, always remembering how hard people worked for them and under what harsh conditions. Because a “[Citizens’] chief business… is to remain their own masters”.
The surest way of doing so is by the upkeep of a democratic system fit for purpose, by the people and for the people, with public servants accountable to the electorate they serve. The surest way of doing so is to not be a part of a process that constantly denigrates our fellow citizens, scolding them as if they were wayward children. We must at least consider that we sit in the same schoolroom as they do. I’m afraid that in such a world, if Truth and Honour are the objectives, it isn’t the children who receive gold stars who are the most enlightened.
In fact, if we are unable to assert ourselves by making meaningful democratic decisions, we may as well be tots in a nursery. In other words, if we lose the responsibility for these rudimentary functions and forms of freedom, we lose not only our citizenship, but our adulthood. You only have to take one look at the television and cinema listings to discover that we are championing this infantilization in more ways than one.
There’s not a huge number of positives to take from this infernal mess in the play pit, but at least the people paying attention should realise that the liberal establishment holds them in utter contempt. All people. Because wherever your loyalties lie, the attempt to cancel a vote is the attempt to cancel every single vote cast; an attempt to constantly hinder an administration, not through debate, but by slinging mud, is itself an attack on every single person. Because democracy isn’t simply the public’s opportunity to ratify what has already been agreed; nor to be induced, through the art of manipulation, into accepting it. For democracy to have any real meaning it is surely that the masses can go against the wishes of a governing class, and for their wishes to be respected.
“So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him”
– Will Durant, American writer, historian and philosopher
History’s a broken record because the forces that drive it never change. Always in affinity with what went before, everything in existence, material or immaterial, is the progeny of something else. Which is to say that there is never a clean break from the past. It’s always present. This is true of ideas and beliefs as it is the winds of political change.
Henry VIII
Recently Professor David Starkey drew a comparison between Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Church and Brexit. It’s fought over the same territory. It’s fought over jurisdiction. And it’s fought over the meaning and significance of sovereignty. You could go further and say that Brexit is analogous to the Reformation itself, which was the desire to practice one’s religion free from the restraints of a despotic regime naturally craving the fundamental characteristic of despotism: control.
In order to get his divorce from Catharine of Aragon, Henry is forced to sever religious and political ties with Rome. Because England is subordinate to a European court, to which it pays hefty subsides, which has already refused to grant him his request. The Roman Church’s hold over English affairs isn’t a forceful one, but a moral, political and economic one. In Tudor England there are Catholics whose loyalty remains with the ancient regime and attempt to thwart partition. Henry purges them and this purge continues right up until the English Civil War.
To do all of this, Henry, a formerly staunch Catholic, jumps on the coattails of an already established seditious movement, and uses it to seize power from the despotic Church.
If you replace Henry VIII with Boris Johnson, the Church with the European Union, ‘Remainers’ with Catholics and the seditious movement with Brexit, you will see close parallels with the political landscape of today.
The Reformation started with the subversive infiltration of Protestantism, but Brexit has been triggered as a result of the angry backlash to the apparent infiltration of the nation’s socio-economic-political structure with huge combinations of transnational capital and agents loyal to its bureaucratic institution, namely the European Union.
It should always be repeated that the country never voted to join the EU. In 1975 the country voted to join the European Economic Community (EEC), a vote which merely ratified the country having already entered in 1973. Since then more powers have been ceded in an ever closer political and economic union, with the EU in its current guise being established in 1993 after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which was followed by the Treaty of Amsterdam, Treaty of Nice and Treaty of Lisbon.
This transfer of more and more power through the backdoor represents a major, mostly silent reordering of the bonds that bind us. Of the social contract itself. The reason for this silence is that established power is asking the public to accept in practice what they know perfectly well they wouldn’t accept in theory. And though the conscious manipulation of the masses is an indispensable element of societal control, the current schism exposes the failure of silence and contrivance to steer public opinion away from an outdated belief system: the love of country.
This failure is responsible for the widening chasm between the beliefs of the liberal establishment and the bulk of the population, and between popular sovereignty and parliamentary sovereignty. And this is despite the current liberal establishment not daring to admit to what it believes. As a class they are non-literal Mohammedans who continue to wear the garb of Christ, observing the Eucharist while facing Mecca.
Taken as a whole (and considering the signing into soft law in December last year of the UN’s Global Compact for Migration, which creates an international structure of resettlement, with migrants having the right to settle where they please, national governments being encumbered to ensure they are safely housed and provided for and to enact legislation to criminalise as hate speech anyone who criticises mass immigration) you would have to conclude that the liberal establishment believes in the disintegration of the nation state. Of most nation states, for that matter. Which, by inference, points to a largely invisible, hegemonic global power, of which the EU is one head of the Hydra.
This isn’t democratic, how could it be? The centralisation of power over a vast area is to democracy what the Vatican is to religious self-determination.
Mutual ideas and beliefs are the pillars that hold up the edifice of a healthy society. They are the glass in which the social cocktail is housed. When they start to breakdown, society itself starts to breakdown. And presently in Britain, as in the rest of the Western world, we are seeing cracks, major fault lines in the very structures that hold it together. The reason is that because the fabric of power has changed, its accompanying beliefs have changed.
In the past, attempts to make radical changes to belief systems have invariably met with bloody resistance. Since WWII the global establishment has tried to avoid this by implementing its grand vison by slow degrees, of which the EU is but one manifestation. Other trading blocks, and global institutions, such as the IMF and UN are others. They are proxies of a transnational power that seeks to dissolve national boundaries and establish a global control grid, which conceals its power by leaving the various forms of nationhood largely intact.
To-date, its success has been proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms. A transnational power that has been marked by sly infiltration, not philosophical and religious conversion. Indeed, most of the talk of those loyal to the EU consists of sophistries and excuses invented to patch up a corrupt compromise of a transnational oligarchy. Thus, worship isn’t a social undertaking, but a private one.
But this network, of which the EU is a vital cog, is failing. The genie is out of the bottle and the troglodytes are out of the cave. The torch of nationalism the world over has caught alight. It will either be quelled by persecution or it will spread like wildfire; because until this point, the establishment’s attempts to throw cold water at it have only exacerbated the blaze.
The Brexit debacle is the white smoke billowing from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. It’s the signal that our relationship with power has changed.
“The society of experts will control propaganda and education. It will teach loyalty to the world government, and make nationalism high treason. The government, being an oligarchy, will instil submissiveness into the great bulk of the population…It is possible that it may invent ingenious ways of concealing its own power, leaving the forms of democracy intact, and allowing the plutocrats or politicians to imagine that they are cleverly controlling these forms…whatever the outward forms may be, all real power will come to be concentrated in the hands of those who understand the art of scientific manipulation” – Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook
There is a fever sweeping over the western world. True, incurable sickness has been its resting state for decades, but presently symptoms look set to intensify, producing all the sort of horrors that such fevers produce in the minds of rather lost middle-class men and women. The fever, with a rather self-triumphant, apocalyptic trumpet-blast, calls itself “Extinction Rebellion”.
