Why Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Matters

1. A Brief Intellectual Biography

I wrote the second part of this essay for the annual meeting of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund, on the Commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of the German-American thinker, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888—1973). That part was originally written for those who already know of his work, which is a very small group indeed. The voice it is written in reflects not only the circumstances and interests of the audience for whom it was written, but it reflects the emphasis, which I think might be of value to those who know nothing of him. Hence for those who have never heard of Rosenstock-Huessy before, a few biographical details may be warranted.

He was born in 1888 into a family who were of Jewish blood but had no interest in their tradition. His mother was as little moved by her son’s conversion to Christianity as she was by the tradition of her ancestors. Of his conversion, Rosenstock-Huessy said that there was no road to Damascus; his baptism seemed a natural progression from his interest in philology and history, and he simply thought that every word of the Nicene Creed was true. He received a doctor of laws at the age of 21, with the inaugural dissertation, “Landfriedensgerichte und Provinzialversammlungen vom 9.-12. Jahrhundert, (Courts of Peace and Provincial Assemblies from the 9th to the 12th Centuries).” And few years later, he completed his Habillitation (the German degree that is usually a prerequisite for becoming a university lecturer), with the deesertation, “Ostfalens Rechtsliteratur unter Friedrich II (East Westphalian Legal Literature under Friedrich) .”

By the age of 24, he was a private lecturer, teaching German Private Law and German Legal History at the University of Leipzig, before joining the German war effort. He served as an officer, and while fighting in the Battle of Verdun he had, what he himself called, a vision of the providential nature of war and revolutions and their indispensable role in making us and the world we now inhabit. That idea would first take preliminary form in 1920, in the work, “Die Hochzeit des Kriegs und der Revolution (The Wedding of War and Revolution).” This was followed by more complete versions, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (1938) and Die europäischen Revolutionen und der Charakter der Nationen (The European Revolutions and the Character of Nations) (1951).

These works focussed upon the unity of the European revolutions, which he derived from what he saw as the first total revolution in the West—the Papal revolution, an event involving a complete rejuvenation of the Church that led to Pope Gregory VII’s excommunication of Emperor Henry VI over the practice of lay investiture. The popular support for the Gregorian position was perhaps most evident in the Church ridding itself of married clerics. The central argument of the works was that the Western revolutions that followed—the Italian Revolution (the Renaissance), the German Revolution (the Reformation), the English Revolution, the American Revolution (which he depicts as a half-way house revolution), the French and Russian Revolutions—were not only decisive in the formation of the modern European nations and their character, but gave birth to the social materials and commitments/ the faith that would flow into the world wars, and thereby draw the entire world into an unstable unity.

The story he tells is one in which providence (and not the wills of men) forces us into a condition where we must confront each other in dialogue, draw upon our respective traditions as we seek to navigate a common future—or what he called a metanomic society—if we are to achieve any lasting peace. A metanomic society is not to be confused with the progressive, globalist order that asphyxiates living spirits in conflict so that they may all be presided over by an elite of the good, the true and the beautiful—and the extremely wealthy. Rather it is one of persistent tensionality, as nations and peoples meet at the crossroads of a universal history of faith and war and revolt (sin and disease). On that cross road we encounter the various pathways and epochs (“time-bodies”) opened by founders who often stand for inimical life-ways, and yet we have to find a way to stand or perish together.

The works on revolution were themselves but parts of a more complete attempt to outline his vision of a metanomical society, Die Vollzahl der Zeiten (“The Full Count of the Times”), which would almost take him fifty years to complete. There he formulates the problem confronting the species, as one of making contemporaries of distemporaries—for we all come out of different “times.” Die Vollzahl originally appeared as the second volume of the work published in 1956—1958 as Soziologie, and has more recently appeared under the title he intended as, Im Kreuz der Wirchlichkeit: Soziologie in 3 volumes (Vollzahl appears as volumes 2 and 3 in that edition.) The two parts of the work are divided into one dealing with spaces—it is called Die Übermacht der Räume, which Jurgen Lawrenz, Frances Huessy and myself have translated and edited as The Hegemony of Spaces. The second, as I have indicated, deals with “the times.” The plurality adopted in the titles is important—for much of what Rosenstock-Huessy sees as destroying the human spirit is the adoption of the metaphysical and mechanical ideas of time and space as blinding us to living processes and the role of spaces and times in our lives, especially the opening up new paths of the spirit, involving a new partitioning of time.

The first volume of Soziologie/ Im Kreuz der Wircklichkeit is devoted to laying down Rosenstock-Huessy’s methodological critique of what he sees as the philosophical disaster that has culminated in what he calls, in the culminating section, “The Tyranny of Spaces and their Collapse,” the triumph of the Cartesian dissolution of all life into mechanical space paired with Nietzsche’s aestheticization of life which leaves the more fundamental tyranny untouched. That tyranny comes from the failure of a world increasingly dependent upon professionals devoted to ideas and ideals to understand the living powers of social cultivation and us substituting abstractions for living processes. The key idea of that volume is that play had always been conceived as a preparation for life, by sequestering spaces for play which enable people to focus upon the requisite undertaking we are engaged in. Play enables us to develop a more controlled, a more distanced and hence abstract understanding of life. It also aids us in developing our focus and capacities that may assist us in the tribulations that befall us in “real” life. Play is the species’ greatest source of education. It is thus not a mere afterthought to survival but as intrinsic to our nature as to our social formation and history.

Those familiar with Johan Huzinga’s Homo Ludens will be familiar with how play forms the basis of reflective life, though I think Rosenstock-Huessy makes this the basis of sociology, and human social roles, and by doing so does far more with it, especially in how he identifies the way in which the reflective consciousness has generally downplayed the more primordial social emotions and priorities required for developing pathways of life, in which we find our place and commitments in the world. Lifeless essences—“the individual,” “man,” “free will,” and such like—which can be moved about by the mind of the intellectual on a blank canvas of mental space are treated as real, while real forces of shame, admiration, gratitude, behests, affirmation, negation (I am taking a random selection from powers Rosenstock-Huessy denotes within a larger sociological breakdown) whilst still socially operative are not even noticed by most scholars and researchers.

It would be remiss of me not to mention another preliminary aspect of his intellectual biography. Prior to the First World War, Rosenstock-Huessy was the teacher of the most important Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig. Their friendship and his lectures led to Rosenzweig considering to follow his cousins (the philosopher, Hans and author, Rudi Ehrenberg) and Rosenstock-Huessy into the Christian faith. At the last minute, after attending a Yom Kippur service, as a farewell gesture to the faith of his ancestors, Rosenzweig decided that he would “remain a Jew.” Rosenzweig’s “conversion” experience led him to seek out Rosenstock-Huessy again and enter into a dialogue about Christianity and Judaism.

In 1916, the two friends engaged in a heated but brilliant exchange, in which each defended his own faith and criticized that of the other. The correspondence has been translated into English and edited by Rosenstock-Huessy in Judaism Despite Christianity. It is the most important Christian-Jewish dialogue ever written. Rosenstock-Huessy left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, but he did return in 1935 to help launch Rosenzweig’s Collected Letters. Rosenzweig, by then was deceased, and the correspondence between him and Rosenzweig played a special part in that collection. In my book, Religion, Redemption, and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I have written the only extensive account of the intellectual relationship between Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy, that draws attention to how they believed that they were, in spite of irreconcilable differences of faith, fighting on a common front against the kind of abstract and philosophical thinking that has dominated the West and is now destroying it. Both, in different ways, undertook to explicate the power of their respective traditions and what those traditions uniquely brought to our understanding of experience. Whereas Rosenzweig has a small audience in the academy (and I make no excuse for the fact that I find the academic reception of Rosenzweig in the US and Germany to be a bowdlerisation of his thinking so he can fit the “ethical” and “political” prejudices that now dominate the academy), Rosenstock-Huessy is almost completely unread today.

Before coming to the United States Rosenstock-Huessy had played an important role in seeking to build bridges between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. He wrote, Das Alter der Kirche (The Age of the Church) with Joseph Wittig and collected a mountain of material arguing against Wittig’s excommunication—the excommunication would subsequently be overturned. He also played a leading role in the formation of the Patmos publishing house and the setting up of the journal Die Kreatur, both ventures in religious cooperation directed against the forces of resentment that were fuelling the Marxist and Nazi ideologies. In addition to his academic work and writing, after the First World War, he worked for a while with Daimler Benz, editing a magazine for the firm and its workers. He would also play a leading role in fostering cooperation between students, farmers and workers. In the United States he would continue that aspect of his work by helping set up Camp William James, which has been said to have inspired the Peace Corps. He was also the first director of the adult education initiative of the Academy of Labour in Frankfurt, and then between 1929 and 1933, vice-chairman of the World Association for Adult Education. I mention this just to emphasize that just as Rosenstock-Huessy did not belong to one discipline, (he was not a legal scholar, philosopher, sociologist, historian, nor philologist, classicist, nor theologian) yet every work he wrote storms through these and other disciplines, he was also not simply an academic. Like Goethe, whom he quotes incessantly, his focus was life itself, not just ideas.

Admired by Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich with whom he corresponded, and W.H. Auden, who wrote a preface to his I am an Impure Thinker, but unlike so many other German emigres to the US, settling in Dartmouth, he had no doctoral students, and was essentially living and writing as an exile.

2. Commemorative Essay

Unlike every other essay I have ever written on Rosenstock-Huessy, this commemorative one is written for an audience who already knows who he is. Each member of this audience has encountered Rosenstock-Huessy in his or her own way: some are family members, some were his students, others, like myself, simply stumbled onto him. Each member of the audience also has his or her own reasons for how Rosenstock-Huessy’s teachings have mattered in their own lives. Further, there is also a common desire to see his work gain a wider readership and larger influence.

In spite of the indefatigable efforts of Freya von Moltke, Clinton Gardner, Harold Stahmer, Frances and Mark and Ray Huessy, Lise van der Molen, Michael Gormann-Thelen, Eckhart Wilkens, Norman Fiering, Russ Keep, and many, many others (I apologize to the many I have not included here) to gain the audience his great corpus deserves, he remains almost unknown to university professors and teachers and their students, as well as the rest of the population. The efforts of his family, former students and friends have also contributed to preserving his work digitally, which means that scholars in the future have a vast treasure trove of materials to explore, if ever his name does catch fire. Those who contributed to this effort, and those who invented and made available the technology, belong to a common time. Rosenstock-Huessy was a man of his time, who reached back into times usually only of interest to historians and anthropologists, whilst thinking forward both to warn us of the dangers of our time, and to galvanize our faith in a time of greater concordance, one in which love, faith and hope converge so that we may better be able to achieve tensional bodies of solidarity—what he called a “metanomic society”—rather than persist in the cycles which lead us periodically back into hell.

Some of the people I have mentioned have now passed, others are still doing what they can to see his work take on a larger body of those who hear the urgency and respond to the perspicacity and grand sweep of his analysis of what being alive means, how it matters, and how lives over multiple generations have been formed.

Those of us who are party to this commemoration, irrespective of personality differences and styles of what we think may be the best tactic to gain a larger audience, irrespective of what we even think of each other, we are together because the trails and encounters of our individual lives have awoken in us a common appreciation of the “genius” of a man who has brought us together so that what we say, to each other and about each other, in his name, matters. Rosenstock-Huessy fought his entire life against the one-sided polarities which have divided philosophers into idealists and materialists, and thereby led them into metaphysical entrapments where pride in purporting to know the All subsists alongside a litany of errors which prevent us from knowing what really is important, what really matters, what really bears fruit.

It was Rosenstock-Huessy who most schooled me in the importance of our responses to the contingent circumstances that befall us, to the loves that move us, to the faith that focusses our observational powers about what matters in our lives, to the power of speech to bind or divide us, and to the times which flow around and through us, and how times are socially formed.

Each person here will know the major moments in the trails of their lives, even if not the countless trails of their ancestors whose offshoots they are, which led them to Rosenstock-Huessy. In my case, it was coming across Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution, while simply running my fingers across a library shelf in the library at the University of Adelaide, just as I had completed my PhD, which would become my first book, The Metaphysics of Science and Freedom: From Descartes to Kant to Hegel. Had I not been attending that university, had I not been at that section in the library, randomly walking by shelves, had the university not existed, Australia not been discovered, the printing press not invented, had that title not caught my attention (I had just taken up a job involving teaching a subject I had designed, called “Justice, Law, and the State”), had its position on the shelf rendered the book invisible, I may have never heard of Rosenstock-Huessy. And Harold Berman would never have written that book had he not been Rosenstock-Huessy’s student in Dartmouth. And my life would never have taken the trajectory it has had I not picked up that book, and you would not be reading this essay.

I may have remained caught up in the metaphysical grip of a way of thinking that has been as pernicious as it has been influential. I was certainly in the grip of that thinking when I encountered him. But I had already reached a stage where I was finding philosophy far closer to spiritual death than most ever realize. In my case, I can truthfully say philosophy was killing me when I encountered Rosenstock-Huessy. On that point, along with his friends Rudi Ehrenberg, Viktor von Weiszäcker, and Richard Koch, Rosenstock-Huessy always saw that the severance between nature and spirit was a life-threatening disease—and, for those who do not know it, and who have some German, I cannot recommend strongly enough his Introduction to the edition, with Richard Koch, of writings by Paracelsus—Theophrast von Hohenheim. Fünf Bücher über die unsichtbaren Krankheiten, whose subtitle in English reads, Five Books on Invisible Diseases, or Chapter 8, “Das Zeitenspektrum” (“The Time Spectrum”), from Heilkraft und Wahrheit (Healing Power and Truth).

When, thanks to Berman’s book, I picked up Out of Revolution, the opening sentences of Chapter One, “Our passions give life to the world. Our collective passions constitute the history of mankind,” struck me with such power that I was stunned. I suspect others in this audience may have experienced a similar feeling when they first read something by Rosenstock-Huessy, that feeling of being overwhelmed by an insight and how it is expressed, and feeling that this is someone who sees and knows important things. I know that not everybody responds this way to Rosenstock-Huessy. That is especially so with university people. I have had almost no success in sharing my enthusiasm and love of Rosenstock-Huessy.

Apart from my own failures to interest people in his work, the question of why he has not received a larger academic audience has to do with many things. First there is his style. His writing is sprawling and associative, connecting things specialists do not connect. His voice teeters on the conversational and it is laced with anecdotes drawn from every-day experience that do not resonate with an academic audience. His writing rarely, if ever, fits into a discipline—and hence, as he recounts in Out of Revolution, the university did not know where to put him, or what to do with him. His Sociology is many things, but it is most definitely not a traditional Sociology. He dismisses Weber and Pareto with barely a sentence each, but he connects himself with Henri de Saint-Simon, and proceeds to hail him as the founder of Sociology. He writes constantly about language, but he does not do Linguistics, and he almost only ever mentions linguists to rebuke them. Likewise, his writings on Christianity barely engage with theologians, and he finds theology as a discipline to be barren. That he disparages the importance of the mainstream (quasi-Platonist) understanding of the soul’s survival after death makes even his Christian faith look suspect to theologians.

The academic mind is inducted into an area of specialization, and that comes with being confronted with, and being required to participate in, various disciplinary debates and consensuses. He never agrees with any of them, whether it be the Q hypothesis in biblical studies, or the dual Homer of classicists. And he bypasses almost completely what Egyptologists have to say about ancient Egypt, with the odd expression of disapproval, relying for his interpretation of ancient Egypt on the basis of his own readings of Egyptian hieroglyphics. He frequently draws attention to the shortcomings of Philosophy. Where he does engage with philosophers, as in, say, his concluding chapter on Descartes and Nietzsche, in The Hegemony of Spaces, Volume One of In the Cross of Reality: Sociology, or with Descartes in Out of Revolution, he has such an original take that it also falls on deaf academic ears.