Extinction Rebellion was founded in October 2018 and describes itself as an international “non-violent civil disobedience activist movement”. On its website it calls on governments to declare a “climate and ecological emergency” and to “halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2025”; that “government must create, and be led by the decisions of, a citizens’ assembly on climate and ecological justice”.
Extinction Rebellion achieved notoriety back in April when the group held large demonstrations in London that brought the city to a standstill, leading to 1,100 arrests. The protests planned over these two weeks are their most ambitious yet, with more than 850 events planned across 60 cities worldwide, including London, Dublin, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, New Delhi, Melbourne, Sydney, Washington DC and New York.
Protests got underway on Sunday 6th October with a vigil in Parliament square, London. The night before many outlets reported that the police had raided Lambeth County Court, a governmental building, which members “were using to store equipment”. 10 arrests were made “for conspiracy to cause public nuisance”.
Prior to the raid the police were gracious enough to call journalists so that they could cover the story…. ….and they were even good enough to pose for a photo
These heroes of law and order have long since found an answer to the age-old philosophical problem: if a tree falls down in a forest and no one is around to report it, does it happen? Extinction Rebellion, for their part, said “This escalation of pre-emptive tactics by the Government and police is a sign that we are being heard and acknowledged as a significant movement”.
Since then, however, it seems Extinction Rebellion and the police have been playing a game of pat-a-cake. Protesters have been gluing themselves to buildings and lying in the middle of roads stopping traffic with the police appearing to be watching on impotently – thereby fuelling the anarchy by their tacit consent. It reached peak satire on Thursday when a blind protester was helped on top of a plane by airport staff at London City airport. His action was perhaps not quite as well thought out as it was undeniably brave.
It’s almost as if the Extinction Rebellion London protest map was dreamt up by someone with the stunted intellectual and emotional maturity of a socially anxious 17-year-old who has been binge reading George Orwell’s 1984. Or, at least, it had those in mind
These protests are on the back of “Climate Strike”, which rallied hundreds of thousands in coordinated worldwide protests several weeks ago. Greta Thunberg, who was the 16-year-old face of Climate Strike, was also a key speaker at the Extinction Rebellion protests staged in London in November last year.
As anyone who has ever tried to arrange a protest will know, the mobilisation of mass numbers doesn’t happen spontaneously. It requires substantial financial backing, full-time employees and infrastructure to coordinate a protest with clear objectives, never-mind a synchronized worldwide protest. Here, we have every continent in the world having a ‘rebellious’ climate change protest at the same time. Who is behind this extraordinary feat of planning?
To peruse Extinction Rebellion’s website is rather like being taken on a trip across the rivers of Styx and Acheron by Charon the ferryman of Hades, such are the dire prognostications. At first viewing, its effect is rather persuasive. One is confronted with simple sloganeering, the website being divided up into several short, fierce pages, as if each were proclamations in a French riot. And one imagines that the short, crisp statements of doom, together with eye-catching imagery, is designed to appeal to a mass audience, from children to hipster grandmothers.
There’s an invitation for newcomers to provide an email for the purposes of news, updates and “Rebellion”. I’m sure that it’s the first time in history that co-opted subversives have been asked to provide trackable personal information in a “resistance” movement. There’s also an option to “Donate”, presumably a request to pay the ferryman for safe passage to this otherworld. It seems as if none are more vitally and recklessly otherworldly than environmentalist progressives who do not believe in another world, only a fervent belief in the one which is “facing an unprecedented emergency….. of our own making”.
The founders of Extinction Rebellion have been somewhat reluctant to publicly disclose their identities. At least, their identities haven’t been divulged on their website. Though they emphatically state that they are prepared to serve jail time to save the planet, it seems they’re not quite as prepared to declare who they are. I suppose anonymity is a fundamental characteristic of ‘Rebellion’ after all. But according to this Times article from last year, the co-founders are Gail Bradbrook, Roger Hallam, Ronan McNern, Stuart Basden and Simon Bramwell.
The main leaders appear to be Ms Bradbrook and Mr Hallam, long-time activists who have been involved with various protest groups, including Occupy and Rising Up. If we delve further, we see that Ms Bradbrook is listed as a director of Compassion Revolution Ltd, and Mr Hallam a former director. Compassionate Revolution Ltd is the parent company of Rising Up and seems to have spawned the latest incarnation of revolution, Extinction Rebellion. Interestingly, the other director is listed as one George Barda, whose brother Henry Lloyd Blackmore Barda, is tasked with “upstream risk management” for fossil fuel demon, BP.
It seems that in the past there has been a lack of transparency regarding the funding of some of the companies linked to Extinction Rebellion. Asked about the sources for donations for Rising Up, Ms Bradbrook responded “….some organisations and people that fund activists and prefer some confidentiality, and also through crowdfunding”. A similar screen of secrecy has been imposed for Extinction Rebellion. Major sponsors haven’t been disclosed, and it appears that many of the donations through crowdfunding are anonymous. This lack of openness at the heart of the green movement is rather troubling, considering the extreme message they are promoting.
Dr Gail Bradbrook
Some of the statements made by the ringleaders have been, shall we say, curious. Ms Bradbrook, who has the air of a depressed hairdresser, was granted a captive audience this week by the state broadcaster to repeat Extinction Rebellion’s calls for the UK to move to a zero-carbon emissions economy by 2025. For one thing, to call for zero carbon emissions by 2025 is rather like saying that cutting off King Charles’ head was one of the most elegant of the Cavalier fashions in hairdressing. 6 years to zero carbon emissions is deliberately obtuse. In fact, it’s completely unfeasible unless society collapses, and martial law ensues. But Mr Hallam, another co-founder, apparently came to London “to take down the system”, and has stated that Extinction Rebellion, “will bring [the Government] down and create a democracy fit for purpose and yes, some may die in the process”. Off with his Majesty’s head, it seems.
According to Rising Up’s manifesto, a forerunner of Extinction Rebellion and ostensibly set up and led by the same people, all private businesses must be abolished and it should be “illegal for any enterprise other than the state and local co-operatives to create the nation’s money”. Indeed, the claim that this radical leftist political agenda has anything to do with climate change collapses upon the discovery of this article, “Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate”, which was authored by another co-founder, Stuart Basden.
Mr Basden’s writing is awash with all the typical cultural Marxist talking points. In other words, gibberish that’s been keeping our universities busy for many decades. Notions like “white privilege” and “patriarchy” are propounded as fundamental, systemic problems within society. These divisive abstractions, which of course are largely undetectable by empirical analysis, fit in snugly with the rest of the movement’s diatribe, which read like the vain demands of fanatics completely empty of cogent analysis. There are merely repeated calls for the “science” and that we “must listen to the scientists”, without citing the actual science; while making wild claims that, for instance, 6 billion deaths will result from climate change within the next generation or two. A claim loudly discredited by the scientists themselves.
The overall effect is to induce fear and panic, as the overall effect of cultural Marxism is to fracture existing ideas and customs. This fusion is perfectly encapsulated by one of Extinction Rebellion’s core mantra’s: “It’s time to act like this truth is real” – which is almost to say, it doesn’t have to be real. Classic Marxist subversion.