Then there is the overall vision. He has a providential reading of history, and the role played by wars and revolutions as the great powers of providence, at a time when providential history has almost no academic representatives. Even the Marxists have largely dropped the teleologism in Marx. But teleological history is not the same as providential history. The key point about his providentialism and how that differs from the progressivist academic orthodoxy of today is perhaps most easily understood if we distinguish between a cast of mind which looks to ideas and ideals, and attempts to rebuild society around the normative claims it makes. This is the standard way in which the philosophically influenced mind works—to be sure Marx transferred the site of development to the material plane, but, for all that supposed break with idealism, his position was still one of postulating what he already knew to be the best (ideal!) society (communism) and looking for how it would be realized. He missed two things that are intrinsic to Christian doctrine and to Rosenstock-Huessy.

First, reality is revealed, and not the result of thinking it through to its end. Secondly, our reality is inseparable from our sins. It is how we build with that that matters. The philosophers teach ethics. They do so because they believe that if we can act without error we will make ourselves and our world much better. This is idealism pure and simple. The difference between Christianity and philosophy and its predilection to instruct us in ethics and designing laws to make a better world stands in sharp relief to what Christianity is doing when we think about Peter and Paul, the two pillars of Christ’s Church. One was a weakling and a liar; the other a zealot and witness to murder. The Church is a creation of sinful flawed creatures. That is why Rosenstock-Huessy saw it as a miracle, and its very existence a confirmation that Jesus was the Son of God. It is the recognition of the salvation of the fallen, the forgiveness of sin, redemption through grace not the potency of our virtue and intelligence that is constantly at work in Rosenstock-Huessy’s writings. Thus too, Rosenstock-Huessy sees war and revolution as the greatest creative occasions not because they are good things, not because he is calling for a revolution in which we implement what we think will be the better future, but because they are symptoms and signs forcing us to recognize the dead ends we have reached: they are spiritual diseases. They reveal us at the end of our tether, and are the preconditions of our ways of dying into a new form of life. One of the inner secrets Rosenstock-Huessy sees in Christianity is that it teaches how we must die into new life.

Rosenstock-Huessy also makes Christianity the root of the tree of universal history, in a century where the academic mind has largely been devoting itself to a neo-pagan revival, as most evident in the importance of what Rosenstock-Huessy calls the four dysangelists of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, each of whom is involved in destroying the traditional components of every civilization, including Christian civilization. While Rosenstock-Huessy goes deep into why the various pillars of civilization exist and why their modern destroyers are so destructive, he is as little interested in defending tradition for the sake of tradition, as in congratulating those who think that we have simply outgrown traditions because we are smarter and better. But he is interested in the collected learning of the species, of the creative, revelatory and redemptive aspects of life which accompany how we organize our lives, how we orientate ourselves as we command and call, declare, and refuse, and then occupy the different fronts of reality that our lips and hearts and hands have opened up.

We all occupy different positions in the various fronts we encounter through our various social allocations, from the family to the division of labour, to our culture, and so forth. A tradition is only a tradition in so far as it is a living pathway of spirits; pathways can run out of spirit; they can be merely dead ends. The tension between anchorage and dwelling, and the spirit’s movement and growth is one of the most important of the species. Societies can be equally doomed by a refusal to grow spiritually, by idolizing their traditions, and by becoming unhinged as the enticements of our desires and imaginings sever us from sacrificial requirements intrinsic to love’s existence and movement.

Rosenstock-Huessy takes cognizance of the fact that all life is about mutation and transformation (which is why he identifies with the Christian fathers who saw Heraclitus as a Christian before Christ’s birth). The power of the language of religion, he would say in Practical Knowledge of the Soul, lies in it, addressing the secrets of transformation. We can never be alert to mutation and transformation if we neglect the importance of contingent encounters, or the creative opportunity that a moment may call for. The meaning of our actions are only revealed through our responses to the circumstance of the moment—not by our plans and intentions. Thus Rosenstock-Huessy emphasises that responsiveness is a condition we ever find ourselves in—not “cogito ergo sum,” as he famously said, but “respondeo etsi mutabor.”

Knowing when to preserve and when to jettison, how to respond to the requirements of the time and circumstance, how to know whether the powers of the tradition are alive or dead, having a sense for which of the hidden powers of the future are to be fought for and given over to, that is part of the cross of our suffering, the trial of our lives, the test of our faith. This is something that is simultaneously something that we are never sufficiently prepared for but what we most need to be educated for. This is also why Rosenstock-Huessy, in the first volume of his In the Cross of Reality, places such importance on how games or play prefigure in our lives—they are means for preparing us for the serious and the unpredictable contingencies which require on our part an astuteness of observation and a strength of character. Neither of these qualities are particularly highly valued by a modern education system which prioritises principles ostensibly encompassing the sources of all our greatest social problems and their application which will ostensibly solve them. The sporting field, though, is a preparation for the battlefield, and the “battlefield” or “theatre of war” is the most serious space in which life is tested.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s view of life owed much to his experience on the battlefield. His conceived War and Revolution amidst the horror of Verdun. The sense of urgency, of trauma, of the horrors we are capable of unleashing, and of what is required for our survival, as well as what contributed to the nations of Europe killing each other on such a scale are woven everywhere into his writing. They give his voice a sense of reality that comes from being covered in mud and splashed with blood, from watching his comrades killed in combat. It is a voice that does not simply come from the study, which I suspect is why those who live in and from the study and the classroom rarely respond to it. That is also why how he approaches the great task of building a lasting peace has nothing in common with the far more popular figures such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Jacob Taubes (who for a year corresponded with Rosenstock-Huessy), Giorgo Agamben, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, all of whom sought to implicate the modern radical project of emancipation within the theo-political one of the messianic. And they, like their less theologically sensitive contemporaries, such as Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, who have had such an important influence on the ideas circulating in the Arts and Humanities, all view traditions and social roles as if they were explicable through the dyad of oppressor and oppressed, and hence as if what mattered most in a life was that it could be lived according to one’s desires.

But they also want to expose the shaping of desires by the dominant social powers and the ideologies that sustain their privilege, as that very shaping of desires also is a symptom of oppression. Emancipation thus always comes back to appetites, and sociality magically forming some chemical compound to be released in utopia or the “to come.”

However philosophically clever and satisfying the above thinkers are to students and professors who think that ideas exposing who has more, and how much more “power” we will have when emancipated, Rosenstock-Huessy had no time for such vapid analyses that betray the idealistic vapours of their conjuration. Thus he rarely mentions any of the major figures of twentieth century Marxism in his major writings. In some letters, we discover that he thought the revival of 1848 in the age of world wars was a disgraceful failure to read the times. He also lets off steam about Habermas, Adorno and Bloch, while he seems oblivious to the French structuralists and post-structuralists who had started to make a name for themselves in the 1960s and who would go onto play such a large part in the kinds of political narratives coming out of universities in the last forty or so years.

In sum, what the generation who came of age as they were being educated in the 1960s came to see as the great voices of orientation, the very voices which came to play an ever bigger part not only in university curricula, but in policy, were either unnoticed or dismissed by Rosenstock-Huessy. The idea that the greatest problem confronting the species was to overthrow the forces of oppression to emancipate the self we—and those who think just like us—identity with was completely alien to Rosenstock-Huessy. And it is the lack of such a core principle in his work that also continues to alienate him from readers who are of, or trained by the academy.

Whereas the academy has come to play a major role in the narratives which have now come to define the West, neatly now summed up as policy formulations of Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity, Rosenstock-Huessy saw freedom as both a decisive feature of what we are and of the better, more Christ-like, world. It is inseparable from the Holy Spirit, and his take on freedom is yet again an indication of how he diverges from the commonplace distinctions of philosophy which are now so engrained in the mind of the educated public, and the way his faith informs his eyes and ears and throat and heart.