The fact that this is a political and not an environmental movement is also demonstrated by it being focused almost exclusively on the western world, while completely disregarding China, which is by far the world’s worst carbon emissions offender. If the people in the UK, for example, who contribute less than 2% to the total global emissions, lived out of caves starting from tomorrow, it wouldn’t make a scrap of difference to scaling back the most alarmist of the climatologists’ doomsday predictions. This impression is reinforced by Ms Bradbrook herself who at a CogX event in June said: “We have to de-growth the economies of the west and, in fairness, allow the economies of other countries to grow”. The CogX event, which was a “festival of Artificial Intelligence and emerging technology”, was sponsored by HSBC.
The absence of a healthy debate about climate science, and the constant repetition of dogma about the science being settled – which has to be the most unscientific statement one can make, as science is never a consensus, but a moving target open to repudiation – has led to the environment movement being hijacked by the hard left, which seeks to capture and control both local and world economies. Thus, capture and control every person living within them.
Does it not seem rather odd how embedded in the system these revolutionaries are? How well organised. And how very tolerant the authorities have been about their activism, which is ultimately intended to cause food shortages and “once that happens the regime will fall.” Not that this extremism deters the UK’s Energy minister, Claire Perry who recently said that if she was younger, she would have joined the protests herself.
Curious company for a revolutionary to keep. On the one hand, Ms Bradbrook is advocating “resistance” and “rebellion” and, on the other, she plays a part in the core components of the very system she seeks to bring down. Her left hand doesn’t seem to know what the right hand is doing. Or does it?
Both the environment movement’s calls for carbon emissions reduction and the planetary roll-out of 5G – the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), which is the inter-networking of physical devices facilitated by the advances in 5G wireless technology – are core tenets of the UN’s sustainable development, Agenda 21 programme. A non-binding motion signed by 178 countries after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. As of 2015, it is now termed Agenda 2030, as the aim seems to get it fully implemented by the year 2030.
It seems Extinction Rebellion was hastily inaugurated on October 31st 2018 to ride the wave of publicity generated from the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) ‘Special Report on Global Warming 1.5C’ (SR15), which was published earlier that month. The SR15 made the alarming prediction that unless carbon emissions were drastically cut the world ‘may’ face apocalypse within 12 years. Which happens to be precisely in-keeping with the date of UN Agenda 21, which was written 30 years ago, and planned decades before.
The SR15 boasts 6,000 scientific references and was penned by 91 authors from 40 countries. Only that, as the IPCC is part of the UN, membership comprises nations, not scientists; the final report being written by diplomats and politicians after recommendations from the scientists, who are themselves cherrypicked by a familiar framework of market forces and mutual interest.
Like all other aspects of society, science is not divorced from the market system. It does not walk on hallowed turf. In fact, this is even truer of scientific research, which is entirely contingent on patronage and benefactions. And even more true of the IPCC, which filters scientific data through a prism of political interest. To emphasise this point, last month 500 scientists penned a letter to the UN Secretary-General declaring that “there is no climate emergency”. Which is to say that the so-called consensus is political, not scientific.
The politics of climatology predates the science. It can be dated back to 1967 to an obscure publication, ‘The Report from Iron Mountain’, which was later picked up by the Club of Rome, an elite society founded in 1968 by David Rockefeller and a string of the most influential and wealthy people in the world. The club published a report in 1972 entitled ‘The Limits of Growth’, which was a Malthusian take on population growth in a world of finite resources, and a thinly disguised version of eugenicist theories that were prominent in the early part of the 20th century, and which achieved infamy during the Third Reich in the 1930s and 40s. Throughout the 70’s, when the science of global cooling was all the rage, the club, in various publications, advocated more population control measures and a progressively increasing gasoline tax to curb excessive global population. But the fear of food shortages as a result of exponential population growth was gradually replaced during the 1980’s by climate change fear-mongering. On page 75 of the club’s 1990 publication, ‘The First Global Revolution’, it states:
“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention……The real enemy, then, is humanity itself”
This excerpt appears under the sub-heading, “The common enemy of humanity is man”.
And thus, the fledging science of global warming achieved maturity, with UN’s Agenda 21 being published at the Earth Summit 2 years later. We should add that the UN itself was set up after the conclusion of World War II by much of the same titans of finance and industry, including the Rockefeller family and other banking dynasties, which completely control and dominate the world’s monetary system. Considering the demonising and scaremongering of fossil fuels, it’s ironic that the Rockefeller family owes it’s wealth to Standard Oil, a company which monopolised the oil industry in the 19th and early 20th century, before the family branched out into banking.
{Note: I’m using the Rockefellers to furnish a narrative for the purposes of readability in what is a condensed medium. Although they are extremely powerful and, in this global system, are certainly upper management, they are not necessarily the proverbial kingmakers. It should also be noted that the fabric of power has not changed since humanity first started forming groups, dividing resources and spinning tall tales about the way things are. It has no race. No fixed ideology. No scruples. Its only concern is to remain atop the human tree. And it will do so at any cost and by any means necessary].
“When science is divorced from ethics scientists will use their skills to pursue power not truth” – Blaise Pascal
The science of climate change is one where all the important people benefit, hence its dominance of scientific discipline and widespread promotion through the pyramidical web of global governance, via the political, economic and media spheres. There’s a common misconception that the interests of the trillion-dollar carbon emissions industry and fossil fuels industry are opposed. They are not. The same powerful hand controls both. With those profiting from carbon emissions taxes being the same fossil fuels and banking tycoons who have been bankrolling the “green” movement, as this US Senate report demonstrates.
Al Gore received an Oscar for his 2006 film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and it led to his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Time has shown that the claims made in the film were wildly inaccurate
Some of the lead advocates of climate change alarmism, such as Al Gore, and Maurice Strong, considered to be the father of the global warming scare, are and were heavily invested in the carbon trading mechanisms that deal with carbon offsets. Gore’s investment company, Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offset opportunities, is the largest shareholder of The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). While Strong, before he died, served on the board of directors of CCX. Strong was a leading figure of the Earth Summit in 1992 and the drafting of the UN’s Agenda 21, where the theory of global warming caused by human activity was first emphatically advanced. Strong, like so many others behind this movement, made his billions in the fossil fuels industry.
All the recognisable multinationals have got in the queue for a slice of the carbon tax pie in this emerging economy, from HSBC, JPMorganChase and Citi, in the Blended Finance Taskforce, where “Profits [are] to be had” in “climate-related sectors”; and the guzzling fossil fuel corporate behemoths, the likes of Ford, Toyota, British Airways, BP and Unilever and many others, have all called for these carbon trading systems to be established at the G8 Climate Change Roundtable.
Carbon tax implementation, at a gradual gradient, accomplishes five things: the transition to a new sustainable economy without fossil fuel abundance, to stabilize markets; it provides an ancillary benefit of a pure profit carbon emissions market for the hydrocarbon energy tycoons in the incoming resource squeeze market; it facilitates the largest redistribution of wealth in modern history, with the richest in society benefitting at the expense of everybody else; it facilitates corporate resource extraction and control under the guise of “conservationism”; and finally, and most importantly, it ingeniously uses the environmental movement as a substitute for war to maintain class structure.
The political economy is primarily concerned with the distribution and redistribution of wealth. It is controlled by those who command the system of universal commodity exchange – the banks – and those who command the largest share of the resources and or markets – major industry. In a globalised system, a pyramidical power structure, which humans have always lived in since they emerged from the Garden – or from the primordial slime, whatever your preferred theory – is therefore global. And this shadow global power is concealed by its many bureaucratic, corporate and political faces, for absolute power is only tolerable if it masks a significant part of itself.
Science, from a political standpoint, is being used as a tool. A propagandistic tool. It’s a means to preserve and reinforce existing power structures, and used as a compelling pretext to control resources under the guise of environmental protectionism. Much of the established science is about land management, as you can read here.
Science provides an inscrutable shroud to conceal real objectives. Which is what politics is all about: selling marketable pretexts to a largely credulous populace to validate pre-determined objectives. Furthermore, to subdue an otherwise choleric populace by giving them the illusion of consent. This fusion of politics and science is like oil in water. But it’s effective.
Established power is obsessed with resource extraction and control. It doesn’t care about money. It controls an unlimited supply of money through the practice of fractional reserve banking, and since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, this supply is unbacked by the gold standard, but by the petrodollar; a sure sign where true power lies.
The main objective is to control resources. Namely, geographical and human resources. In the latter case, the principal method of control is debt. The various local and regional agencies and institutions which were set up their owners, and heavily influenced by them, are designed to privatise profits and socialise losses. Take the US’ recent ‘withdrawal’ from the middle-east. It’s been estimated that the US has spent $8 trillion on the interminable warfare in the region. The US national debt stands at over $20 trillion. Hence, profits are privatised and losses, socialised.
Only a very rudimentary understanding of the market system will inform you that, though science is our best method of discerning objective truth from fiction, it’s corruptible. Because humans are involved. I won’t get too embroiled with climatology here, but I will leave you with this before I proceed:
All the current warming data is confined to a record comprising a fraction of the existence of the earth. One obvious problem therefore is that it presumes a baseline. And it takes it from the mid-19th century when records started. I need hardly dwell on how specious this is. We have evidence of fabrication of data, and collusion within the scientific community of adjusting temperature records to exaggerate warming trends. We can glean from the ice records that the world has been warmer than it is today during many periods of history, including the recent history of a few hundred years ago. This is corroborated by botanists and palaeontologists who have found evidence of flora and fauna in northerly regions, which are unable to habitat there in the existing cooler climate. Despite an estimated one third of all anthropogenic forcings (human caused greenhouse gases) in the history of civilisation being produced in the last 20 years, it has produced a statistical 0 degree warming trend. During this time, we’ve seen the label of “global warming” being replaced with the generic “climate change”, which of course is rather fatuous considering the world’s climate is naturally cyclical.
It’s rather curious how temperature aligns with solar activity…
“Some even believe we {the Rockefellers} are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as internationalists and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will……If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it” – David Rockefeller, ‘Memoirs’ 2002
Globalism is a world system where the overwhelming majority of the human population are controlled, dominated and exploited by a political, economic and media elite. A major aspect of successful governance is through controlling the cognitive landscape. As such, like all social systems that preceded it, presently, prevailing ideas tend to be the ruling ideas, filtered down the cognitive edifice as a faucet fills up a glass with water. True motives are often concealed, especially when public sentiment may largely be inimical to them.
Take the basic example of war. It is typically uncongenial to the democratic instinct, which is why powerful bodies package the reasons for war in something that will more likely cultivate public support. Such as when a foreign regime is presented as posing a “clear and present danger”, or perhaps “intervention” will be for some noble humanitarian endeavour.
You have a hard tyranny when say, neo conservatives find a persuasive reason to bomb another country to smithereens. The flip side of this is often ‘blowback’ terrorism, and the implementation of a draconian police state at home and abroad. With notions like the Shock Doctrine, forwarded by the estimable Naomi Klein, or the strategy of tension, advanced by NATO, the intention is to bamboozle people without giving them a moment to pause and reflect. You stress them out economically, such as through the iniquitous imposition of austerity, while creating a climate of fear in their communities, and promoting hedonism where they become too distracted, weakened and degraded to question a huge soft tyranny which creeps up on them on the blind side. That being the slow, continuous movement towards the implementation of Agenda 21 by 2030, under the auspices of the UN, as these other things are grabbing the headlines.
In order to execute this grand plan, not only does there need to be pressure from above, as described, but also pressure from below, which are the demonstrations on the street. This creates the illusion of a popular mandate for what has already been planned. It also keeps the urgency of climate action in the news cycle so that the agenda seeps subliminally into the collective unconscious. This is what is called “astroturfing” – fake grassroots movements. In other words, state-controlled opposition.
The people who rage against the system become the instruments of the very system itself. Their energy is galvanised and re-directed to matters of no real consequence or to steer the prevailing narrative. Genuine activism is infiltrated and ideologically subverted from within, and front movements are established, using well-worn templates, to attract dissidents and therefore neutralise their revolutionary potency.
An interlocking web of change agents, which are linked to the UN’s sustainable development programme, and various Think Tanks, set up by huge combinations of transnational capital, link to other Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and organisations for the purposes of psychological programming. Such as the Tavistock Institute or the British Psychological Association or Common Purpose. It’s a kind of advertising, if you will. For example, DEMOS is a think tank that is injecting ideology into our media. One quote from DEMOS, which is linked to British Intelligence: “The new democracy will work with a combination of government open infiltration and citizen groups taking direct action”. Such organisations, which are internationally backed and borderless, but work on a local and regional level, link into state institutions like the metropolitan police. They begin to change local customs by infiltration and a process of ideological subversion.
We recall that co-founders of Extinction Rebellion are rubbing shoulders with executives of the hydrocarbon energy and telecommunications industries. Not that Extinction Rebellion, itself, is important; it’s the template it represents that’s the key. These groups tend to dissolve almost as rapidly as they emerge, like shooting stars across the night sky. It’s almost as though the kaleidoscopic effect of mutating shapes and forms is intended to distract, bewilder and befuddle the general population. Extinction Rebellion was born out of Compassionate Revolution and Rising Up! And Linked to Reclaim the Power and Occupy. Extinction Rebellion is just one of 21 eco-companies which operates out of Stroud, Gloucester.
{Note: The point here is to demonstrate the existence of controlled opposition state infrastructure. And the state infiltration of protest movements. It is not to cast aspersions at the members of Extinction Rebellion. Whether Ms Bradbrook or the other members of this movement are witting or unwitting participants, is immaterial. It is likely that there are knowing ringleaders, but who they are is a superfluous question. And not one I wish to entertain}.