Please indulge me the following excursus into the history of modern philosophy. For if we understand the underlying connections between the modern elevation of the value of freedom, the specific meaning that freedom takes on in the modern context (one very different even from classical philosophy), and the underlying metaphysical parameters within which it emerged, we are in a far better position to appreciate how we are still very much entrapped in the mental prison that Rosenstock-Huessy was trying to break open. We will also better appreciate why Rosenstock-Huessy’s Christian solution is a genuine solution to what commenced as a dream (Descartes’ dream) and has become a living nightmare.

The modern philosophical view of freedom emerges in the broader metaphysical dualism of determinism and voluntarism. They are the polarities which Descartes appealed to in his claim that there were two fundamental substances which provide the basis for all of our understanding of reality—one is immaterial (the mind), the other is defined by virtue of it being extended (the body). Mind, though, in Descartes solely consists of cognitive operations, so the voluntarism in Descartes is strictly limited to acceptance or negation, while the body is construed entirely deterministically. While the particular means identified by Descartes as required to explain causation was abandoned thanks to Newton’s demonstration of the fact (not hypothesis as he proudly declared) of action at a distance, the far more important philosophical contribution made by Descartes was the metaphysical redefining of the world as a totality of laws operating through causal mechanisms, i.e. determinism.

The German idealists (though not Hegel), but especially Kant, the young Schelling, and J.G. Fichte developed the voluntarist metaphysics that is so widely embraced today. In Kant that voluntarism was purely limited to our moral claims, but it finds it most complete form in J.G. Fichte, the major philosophical figure in the Romantic and nationalist movements in Germany, who is barely read today. Fichte had taken the Kantian and Rousseauian idea of freedom being submission to a law which we give to ourselves and extends it to any and every activity where there is human involvement. Thus life itself as we fathom it and participate in it through our consciousness of it and ourselves, for Fichte, is but the self-conscious postulation of the ego. Hence the world is but a fact-act, and our relations are all potentially contractually formed, albeit on the basis of some intrusions by the non-I, which are, inter-alia, racially determined (hence his nonsense on the German character.)

The highpoint of Fichte’s fame was in 1806, when he delivered his Addresses to the German Nation, which was a call for the unification of the German people into one nation to counter the Napoleonic conquests. By the 1830s his fame had dropped away, but his influence had impacted indirectly upon the romantic radicalism of the young or neo-Hegelians. In spite of their name, the young/neo-Hegelians were generally radically anti-tradition and anti-institutionalist and in this respect deeply opposed to Hegel’s philosophy of the reconciliation of the Enlightenment spirit of diremption. They are mainly remembered today because its “members” included Karl Marx. The most philosophical amongst them was probably Ludwig Feuerbach whose critique of Hegel was to be repeated by the young Marx. The two figures in that group that are most conspicuously Fichtean in their philosophical formulations were August Cieszkowski, and, Max Stirner. Cieszkowski is all but completely forgotten, but while Stirner’s work of anarcho-individualism, The Ego and Its Own was philosophically light-weight compared to Fichte, his name has survived, in part due to the merciless polemic against him by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, but also because he would be an important influence on Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche, though, was also deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, whose polemics against Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel contain some of the best comic lines in the history of philosophy.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy also proceeds by way of metaphysically uniting determinism and voluntarism. He does this by making the will the underlying creative material power of the universe, which is also inseparable from the representations that accompany its incessant drive. He had, so he claimed, bridged materialism and idealism by uncovering the nature of Kant’s notoriously elusive thing-in-itself—Kant had claimed “the-thing-in-itself” was a necessary postulate of reason, that we could never understand, because it lay beyond the mental strictures of our “experience”—it lay outside the parameters—the a priori elements of what he called the faculty of understanding. Nietzsche would simply appropriate this hybrid of material determinism and the will as the fundamental power of the universe.

But whereas Schopenhauer’s response to this was to seek retreat by withdrawing his mind from the world and the restless tumultuous will that was the source of all our suffering, Nietzsche merged a physiological/ biological (determinist) view of human beings with the more Fichtean and Stirner one of heroic potency. Nietzsche ridiculed “the heroic,” a term being bandied about by Carlyle (also an admirer of Fichte), but his superman is a call for the breeding of just the type Fichte had made the high point of his philosophy.

The same deterministic-voluntarist hybrid, albeit without the philosophical self-consciousness and deliberation of Fichte or Schopenhauer, is also in Marx. He claimed to have demonstrated the necessity of socialism arising from the break-down of the bourgeois mode of production, whose laws he had claimed to identify in Capital. But the movement between bourgeois and socialist society was also predicated upon the revolutionary act by the industrial working class, i.e. that act and class were the sine qua non of socialism. In spite of his constant refrain that consciousness was determined by society and not the other way, Marx himself laid out a theory of ideology which would be essential to the radical thinking of the next century. For without clearing away the ideological distortions which protected the ruling class that action might not occur. The proletariat, in other words, needed to be educated, needed to have their consciousness raised. His theory contained two irreconcilable “absolutes”—one (the reality of the capitalist mode of production) studied by the scientist , the other (a non-existent future socialist and then communist society) appealed to by the revolutionary. Eventually the revolutionary Marx quietly adopted the kind of voluntarism that would define Leninism: that moment came when Russian Marxists asked Marx if they could bypass capitalism taking hold in Russia and leap straight to a socialist society. He replied, Yes—and with that he tactility renounced the deterministic basis of his own theory: consciousness could in fact determine social being.

The one philosopher who grasped the importance of the metaphysical bifurcation that had been playing itself out since Descartes was Hegel. He had argued that the modern metaphysical bifurcation of determinism and voluntarism was but one more unfortunate legacy of the Enlightenment’s division of the world into the finite, and infinite, which, he argued, rests upon a dogmatic (and philosophically false) belief that the finite is not a moment within the infinite, but a separate part of it. That is, it cuts us off from the world that it purports to exhaustively define so that we can understand all its laws. Hegel was correct to see the dialectical relationship between determinism and voluntarism. His mistake was his faith in philosophy itself—and even how he pits faith against philosophy involves the error that explodes his entire edifice. That error is most visible in the key to his entire corpus, his lesser known book, Faith and Knowledge. While it provides a brilliant analysis of the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, it is based upon a completely false understanding of faith.

Although Hegel admired Hamann, and wrote a very positive and lengthy appraisal of him, had he read him more closely he would have realized that faith is not something arrived at when knowledge reaches its end. The idea that faith was required when knowledge reached its end was what the Romantics had in common with Kant, and it was this that Hegel kept finding and criticising not only in Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi, but young Schelling, Schleiermacher, Fries and other contemporaries. His point was like Kant, who had denied any knowledge of the thing-in-itself, only to tell us a lot about it, they all speak of the limits of knowledge only to tell us what they know lies beyond knowledge, and how we too might know it! While Hegel’s argument against the philosophers and theologians is compelling, it, nevertheless, misses the point—that faith is what leads to knowledge and indeed to the life you have, not what takes place outside or beyond it. It is utterly existential, and world-making.

When one sees the ruin of Hegel’s life-time work, a system with nothing but rubble to be picked up by subsequent generations we cannot help see (I at least) the deep failure that incubates within philosophy. For none has done a better job than Hegel in demonstrating that any subject we consider is only what it is because of its predications. The more knowledge we bring to/have about the subject, the more we see what it is. That is a very clever defence of science and the importance of knowledge as a systemic enterprise—but it overstates the importance of reason and ideas and underestimates the things that Rosenstock-Huessy emphasises which are required in knowledge and which I talk about at the end of this paper. Thus it is, for Hegel, that to know the part requires knowing the All that informs the part. That is a brilliant metaphysical insight, and it sends Hegel on the path of writing The Science of Logic and The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Science, and the most magisterial account of the history of philosophy ever given, as it demonstrates how his philosophy is the culmination that recognizes the conceptual development and labour that led to him.

If philosophy from its origin aspired to the God’s eye view, it is Hegel who has the eye of God. Or so it would be the case if he were correct, though we can see how silly it is when we start to look at some of the errors of judgment he displays in his Philosophy of Nature, especially. But our life is not formed in the study, nor by denoting the dynamic of our contradictions. It is formed by the faith that has carried us to where we are as it also moves us to our next action. This by the way was why the deeply religious Hamann liked Hume so much and forgave him for his more enlightened nonsense. Hume understood that faith is a motivation where all our knowing can be sceptically broken down if we pose the right questions to it.

Hegel, aside, the disjuncture between determinism and voluntarism remains very much with us in our confused world. Here Hegel’s genius retains its relevance. For we can see that because the greatest faith in the Western world today is faith in their ideas about the world and they themselves are caught up in the constant oscillation transpiring between the polarities of the metaphysical spectrum upon which their ideas “pop up.” More often than not the oscillation (Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction) transpires within the one narrative. An extremely common one involves being drawn into identifying the determinations of identity (gender, race, ethnicity etc.), whilst at the same time rallying behind the (wilful, i.e. idealist driven actions) overcoming of those determinations by changing our ideology.

The contemporary soul, in sum, in so far as the modern project is to a very large part a philosophical—an ideational—creation is torn between two absolutes, the absolute of the universe and the social forces that are treated as naturalistic variations of ideological social power, and the absolute of emancipation in which the rights of the oppressed subject triumph over the unjust imposition of the privileged. But the concept of emancipation is also implicated in the other metaphysical oscillation concerning freedom which accompanies the determinism/ voluntarism dyad, which was at the centre of Kant’s (unsuccessful) attempt to provide an unassailable metaphysics. That was the division between freedom as the formulation of a categorical imperative (i.e. the capacity to make unconditional universal moral commands) and simply giving into the appetites (our appetites, in this schema, are simply bodily determinations). From the Kantian perspective surrendering to our appetites is the antithesis of freedom—so much so that he holds that no act is free if is affected even by the tiniest degree by an appetite.

Kant aside, the idea of freedom has become extremely commonplace today, although the idea of our freedom requiring removing the strictures upon the appetites is the view of freedom to be found at its most brutally honest form in Sade, and in a more humorous version in Rabelais’ less semen and blood-stained depiction of the kind of giants we could be were we free of religious superstition, priests, bad rulers, lawyers, scholastics, etc.

The liberal view of freedom, which goes back to Locke and takes persons and their property as the bastions of liberty, mediates between the appetites unbound, and the binding required of other appetitive beings. That human nature is nothing but appetites in motion is also an offshoot of the deterministic metaphysics of the modern and is laid out by Spinoza and Hobbes, and it will be this view of the self without freedom or faith in its own dignity that will be a major impetus for Kant’s critical philosophy.

The politics of emancipation in the West (and they have no real resonance outside of the West today), though drawing upon “moral” posits which give it normative leverage (the leverage of shame), is the dialectical resolution of the modern components of the idea of freedom. It incorporates the satiation of one’s appetites, the right of respect (dignity) for having one’s appetites and determinations (being/ identity), control of education to enable the breaking up of oppressive/ traditional forms of social reproduction to enable this dignified/ appetitive self, as well as the political demand that this emancipated self receives the resources, whether through reparations, or career and office holding opportunities distributed on the basis of one’s being/identity, that enable its perpetuity. Indeed as we are witnessing, the emancipated self requires for its realization a complete overhaul of the entire political, economic, pedagogical and social spheres. That it has generated an all-encompassing alliance between the state, corporations and those who determine which ideas are to be taught and publicly tolerated in order to sustain this new world of new selves also requires an unprecedented technocratic, bureaucratic and ideocratic alliance.

All of this is as remote from Rosenstock-Huessy as pretty well any other kind of campus-initiated politics that have grown out of the student revolution and its aftermath. In sum, then, for Rosenstock-Huessy the secret of freedom is not disclosed by Descartes, Spinoza, Roussea, Kant, nor Fichte nor Sade, a decisive influence in the French pot-pourri of Bataille, Blanchot, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, who have played such a huge role in the Arts and Humanities in the Western world, nor Marx nor Nietzsche. even if Rosenstock-Huessy finds things in Marx and Nietzsche which he sees as valuable. It is to be found in the partitioning of time, and the foundation of a new time. For Rosenstock-Huessy the great partitioning occurred with Jesus, for it would both bring an end to all of what he called “the listening-posts” of antiquity, that is the distinct life-ways of tribes, empires, city-states, and the diasporic Jews bound by their God, their belief in His promise, their prophesies and expectation of a Messiah, as well as breathing new life into them by raising them to another socio-historical plane and purpose.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s argument about where Christianity fits into the larger scheme of a universal history can be seen as a variant of the kind of accounts we find in the writing of people like Frédéric Ozanam, Christopher Dawson, and G.K. Chesterton, though I think once the second (and third, depending upon the edition) volume(s) of his Sociology are factored in with the two studies (the German and English versions being organized differently and having somewhat different emphases) of the European revolutions then his account is sui generis. Like any historical account, and especially when it covers such a massive array of events, some of its findings as well as the stations on its way are disputable.

However, that he provides an account of history in which he draws attention to so many variables being of consequence for the world we now live in, and that he does so balancing structural (especially in the Sociology—though, it would also be the structural features of his study of the European revolutions that would lead to a preface to the Die europäischen Revolutionen being written by the doyen of structuralist/systems theory Political Science, Karl Deutsch) and contingent features lays out a great research project that remains largely neglected. Although Berman’s two volumes of Law and Revolution is an important contribution to the development of that project.

But just as the Christian centre of his universal history has left his work being neglected, the method is also something that leaves the work being neglected. That he has a method is something he makes clear in the first volume of his most methodical writing, the first volume of In the Cross of Reality/Sociology. But just as his understanding of freedom has nothing in common with the philosophical way in which freedom has developed, his method is what he calls the cruciform one in which there are no such things as objects per se or subjects per se, even if we are to retain that philosophical language, which Rosenstock-Huessy only very occasionally does, nor are future and past unmediated by each other.

We all find ourselves torn by what we each bring to a situation, as well as what has gone into creating the situation which takes us far beyond what can be encapsulated in the words of subjectivity of objectivity. Words like subject and object have such philosophical importance because of the philosophical willingness to eliminate the complexities which overly complicate the process of having clear and distinct ideas. The terms are the result of a decision to simplify reality so it is better controllable. The terms subject and object conceal an array of actions, circumstances, occasions, historic and semiotic backdrop and inherited lexicon and knowledge-pool, as well as the associations and memories that we have and do not even know we have until we speak. “Speech,” and Rosenstock-Huessy folds writing into Sprache/speech—discloses us to ourselves as much as it communes with others—and these in turn are enmeshed in what he calls our prejects, what calls us and pulls us from the future, and trajects, which push us.

At the most critical moments we are literally torn apart between competing directions, in and at the cross and the cross roads. This is also why Rosenstock-Huessy also deviates so decisively from the general tenor of the modern mind which thinks that through its intentions and designs it will get the world it wills, as if the self and world are not inexhaustible mysteries which are revealed by the word and over time through our participation in life, but substances to be analysed into clear and distinct ideas and synthesised so that we can be masters of ourselves and the world. In sum, the modern philosophical position which has seeped so deeply into the world is one which exists in defiance of the Holy Spirit through its elevation of the self as subject, or, which is in essence no different, the elevation of our understanding of “the All” whose most important determinations have been identified by our great luminaries.

Rosenstock-Huessy is a counter-Enlightenment thinker, in the vein of Hamann, in so far as he prefers to throw himself on the ground and pray in the midst of that cross-road because he knows how fragile we and our minds are. He would rather trust the Holy Spirit than the technocratic spirits which have emerged out of the modern philosophical imagination and its limited but insufferably proud understanding. His writings are testimony to that Spirit. What I recounted earlier about the way I came to Rosenstock-Huessy, and what have suggested about the way everybody has come to him is exactly the kind of meaningful event in a life that Rosenstock-Huessy has taught me to appreciate the living presence of Holy Spirit. But thinking thus, and seeing the world thus necessarily puts him at odd with the entire academic mind-set of today which, at its worst, see the world and our participation in it through a technocratic/and or ideological template, and, at best, through the systemicity we may gather through positioning ourselves within the sciences, including the human sciences.