While the police watch on impotently at protestors blocking bridges and roads, denying law abiding citizens access to hospitals, many far-right groups aren’t even allowed to meet. If they did, how long would it be before the police did their job and put them in the back of a van? I suspect the officers themselves want to get on with policing but are being held back by upper management who are taking orders from British intelligence agencies and so on and so forth.
While Extinction Rebellion’s cannon fodder are eventually incurring the wrath of ponderous authorities, and being given criminal records, it appears the leaders themselves have been granted apparent immunity, despite fronting a movement that beseeches people to break the law. Moreover, the media is clamouring to give them recognition and a platform to promote their pernicious and unsubstantiated ideology.
Genuine activism avoids breaking the law or, at least, it does so discreetly. Genuine activism tends to avoid events in public places where there’s facial recognition surveillance on a huge scale. But Extinction Rebellion’s first gathering in November last year was at Parliament Square, London possibly the most surveilled piece of land in the country. That set the stage for the ‘protests’ this year.
Protesters were empowered to only be disempowered
Genuine activists are being induced to break the law under the auspices of the very structure that they are protesting against. They are being used as unknowing pawns on the grand chessboard. They’re therefore being empowered only to be disempowered. Meanwhile, real environmental problems, such as the poisoning of the water table by fracking, and the hearty activists who are doing all of us proud by leading the fight against this alarming practice, are being submerged by this larger, fake movement.
The leaders of Extinction Rebellion are running training camps on civil disobedience. They are making money out of selling “activist courses” to unsuspecting people. When one lifelong protester asked why people needed training, she was told it was “so that everyone knows what to do and can act safely”. Apparently, a “Tranquillity Team” is there to remove anybody who does not follow correct procedures, which seem to be the reinforcement of stupid repetitive mantras and playing dead with blood sprayed over you. If you think that you don’t need training to be an activist, and you just kind of turn up in a peaceful and courteous manner to make your point, you’d be right.
This mirrors the mandatory training that is arising across many organisations. Many people, from students, professors, and people across the workforce alike, have complained about how insulting, demeaning and frankly, totalitarian such training is. Organisations have now taken on the parental responsibility of nurturing adults back to adulthood. In a world of oppressive political correctness people are being taught by repetition, through procedures of rigid standardisation, how to behave in their daily interactions. And any failure to conform to an increasing narrowing of permissible expression is met with social and professional punishment. This is also familiar with the rote learning in modern schooling. It is outcomes-based education. You’re supposed to come out thinking a certain way. If you’re not, something is wrong.
Controlled opposition groups are easily identifiable by their well organised synchronicity; by them being granted a media platform to promote their ideology; by them being universally lauded by the world of politics and celebrity; by the police’s apparent reluctance to do any policing; and by their simple sloganeering, and repetitive, fatuous mantras, where the overall effect seems to inculcate a kind of pseudo-religious environmental zealotry.
In this sort of auto-suggestive, community echo-chamber of repetitive mantras, the solitary, lonely, true, enduring love of Mother Earth enters every thought, and becomes the very substance, or as our forefathers would have said, the “stuff” of life. And the ironical observation is that by being swept up in this culturally engineered whirlwind the protesters are objecting to the very stuff of life itself: carbon.
‘The Red Brigades’, “created by a street performance group from Bristol” – where eco-spirituality meets communism
Much of this agenda is being sold to the public under the rubric of eco-spirituality. We can observe that abstractions are controlled by those who possess them to subjugate those who don’t. Old creeds are slowly being replaced with beliefs which better serve the expediencies of the age. Ms Bradbrook, for example, is a self-confessed pagan spiritualist and a fan of using “psychedelics-aided magical ceremonies” for advancing the movement.
There is nothing remotely spontaneous or grassroots about most collectivist movements. If the movement is initially grassroots, it will either be infiltrated by money or destroyed by the typical mechanisms. Acting through entire networks of proxy organisations like charities, scientific institutions and NGOs, allows corporate behemoths and huge combinations of capital to obscure the fact that governmental policies are being influenced by their interests. Not only are they largely responsible for putting governments into power through legal bribery we call “lobbyism”, but they interact with governments through their proxies.
Mass media, multinationals and NGOs work together to manipulate public sentiment. The interests of powerful organisations are almost always antithetical to the interests of the ordinary person. Because power and powerlessness are always diametrically opposed. Over time, people in power have set up well organised and complex structures that are designed to channel people’s need for meaning and power into a system which they control, like the canals that flow into a much larger body of water. Here, its energy can be confined and exploited, in the same way reservoirs created by dams are designed to suppress floods and provide water for other activities. We therefore see that the more people protest for a common cause, the tighter are the shackles placed upon them, just as a frantic animal seals its fate by blindly twisting and turning in the hunter’s trap.
If we build a rule into our personality where we say that anything we perceive as positive from the perspective of the environment is therefore something that we’re in favour of, we can be easily manipulated, because all that has to happen is that somebody wraps that label around something noxious and we may not detect until too late that it isn’t what we signed up for. What’s more, this sets the stage for our cognitive dissonance to be weaponised against us. Once we’ve protested for something called environmental protectionism and we discover that it wasn’t as it was advertised, we have a predicament, we either have to publicly admit fault that we favoured this in the first place, which is hard to do, or we double down on protesting even further. This effect is certainly enhanced when opinions have become enveloped in a mist of pseudo-religious idealisation.
A lot of people in the past, who simply got involved in a movement because it was labelled in a way that sounded good to them, continued to move in the wrong direction because at the point they began to detect that it wasn’t what it was supposed to be it was too late for them to figure out how to back out. The Russian revolution that led to tens of millions of deaths started out with the best of intentions, at least for the vast majority.
As history has demonstrated, ideologues have always been tools of the oligarchs. During the Russian revolution, from above and below, the public were crushed in a vice of extreme ideological violence, and they were strangled by it. It’s the classic pincer strategy. It’s been used for over a century to take down countries, and the Bolsheviks certainly used it to overthrow the Russian Empire of the tsars. History has a way of repeating itself.
“Without big banks socialism would be impossible” – Vladimir Lenin
There are many different forms of communism. In a nutshell, it is the facilitation of economic equality. The UN’s Agenda 21 is a form of slow boil communism intending to move us into a deindustrialised society, which will be one of rationing, curtailed freedoms and martial law. Considering the coming land grab, most people will likely be corralled in smart cities which, with 5G and its successor, will have full spectrum surveillance and control.
Communism is always bankrolled by breakaway elite factions – or in this case a highly organised and monolithic global power – which enlist the support of the lower classes, and it’s never a grassroots movement – of the people and for the people – as it will portray itself. This is a common misconception. The notion of economic parity is also a common misconception. The most economically unequal societies in history have been those in which central planners have controlled the division of labour and distribution of resources.
Essentially, it weaponises people’s credulity and misplaced idealism and turns it against them. It’s seductive because Marx’s writings – and others – are a brilliant, painstaking deconstruction of the evils of capitalism. The problem, however, is that it doesn’t offer anything more, because it is Godless poison.
It is a world view which promotes group identity over the sanctity and spiritual empowerment of the individual because individual interest is secondary to group interest, and group interest subordinate to the interests of a global takeover. Hence, every individual becomes disposable in the interests of the creation of this socialist ‘utopia’.
The greatest famines of the 20th century were all the result of central planning and land reform. The Holodomor famine that killed 4-8 million Ukrainians was man-made. Indeed, the great Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn estimated that 66 million Russians were wiped out as a result of Soviet policies.
“The Earth has cancer and the cancer is man” – Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning point.
Thomas Malthus was an English economist whose ideas influenced Charles Darwin. In his 1798 work, ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population’ he observed: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man”. He said, “that an increase in a nation’s food production improved the well-being of the populace, but the improvement was temporary because it led to population growth, which in turn restored the original per capita production level”. The inspiration for his work was said to come from his observance of the animal world’s propensity for spikes and dips in population numbers. It’s a pattern that seems indelibly part of the fabric of life. We can even see it in bull and bear financial markets – booms are inexorably followed by busts.
Since the advent of fossil fuels the world has seen a population explosion. Everyone alive today owes their existence to the increased productivity they have enabled. In fact, our whole economy is built around them. They are behind everything, from transport, irrigation, and pharmaceuticals, to materials, heating and construction.
There is a direct 1to1 relationship between wealth and energy; 85% of the world’s energy is generated by fossil fuels. Without them most of the world’s population will return to pre-industrial revolution lifestyles. And we’d live much shorter lives.
Presently, the world’s population is only sustained because of hydrocarbon energy. There are currently no alternatives to bridge the gap, and even if there were, it is so imbedded in our economic system that proposals to reduce emissions by 50% in a short space of time will have irreversible effects on people, in particular, poor people. It will inexorably lead to tens of millions of deaths in the short to medium term. In the long term it will be billions. Because current alternative energy will only support a global population of 1 billion or less. My tentative suggestion is that we should be absolutely certain that the science hasn’t been politicised before we act upon it.
Soberingly, according to the World Health Organisation, which is another branch of the UN, millions of people die every year because of energy poverty, and this has been exacerbated by increases in energy prices caused by carbon tax implementation. The truth is that the great population cull is already underway. And people should know that this is the end result of the protests of privileged, sanctimonious westerners who have ironically been invited to play dead in the middle of the street.
The comforting element of the present climate crisis is that all the prophecies have failed. At least the people who have been repeatedly proved wrong are the people who are quite sure they are right. But the discomforting element is not so much the apparent wickedness of global power; it is the propensity of people subjected to that power to take the world at face value.
The world runs like a machine, and its people are the wheels and axels rotating around the fulcrum of ideas and relationships. Such is the hold of social position on the minds of men and women, commonly held beliefs are difficult if not impossible to displace. For one thing, as Upton Sinclair noted, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. It is also out of fear, for “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” – Niccolo Machiavelli.
Undeniably, exponential population growth is a drain on the world’s reserves of finite resources. With rapidly advancing technology and AI, a few can maintain their luxurious lifestyles without drawing on the labour of the great human population sprawl. But, of course, in this brave new world some people will be less human than others, and the surplus of machines that have hitherto been creating wealth, will be expendable. Simple Malthusian economics.
Gone are the days of nations. We are not necessarily talking of secret clubs, but a global culture of hierarchical networks of mutually beneficial corporate relationships, inevitably determined by the immutable bylaws of trade and finance. This climate change agenda is the cement in the masonry of global population control and reduction.
There’s nothing more self-deceiving and underhanded than a believer masquerading as a skeptic. Skeptics always tell us the flaws of a position, but rarely the strengths of their own. Their finger is forever pointed outwards and never inwards. But in a skeptic we want to know what they do believe. Before arguing, we want to know what we need not argue about.
“They didn’t know what it would mean by voting to leave”
“I think it is absolutely fair to say that most people did not
realise that the Brexit vote would trigger the chain of events that [has]
happened so far”
“Populations with lower qualifications were significantly more
likely to vote Leave”
“Brexit means stupid – so who voted for this?”
“They voted to TAKE BACK CONTROL. They did not vote for no-deal and its implications”
What we observe about the discussion generally is that people do not know how to begin to think. Take the media headlines above. The conversation starts at the end of every controversy and those involved seem to know little about where it began or what it is all about. They just know how they feel about it. They state beliefs as facts, from whence all dogma seeds, then work their way backwards. All their arguments start with an assumption; that is, with something that they do not doubt. And the biggest assumption of all seems to be their intellectual and moral superiority over those they disagree with.
Almost the entire discourse is being shaped by the Brexit skeptics, who allow themselves to sit with dignity while asking those who voted Leave to dance the Fandango. Explain yourselves…you didn’t understand what you voted for, did you?! “The Leave vote didn’t understand the implications of a no-deal Brexit! And they certainly didn’t vote for a no-deal Brexit!”
This flavour of arguments is false for several reasons. Firstly,
because it is caddish. It’s like telling women to know their place and to make
way for the men. The Remainers know best and the Brexiters, don’t. And that’s
all there is to be said about it.
Here, everything that is said against the Leave vote can be equally applied to the Remain side of the coin; but is conspicuous by its absence. With that in mind, I say arise Remainers and kick those feet. I bet most didn’t understand the implications of voting Remain and ceding even more power to an already bloated bureaucracy. I bet they couldn’t give me a meaningful critique on Friedrich Hayek’s, ‘The Road to Serfdom’. Oh, and yes, could they tell me please about the composition of the Council of Ministers, about the measures and updated terms in the Treaty of Lisbon and the political background of Federica Mogherini?
“But more people on the Leave side were uninformed!”
This, of course, is irrelevant, even if it were true. There’s an
underlying assumption that the more you discover uneducated Brexit voters the
more you have diminished the credit of Brexit itself. But this argument says
nothing about Truth, nor what’s the best course for the British people. And
more importantly, it has nothing to do with what is a clear democratic mandate.
It’s the classic argument from authority – or lack of authority, in this
instance. There’s been a biblical deluge of logical fallacies in this sorry
affair. Of course there has.
The inference to be made from this stampede is not that Remainers believe most British people to be stupid, that’s obvious; it’s that they believe themselves to not be stupid. Yet they dishonestly hide their pro-EU sentiments behind a curtain of Brexit skepticism, without ever taking the stage in their own right. They’re like schoolchildren who unfavourably mark their rivals’ exam papers without ever sitting for it themselves.
Less of an assault on those who voted leave, because opinions can
change; rather, this invidious discourse has been a savage attack on democratic
rule itself, which I suppose is quite apposite all considered.
The concept
of democracy is very simple, or at least it should be. It’s that citizens
should be given an equal choice over their collective futures; where welfare is the social object, and
normally will is the social law. Take the example of a plane crash in which 20 people are
left stranded in the wilderness. Who would rule? Could the strongest and
cleverest rule without the other 19 submitting to his/her authority? If their talents are used for the
community, then they are the servant of the community. And the community is
sovereign. If their talents are used against the community, why should the
community submit to them?