The Holy Spirit though is not a thing, and certainly not anything that can be adequately incorporated into a social or human science, at least so long as the sciences proceed according to the strictures that were designed to study nature in its mute “object” manner. But that approach to nature also involves us blinding ourselves to ourselves. On that front it is most interesting to compare Rosenstock-Huessy’s comparison, in Der Atem des Geistes, of the respective insights and ways and means of Michael Faraday with those of Eddington. Rosenstock-Huessy rightly indicates, no science of anything would be possible were it not for the breath of inspiration of a founder of a hitherto unknown pathway of the spirit, and the inspiration (the shared breath) that the founder is able to instil in others who follow down that path as they take us further into unexplored aspects of life. Nietzsche had claimed that the ascetic ideal in Christianity prioritised truth in such a way that it opened up a pathway for science, but Rosenstock-Huessy takes seriously what most philosophers simply ignore and that is the personal dimension and interaction of those involved in research, and the spirit that binds them in their inquiry. Thus he addresses not only what knowledge is for, but for whom it is for.

I will return to this toward the conclusion of this essay but here I wish to emphasize Rosenstock-Huessy’s recognition of the primacy of the elemental component of a living process is what is invariably left behind in abstraction. As I have hinted already what Rosenstock-Huessy teaches about Christianity, and what he finds in Christianity is what has mainly been lost, especially by theologians, about why it is important: what it reveals about life.

We live in an age where doctrine and abstraction proceed as Siamese twins, where it assumes that a doctrine such as is embodied in the Christian teaching came out of someone’s head, rather than out of lives lived, and it is what was picked up and then taught by the lives lived in devotion to a particular person, a person acknowledged and revered by those who witnessed him as a person who was both man and God, someone from whom their lives took on such a meaning that they saw themselves as being reborn through their faith in him. Rosenstock-Huessy had said that his faith was something he grew into because could never understand “why everybody did not believe the Nicean Creed.” Those are not the words of someone who thinks abstractly, but rather someone who has an uncanny perspicacity, the ability to see the relationship between the spirit and flesh of Christendom and the words that those believers at Nicaea formed with such precision and purposefulness. What Rosenstock-Huessy sees as exemplified in Christianity is the illustration of the word becoming flesh: life, teaching and actions belong together, as he writes in his masterful essay, “ICHTHYS”: they are a trinity, and as such they are the cure against what Rosenstock-Huessy identifies as “the three infernal princes—of the senses, of thought, and of compelling authority.”

But it is precisely because in forming a world where ideas matter so much we have not become better attenuated to life and its commands and demands but we have deafened and dumbed and blinded ourselves as we deal in words that lack life. We misuse and abuse names that once had power, and now they reflect back our own emptiness and powerlessness, our preference for the dead and the mechanical over the real that is love’s creation. We simply cannot fathom the experiences that gave rise to the names that created the Christian world—the experiences have become completely invisible to us because the words are but husks.

Rosenstock-Huessy’s most systematic work was his Sociology: In the Cross of Reality, which was divided into a critique of the hegemony that spatial thinking had come to play in the world, culminating in the suffocating tyranny of its imposition that had been ensconced philosophically, and an account of the times that have made us into planetary neighbours. While he often had praise for Nietzsche, he saw that the arc of modern philosophy from Descartes to Nietzsche was a fateful one for modern people. For we have become swept up in a technocratic view of life (going back to Descartes) in which the world and we ourselves are but components or resources to be dissolved into an infinitude of space, measured and reincorporated and reconfigured to conform to the plans and machinations that are supposed to emancipate us. Much of The Hegemony of Spaces is devoted to the importance of roles and the way in which they socially position us for our cooperation in making our way in the spaces we operate within. The philosophical prioritising of spaces in an age where philosophism has undermined and in many way supplanted the ways and the role of the Church also comes with the target of eliminating roles so that people better pursue their individual happiness. The rationale of roles within the family, the workplace, the school, which provides our named placement in the social order, which induct us, and steers us through the processes where we must learn the difference between shameful acts and the responsibilities which come with our role, is bound up with the fruits that we all must socially harvest if we are to have concordance and growth. Once again Rosenstock-Huessy sees the reductive and destructive force of the materialism/ idealism truncations and their naturalistic/ scientistic counterpart cutting away at how we are able to access and creatively participate in the spiritual development of the species. The grave threat facing “modern man,” requiring that he “outrun” it, is sterility, a sterility of spirit that also shows itself in its suicidal self-destruction, in its concentration camps, in its danger of turning the life-world into a gigantic factory.

If the motherless Descartes was the mother of this world, the fatherless Nietzsche aspired to be the true father who would give birth to the superman who would rule the earth. For Nietzsche the modern world is the barren offspring of the “marriage” of scientism (Descartes) and aestheticism (Nietzsche). Both swallow up the complexity of real life with their abstract fantasies. Nietzsche holds out the promise of meaning that has been shorn off our lives as but mechanical parts of the universe by Descartes. It is a deluded promise made by a man who saw much but missed much, most notably the sterility which becomes satiated by imagined children being a substitute for real children.

The second volume of Rosenstock-Huessy’s great masterpiece was devoted to one overarching theme, an account of the great times that have contributed to a universal history. The infinitization of space has as its corollary the infinitization of time, which is another way of saying the reduction of all the social creativity that has formed different times, different epochs, different generations, different ages of the spirit. Rosenstock-Huessy’s contribution to countering the spiritual and existential mass murder of reducing us and our lives, our traditions and achievements, our future hopes, and our faith and loves to spatial confinements and mechanisms is to draw us into what he calls the Full-Count of the Times.

The work as anyone knows who has read it brims with brilliance: it betrays the kind of erudition that is the preserve of the most learned of his especially learned generation; it teems with brilliant aperçus, and it makes the most marvellous connections across periods that convey an entire sense of meaning and spiritual purpose to great periods of time. Of course, it is a specialist’s nightmare. But, apart from the dire need it has of an editor who may have salvaged some of the syntactical leaps which drag entire paragraphs into thin air without leaving any trace of meaning behind, it is a work which consciously seeks to connect the lost and forgetful man of the mid-twentieth century with the multiform conditions of which he is the sociological, historical and spiritual heir.

Although he is, as I have repeated throughout a Christian, he explains in numerous works why being a Christian is not simply defining one-self against other religions and gods, but is to enter into a tradition which is founded upon the incorporation and reinvigoration of the living beyond death that precedes it. For Rosenstock-Huessy being a Christian means being open to God’s creation, voice and promise, and one cannot do that if one comes with a theologian’s or philosopher’s truncated and distorted understanding of God. A god is a living name on the lips of people—a people’s existence is bound up with the spirits they serve, the voices they respond to, what they hold sacred, the commands of their god. Rosenstock-Huessy often made the point that people first needed to understand the gods before they could begin to understand what they were talking about if God’s name arose.

And talking about God was already a sign that one was missing the point. The living God is meaningful only in relationship, in communion, in prayer and obeisance and supplication. But in so far as one is trying to explain the spiritually living to the spiritually dead, one has to imaginatively enter into life worlds remote from our own, life worlds we might never have thought about, but without which we simply would not be what we are. Few, apart from Herder, have laboured as much as Rosenstock-Huessy to explore the historical, sociological and broader cultural conditions which are part of the human story. It is the fact that, for all our differences, we are part of one family. This is why the Aborigine is the kin of the modern office worker, though on the surface they may as well live on different planets. How have we come to inhabit such different worlds, with our different traditions, our different ways of world-making, our different orientations and priorities, our different “gods” and values, hopes and expectations?