In such a simple example we can see the benefit of rule by popular consent. We also see that there’s clearly a direct relationship between the freedom of choice and results. The problem is that the directness of this approach has been corrupted in a society which is infinitely complex; in a system where nothing is straightforward; where all paths are meandering even when they are meant to be straight. The fault, therefore, isn’t with the concept of democracy per se, it’s that anti-democratic things have hidden themselves within this complexity and seek to thwart and undermine it by ingeniously presenting its own self-interest to be in the democratic interest of all.
Of course, in a system that calls itself a democracy, anti-democratic elements will only be tolerable if they mask a substantial part of themselves. It’s rather like the Carnival of Venice where masks give wearers free licence to do as they please. Occasionally, however, the mask slips, and we see the true face of power in all its ugliness; we may even see the identity of those who are committing debauched acts. And in recent times, nowhere has the Carnival’s spotlight been shone more than on Parliament’s handling of the Brexit referendum.
A referendum is perhaps the purest form of this direct method of governance, so it is perhaps unsurprising that in this most indirect of systems there’s been a failure to fit the most direct of all ideas. But the clash isn’t necessarily between simplicity and complexity, it’s between sincerity and insincerity. And the battleground, as ever, is the economy. It seems the main contention to upholding the result of the referendum is that it “would be bad for the economy”, while a no-deal Brexit “would be catastrophic for the economy”.
One MP who is a loyal slave to the economy is Hilary Benn, who has motioned the Benn Bill, which essentially aims to block a no-deal Brexit. This hastily written bill has been passed by Parliament. The official position of Labour, the opposition party of which Benn is a mutinous member, is to renegotiate a “good deal”, then put that before the public in a second referendum in a binary proposition with remain. Labour first said that they will then campaign for remain because it would be “better for jobs and economic security”. Now, after attracting a considerable amount of public ridicule for this stance, they say that they will be “neutral” in that scenario. Yes, really.
To my knowledge the media hasn’t seriously analysed
this prevention of the possibility of a no-deal. Lamely repeating ad nauseam
that “no-deal would be catastrophic for this country”. Nor has it adequately
analysed the very deliberate attempt to thwart the result of a popular vote, as
we see inferred by Labour’s official Brexit policy. It merely wheels out
cherry-picked expert after cherry-picked expert with dire economic forecasts;
talking point after talking point that roll off the tongue like a Bishop reading the liturgy
from a holy book.
Media talking points fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the details and obscuring features. It’s a gentle process that accumulates over time, for if the storm was more violent, it would be more visible. But because a small clearing in the wood can be worth more to us than whole forests of mere entanglement, let’s point out the obvious. To block the possibility of a no-deal Brexit is to block Brexit itself. Because all the EU needs to do to keep the UK in the union is to offer terrible deals making remain the only viable option. At the very least, the prospect of securing a deal advantageous to remaining will be successfully negated.
The Bill therefore can be rightly described as a “Surrender Act”. Because a very rudimentary understanding of the concept of bartering is clearly missing from Hilary Benn’s motion. Rather, it’s designed to immure the pro-Brexit Government in paralysis. And attempts to prevent a snap election merely deepen that paralysis. Such disingenuous prevarication has marked parliament’s stance on this issue. In what is a very clear circumvention of a democratic vote, the largest mandate in British electoral history.
To be, on the face of it, so ignorant of basic trading principles makes one a little sceptical of the judgement of those who are keen to invoke trade as a good reason to suspend the democratic will of the people. If, as I suspect, parliament is not ignorant of trading principles and has cynically passed the bill to thwart the result it, in turn, makes one cynical of their concerns. Which seem to centre around short-term economic problems and not long-term predictions. Indeed, decisions grounded in the short-term tend to fail in the long-term. But regardless, even if they were sincere and their concerns justified, it is quite immaterial to the question at hand.
Surrendering everything to trade and commerce is not
democracy. Capitalism is not democracy; and is admittedly, at various
gradations, rather against democracy. Did it not occur to the purveyors of
sound economic planning that the vote could have been about culture and
identity, and not the God of GDP? In fact, inherent in the very notion of
voting is the suggestion – and what so many journalists seem so eager to forget
– that the country and its economy is the servant of the people and not that the
people are servants of the country and its economy.
If parliament refuses to uphold a democratic vote it
ceases to be credible. Actions signify more than words. You can’t speak the
words of democracy while walking the walk of dictatorship. Because
it is simply not tenable that the result that failed is the same as the
realities that did succeed.
In George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,
children are depicted as being a key tool in the control of civilians by a
totalitarian state. In the novel they are ideologically trained by the ruling Party and come to adore its rituals and the processions; they proudly
wave banners, preach Party orthodoxy, and fiercely chant slogans and songs,
seeing it all as a “glorious game”. Their malleable minds were shaped before
drying into cement, the training inculcating a ferocity which was “like the
gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters”.
Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1948; but, by that point, the ideological targeting of children had long been a staple of population control. Certainly a staple of aggressive political authority. Something that undeniably took place during the Nazi regime in Germany. In his speech at the annual Nazi Party rally in 1935, Hitler declared: “He alone who owns the youth gains the future”.
The
Nazis put tremendous effort into indoctrinating children. One of its principal outlets
was the Hitler Youth, an organisation which was inaugurated in 1922 (Hitler-Jugend, Bund Deutscher Arbeiterjugend “Hitler
Youth, League of German Worker Youth”). The
Hitler Youth constituted the single most
successful mass movement of the Third Reich. Children were removed from
their parents and obliged
to participate in National Socialist rituals and drills and military training,
leading to doctrinal lessons. The sole purpose of which was to instil children with
Nazi beliefs.
In 1939 Hitler Youth was made mandatory, but by the mid-30s it had
a monopoly on all youth sports facilities in Germany,
effectively locking out non-members. Furthermore, before it was made compulsory, pursuing higher
education or getting an apprenticeship was contingent on membership, and parents
were regularly coerced into getting their children to enlist in state programs.
The children themselves, had they not been members, were asked in school to
write essays about “why I’m not a member of Hitler-Jugend”.
When children weren’t in school or at Hitler Youth they were faced
with continual Nazi propaganda, from the media and popular culture generally, which
centred around the existential threat to the German people from the purported
infiltrators and saboteurs, namely the communists and Jews. The news was awash
with this grand doomsday narrative, cynically spun to manipulate the minds of young
Germans.
As strong as it may sound, the recent ‘Climate Strike’ protests reminded me a little of Hitler Youth in its exploitation and ideological targeting of impressionable children. Climate Strike’s face was “climate activist” Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old girl from Sweden. And its foot soldiers were comprised of millions of truant children across the world who took to the streets with placards and banners to demand that world leaders take swift action to avert an “impending environmental catastrophe”. The numbers of anxious and spirited adolescents were helped, I’m sure, by the fact that the protests were staged on a Friday, with many teachers the world over encouraging their students to skip class.
Naturally, the mass media were falling over themselves to
cheerlead for the millions of truant children. They praised them for their
moral fortitude in leading the movement to save the planet. But they were of
course lying. Like all political movements, Climate Strike was set up by
cynical adults, who merely enlisted the support of the youngsters by
propounding a message customized for their digestion.
Similarly, in Nazi Germany young Germans were incessantly praised by the media for their contribution towards defending the Fatherland from the invaders. The National Socialist message also had a black-and-white doomsday appeal, only this time it was the existential threat posed to the Aryan race by state enemies, and not the existential threat of the economic system on climate change.
In Nazi Germany, firstly debate was discouraged; then dissenters were silenced; finally, all those opposed to the objectives of National Socialism were imprisoned and transported to the concentration camps in the east. Detractors of official orthodoxy on climate change, on the other hand, are widely given the label “climate denier”, which is suggestive of fruit loopery and conspiracy theories. It’s also redolent, dare I say, of “Holocaust denier”. And Greta Thunberg’s mother, Malena Ernman, even equated the two in her book, ‘Scenes from the Heart’.
The term’s use is clearly designed to suppress debate and shame those with heterodoxical views, or those who just want to probe the matter for themselves. Accordingly, there’s little to no debate about “the science” in mainstream circles, wild claims are merely repeated alongside wild forecasts. In fact, it’s quite remarkable that there’s been so much talk about “the science”, with so little talk about the actual science itself. It’s hardly in keeping with the enlightenment spirit. And more in keeping with a cultish allegiance to authority and dogma.
After the protests, Greta Thunberg was granted an audience at the UN and gave an impassioned speech about the crisis, scolding world leaders about their inaction in tackling what was a “mass extinction” and that “people are dying” and “entire ecosystems are collapsing”. She received an ovation for her moving performance, which was bereft of one single piece of salient data. Greta merely pleading that we should “listen to the scientists”. Which scientists she did not specify; presumably not the 31,000 scientists who have signed a petition declaring the ‘official’ scientific position to be politicised and unscientific.
Greta stated at the beginning of her speech that “she shouldn’t
be here” and that she “should be in school on the other side of the
ocean”. Precisely, Greta. Since when are world leaders taking their advice
from schoolchildren, and why was this one in particular given a world platform
to speak on this issue? I tentatively suggest that she was given this platform because
what she had to say was exactly what the globalist elite and the UN wanted to
hear; more importantly, what they wanted YOU to hear. She also has extremely
powerful backers.
“You’re stealing our futures….we will never forgive you” was Greta’s powerful refrain midway through her speech. She spoke about losing her childhood and losing her dreams, like so many children across the world, as a result of the decisions made by older generations. This thread, pitting credulous children against so-called cynical adults, who have “fantasies of eternal economic growth”, I have to say, is most sinister. It has all the hallmarks of Orwell’s dystopian vision, in which a brutal regime was depicted as making every effort to systematically undermine the family unit, while calling its leader “Big Brother”, which was a tacit appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Essentially, Orwell vividly described the very effective obtrusion of the regime within the confines of the home.
In Orwell’s work the dictatorship went further and was even able
to use children as spies and informants to ensnare parents who were not loyal
to the regime. This is how Orwell describes it:
“It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak — ’child hero’ was the phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police”
A political attempt to place a wedge between children and adults on this matter is disgraceful and intentionally divisive; and it is an unsettling development. But it was in keeping with Al Gore’s remark in an interview with a Swedish outlet several years ago where he claimed that climate change wasn’t a political issue, but a “moral one”; that we “owe it to the children and their children” to act decisively on this matter. In this 30-minute interview Mr Gore didn’t provide any data that could be independently verified. A recurring theme. The predictions he made in the 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” have of course proven to be spurious. But the environmentalists continue to make wild claims, only this time they do so with mentally atypical children as their face and not ex-politician hucksters.
Perhaps it could be considered discourteous to raise Greta’s well publicised Asperger’s syndrome and various other conditions, but I think it’s germane. You must be allowed to criticise ideas. When they’re protected from scrutiny by an artificial blanket you have a problem. Commentators have already fallen prey to political correctness. One example is Michael Knowles, a guest on Fox News. He said:
“….the climate hysteria movement is not about science. If it were
about science, it would be led by scientists rather than by politicians and a
mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the
international left”.
On the same segment the other guest, progressivist Christopher
Hahn interrupted Knowles, saying “Shame on you…..You’re a grown man and
you’re attacking a child. Shame on you”.
Fox News later made a public apology to Greta Thunberg, adding that Mr Knowles won’t be invited on as a guest in the future.
Children with disabilities are – rightly so – immune to criticism,
even when they’re advocating radical politics. Sceptics are being forced to
tread carefully in what is another clear example of an attempt to shut down
debate. Environmentalists are rather like bank robbers who, on their getaway,
are using human shields to deter hostile fire. And what better human shield
than a mentally atypical child? As for her condition, from what I understand it
can bring about an obsessiveness undocked from the marina of perspective. But
16-year-olds lack perspective generally, in my experience. Especially when they’re
bereft of credentials, don’t cite data and work themselves up into a frenzy
reading somebody else’s words.
I think Michael Knowles was largely correct in his surmise. If
there was genuinely an existential crisis a young girl would not be the face of
the movement.
If there was genuinely an existential crisis the science would be
open to refutation, because that, after all, is what science is.
Unfalsifiability is not a strength, it’s a weakness. When current data isn’t
provided, and debate is either discouraged or suppressed, the science ceases to
be credible; rather, it veers into dogma.
If there was genuinely an existential crisis the campaigning would
not be exclusively confined to a western audience but would be focused on China
and India who are by far the worst culprits of greenhouse gas emissions.
If there was genuinely an existential crisis which was based on
grounded science, proponents would not be seeking to stimulate the audience’s
emotions, but the intellect. Because targeting emotions, with the most powerful
being fear, is precisely what the PR industry does, ad nauseum, on the back of
the astonishing achievements of their pioneers, propagandists like Edward
Bernays, Ivy Lee and, dare I say, Joseph Goebbels?
Greta has hitherto been great PR and has proven effective at mobilising a younger audience. Pushing children to the front of a movement makes for great imagery. And pulls at the heart strings. But to target them with rhetoric replete with pathos and deplete of logos, indoctrinating them in schools, which is reinforced by the ubiquity of the message in the media and popular culture, prophesising cultish doomsday scenarios divorced from balanced judgement and transparent certifiable data, and pitting them against adults, while stroking their egos, is redolent of totalitarian regimes which exploited children for political control. And the movement is being fronted by a pigtailed 16-year-old girl from Sweden.
I’m increasingly finding myself being sucked into the murky world of politics, where subjects so reliably produce a kind of hysteria it’s like everything is covered in plutonium. It almost seems foolish to add my voice to this largely unedifying din. Do we really need one more hand nurturing a cultural Marxist monster which feeds on division and conflict? I’ve answered that in the positive, or the negative, conditional on the tint of glass each of us sees the world through. I’ve resolved to speak and write openly and respectfully about truth, reason and justice, simply because it seems incumbent on the little people to shoulder that burden, such is the duplicity of the forces above us. Though we can forget about politics and those who wield the sceptre of power, that doesn’t mean power and its agents – some known to us and some not – will forget about us.
Eddie’s Blog 