But no less important is the question, how is it that in spite of these differences we not only live on one planet, but we find ourselves conscious of the fact that there are so many different worlds, different calendars, different cultures etc. and that we also can speak to and of each other? These questions are burning ones still and Rosenstock-Huessy’s project (here he is very much following the pathway of Herder) is one which requires we drop the philosophical nonsense and norms of Western imposition and listen to each Other. Yet one more irony is that it is precisely those who do the philosophical imposition, who see the world through its norms, who are most hostile to the universal message of Christianity, and its response to the universal condition of human suffering.

Rosenstock-Huessy had an uncanny knack for tapping into that suffering and for entering into the different life worlds, as he looked to the powers and spirits that animated them, the circumstances which exhilarated and terrified them, and the creations and prayers that distinguish them. In antiquity he identified four distinct life-worlds: the tribe, the empire, the Jewish diaspora and the Greek city state. For Rosenstock-Huessy if we fail to understand the spirits of these groups and their legacies we can never appreciate Christianity. If we fail to see the power behind animism, and the powers that connected human beings with their ancestral animal teachers and tribal ancestors, if we fail to appreciate how polytheistic societies arose and what they generated, and what crises befell them, if we cannot appreciate what the Jews learnt from their enslavement and exile, why they awaited a messiah, how will we be able to appreciate the miracles that may spare us from the hellish darknesses that have always befallen civilizations, and peoples?

Rosenstock-Huessy lived through the world war(s) (he believed, rightly in my view, they were but the one event) and fought in one of its phases. But what he saw was that in spite of the horror and darkness, there was survival, and he very much saw that capacity for survival as coming out of the spiritual reserves provided by the Christian faith. The importance of Christianity lies in large part in the spiritual reserves that it has absorbed from peoples and practices who knew nothing of it. We are, for Rosenstock-Huessy, bonded by the realities that different faiths and orientations have discovered and generated and which are part of us and our world, in spite of what we might want to think or believe. Thus he writes in The Secret of the University (Ray Huessy provides this quote in his marvellous introduction to his new edition of The Fruit of Our Lips): “We must all create originally (like the pagans), hope in expectation (like the Jews), and love decisively (like Christians)— that is to say, we must take part in the beginning, end, and middle of life.”

What Rosenstock-Huessy expresses here as an existential truth, an observation about ends and beginnings and the middle of history, is preceded by the life of Jesus, whom he accepts and follows as the Son of God, the genuine middle, “the hinge-point” of history, the moment where the ages are cleft into BC and AD by a life that shakes up the worlds that preceded it and sets them on a new path. In The Fruit of Our Lips, Rosenstock-Huessy talks about the spiritual dead ends that had been reached that provide the opening, the need for Jesus to be the answer to the human prayers:

Jesus was in fact the end of our first world. He took the sins of this first world upon himself. This sentence simply recognizes the fact that in separation, tribal ritual, the temple of the sky-world, poetry in praise of nature, and the messianic psalms, were all dead ends, {in the immutability of their one-sided tendency}. In this sense Jesus’ death sentence was the price of his being the heir of these fatal dead-ends. They slew him because he held all their wealth and riches in his hand, heart, mind, and soul. He was too rich not to share in the catastrophe of the all-too-rich ancient world. {So it was his duty to be the one condemned by the king, the one sacrificed by the priest, the poem of the poet, and the one foretold by the prophet} (41),

It is interesting to note in passing how the more philosophical minded trying to fathom our historical condition can, as Agamben, Badiou, Taubes and Žižek have done, take Paul seriously, but not Jesus (Žižek, the most clownish of these characters at least provides a clownish account of Jesus as a monster who fits into his Marxian-Hegelian-Lacanian schematic overriding of history and spirit). That they take the teacher more importantly than the one whose life gives meaning and purpose to the teaching conforms to the type that Rosenstock-Huessy saw as so unfit to teach because their priorities do not conform to how life and the spirt of life works. What we teach is only actual when it is lived first.

The gospels are not a compilation of doctrines but the record of a life that bears fruits that must be taught and carried into actions. And the life that was lived was what it was in large part because of when it was lived. The who and the circumstance and the encounter are all part of the spirit of the truth and its power. The realization of the power of the life of Jesus required respondents who would take his life and take his teachings into the world so that new pathways of life, new lives could be formed. Jesus’s life was the seed to be spread while, says Rosenstock-Huessy, “The four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the lips of the risen Christ. These lips bore fruit because Jesus was also an answer to their prayers. The four Evangelists lay down their human limitations at the foot of the cross and transform their individual experience into a contribution to the community.” What the modern secular minded person can easily dismiss as merely the stories told by believers and fanatics, in Rosenstock-Huessy’s eyes reveals something astonishing—and the problem with the smug dismissal lies in the complete disjuncture between cause and effect. The irony is all too conspicuous in so far as the great principle of continuity in Greek thinking is the dogma of the equivalence in power between cause and effect. And yet we see the refusal to acknowledge this very principle by those who otherwise invoke it all the time.

For the Christian something great can indeed come from something tiny, the character of a thousand years can be born from the flame of faith in hearts awed by the words and deeds done by the right person in the right time. Faith and miracles go together, and they are intrinsic to Christianity, beginning with the miracle of the world’s creation, and the story of the fall that comes from a lack of faith/trust/ obedience in God’s promise.

How faith is formed owes much to who has the faith and what it is in. Jesus lived but it mattered who responded to him, and who responded to them. That he had the respondents who had their faith is also, from this point of view, this faith-held view, and that they reported their accounts of the life of Jesus and what he taught in the order they did is yet another miracle, or what Rosenstock-Huessy more prosaically refers to as “remarkable.”

“There is” observes Rosenstock-Huessy” a remarkable sequence in the authors of the four gospels”:

Jesus’ name in the old church had four parts: Jesus, Christ, Son of God, Savior. The four Greek initials of these four names were read as Ichthys (fish). The four gospels proclaim this name. Matthew the sinner knew that the Lord was his personal savior (= Soter); Mark knew him from the beginning as the Son of God (Hyious Theou); Luke saw Christ who had converted Saul, to whom Jesus had never spoken (for Paul, Jesus could be nothing else but exclusively Christ); John, the kindred spirit, knew him as an elder brother, that is, he thought of him as “Jesus,” personally.

In spite of Rosestock-Huessy drawing upon biblical scholars and traditions to make his case, one thing that I have not seen anyone else address with such startling insight is his claim about the way in which the gospels form a unity through their positioning on different fronts to different communities. And it is this approach that I see as providing an invaluable example of how our history should be told. It takes the most important, the most world-shaping, book in the world and demonstrates how it is a living example of the circulation of spirit, how truth is polyphonic, how it is nothing without the bond between speaker and listener, how the specific speaker and the specific person/community being addressed matter—and concomitantly how any idealistic reduction, i.e., dissolution of the living encounter and the teaching expressed in that account dies if it is diced up and regurgitated as mere ideas. Allow me to quote two passages from The Fruit of Our Lips, the one tells us something important about the speaker/ writer, the other about the listening community:

1. John writes as an eye-witness who knows the minutest details when he cares to mention them. The apostle is the author of the gospel, and that is why it carries authority.
2. All four gospels are apostolic. Matthew was the converted publican {among the apostles}, and he wrote under the eyes of {Peter and the sons of Zebedee and} Jesus’ brother in Jerusalem before the year 42. Mark obeyed Peter. Luke lived with Paul. John dictated to a Greek secretary.
3. Matthew wrote in Hebrew, not in Aramaic, and he was the first to write.
4. Mark states bluntly that he is quoting Matthew (47).

and:

John spoke to people who knew the arts and sciences; Luke spoke to the greatest high churchmen and Puritans of antiquity; Mark spoke to the civilized inhabitants of the temple states. But thanks to his “bad taste,” Matthew penetrated to the most archaic layer of all society, to the tribal layer of ritual, and so Matthew gave us a version of the gospel that was to become the most universal and fundamental characteristic of the new way of life. The Mass and the Eucharist, the inner core of all worship, is identified in Matthew [26:26–29]. Since he made clear that by His sacrifice Christ had purchased the salvation of the sacrificers, the scripture now says: At every meal, the sacrifice that is the bread and wine speaks to the dining community and invites us to join our Master on the other side, so to speak—on the side of the victim (92-93).

Finally on the importance of Christianity as “the hinge point of history”—and I should emphasise that it these few citations do not remotely compare to the detailed case Rosenstock-Huessy makes in the Full Count of the Times—what matters as much as what preceded Christianity by way of the creations, loves and practices that flow into it and that it redeems, is what it puts an end to by becoming a stumbling block:

I may not relapse into tribal ritual or Pharaoh’s sky-world; Hitler, who tried to do just that, stands revealed as a madman. The other streams are similarly blocked: the modern Greeks, the physicists, and the modern Jews, the Zionists, are certainly not the Greeks or Jews of antiquity. The Greeks glorified the beauty of the universe; our physicists empty it of meaning. The Jews praised God; the Zionists raised a university as the first public building in Jerusalem. So the roadblock of the Word is simply a fact; not one of the streams of the speech of ancient men surges through us directly any more (45).

Rosenstock-Huessy’s reading of history and the role of Christianity as a universalising, planetary forming force stands in complete contradiction to the modern liberal mind which believes it and it alone has found a way to reconcile all the traditions and faiths of the world, thereby illustrating that it is no less a universal dogma than the Christian faith—but it is a dogma that proceeds by deception, the deception of purporting to respect the very traditions it destroys by squeezing their essence into the pre-formations it finds tolerable. Lived faiths are born through and from bloody sacrifices—the blood and sacrifice are as intrinsic to the existence of the faith as to its truth.

Thus, the Jewish Bible and Old Testament and Koran are as bloody books as ever have been written. They are an affront to the vapid comfortableness of the liberal mind which does not want to acknowledge the blood and horror behind its own birth—believing it escapes its reality by virtue of the sanctimony of its moral accusations against its ancestors. In place of harrowing and astonishing testimonies of despair and salvation, of battles and renunciations, of dogmas that require an all or nothing commitment, liberalism distils a religious—moral essence which it drops into an abstract mush. It presents a morally vacuous and existential picture of life’s meaning devoid of real conflictual devotional differences, a safe-space free from micro-aggressions and hate. It presides over the waste land of spirits deprived as much of authority as of their memory.

The liberal spirit is pure tyranny in which all the gods are interchangeable because they have been defanged and folded into the air of ideas and ideals. They are as loveless as they are vacant. They promise the freedom that comes from the right of sensual and racial and ethnic identity in which real differences of the sort thrashed out by Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig in the midst of war in 1916 are only of importance to the extent they may indicate degrees of demanding, having, and blaming the oppressive privileged Other. This cast of mind is the antithesis of the dialogical spirit as exhibited in the amicably acrimonious exchange between Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, an exchange that changed both their minds and opened up new paths for both of them: they both discovered more about their commitments, and priorities, their faiths, what they each held as unnegotiable in so far as they could not lie to themselves about what had made them who they were: and then they joined beyond themselves and beyond their trajects.

One of the most shocking things that we face in the Western world, particularly Western Europe with Muslim immigration is not simply a demographic transformation which the host population has not been prepared for, but the entire process is transpiring without a modicum of understanding being demonstrated in the media or education system about why an encounter must change all parties to it, why that is an opportunity for grace, for new creations of the spirit. Instead, we are witness to a people whose sense of tradition is more than a millennium and a half old encountering a people who have almost entirely lost all sense of communal historical continuity, a people now so spiritually bereft they have little but their stuff and distractions, their escape pathways in booze and drugs and hyper-sexualized culture (that only makes them despicable to Muslim migrants) to show for themselves. Is it any wonder that the Muslim youth are so embittered and willing to embrace causes where they can take direction from a God that lives in their hearts and gives them meaning and purpose that is an alternative to the wasteland that they see all around them?

The liberal narration that predominated among the political and pedagogical classes can only bring to the discussion the same failed abstractions that are tearing itself apart. The Rosenstock-Huessy-Rosenzweig dialogue, as I once said in a lecture in a university in Istanbul, provides the “model” of what a dialogue between inimical faiths must involve. Without such dialogues there can be no friendship, and no birth. But an understanding of the importance of friendship and conflict being in what it gives birth to, again something of such importance to Rosenstock-Huessy, has no meaning in a world in which ideas have supplanted living connections.

Not surprisingly the liberal mind cannot bear to read the Christian Rosenstock-Huessy, preferring to dismiss him as an anti-Semite so that he need not be heard, while the Jewish Rosenzweig is simply reduced to an aesthete and ethicist, a forefather of the pure ethicist Emmanuel Levinas, whose Jewishness never gets in the way of his Greekness, which makes him academically sellable to Jews and Gentiles, who can only look back at past animosities as Christian prejudice and Jewish victimhood. The tyranny of spatial thinking is how it cuts away at the times that provide defining and differentiating characteristics of peoples, and their respective spirits and pathways.

The critical methodological innovation that Rosenstock-Huessy proposed for a new human science unencumbered by the tyranny of spatial thinking was attentiveness to the cleavages in time, or more precisely, attentiveness to the various partitions of time which divide and surround us. When I was growing up it was not uncommon to see nuns and priests in the street. Their clothing was a reminder of another age. And yet they also inhabited this age. We rarely consider how different professions are also the result of a time partition. The further we are willing to follow the way of the spirit and not remain captive to the spatialization of our being the more conscious we can become of why our differences are time-founded and time-bound.

Thus, for Rosenstock-Huessy, the great challenge we face as a species is dialogical and time-ridden. To be able to speak and listen to what has come out of the different times we as a species have inhabited, to be able to, in his phrase, make the times “conversable” is our great challenge. It is also an opportunity in so far as the times have been literally pressed up against each other as the European revolutions and the world wars have made us conscious of our planetary condition. We may be more conscious of our world being one, we can only respond to the challenge that has been posed to us if we bid farewell to the kind of essentialist thinking that has been part of the tyranny of the philosophical legacy.

This is also closely related to other of Rosenstock-Huessy’s aspirations: the desire to make grammar the basis of a new social science, something that is sketched out in Speech and Reality. In various places RosenstockHuessy rues the triumph of Alexandrian grammar. And I recall a former classics teacher of mine saying how crazy this was: Alexandrian grammar was simply a way of teaching a language. For Rosenstock-Huessy, though, why it mattered was because it attenuated the mind to prioritize the philosophical imagination’s way of taming reality rather than properly inducting us into the living priorities such as are provided by the vocative mood and the imperative mood. Social induction commences with the imperative, just as our most serious engagements are ones in which respond to a calling, to the vocative.

The movement from God being a person whom we address and who addresses us to a figure encapsulated in, and talked about through the imposition of the indicative mood is indicative of a massive cultural shift. In our post-Enlightenment age we see that has the result of simply knowing more. But we simply do not know what we are doing if we do not render visible what powers we are giving ourselves over to in our deeds. The moderns have mostly lost all sense of themselves by being blinded by abstractions which hide their deepest sense of what matters to them from themselves. They make conversableness impossible because speech is merely a tool, the modern soul, as he observed in the fourth section of Der Atem des Geistes devoted to the need to resuscitate liturgical thinking, merely a fragmented bundle of nerves (ascribed some mythic identity—in Rosenstock-Huessy’s time race and class predominated), our expectations and motivations bound up with philosophical ideals, while formerly venerable and meaningful names such as person, nature, time, modesty, experiment, and the individual are dissolved in the intellectual acidity of the Renaissance and the further spiritual bifurcation that occurs with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

Against this Rosenstock-Huessy proposed a return to “liturgical thinking,” a kind of thinking that moves us back into the primordial condition of being called, something we know happens in life from our infancy on as we are integrated into the bodies of sociality which provide us with place and purpose. But it is also in the sacred relationship between priest and God, and in the sacrifice of the mass that Rosenstock-Huessy sees the revealed truth that “The soul must be called “Thou: before she can ever reply “I,” before she can ever speak of “us” and, analyze “it” finally.” The deployment of lessons taken from liturgy, as well as prioritising how our capacity to partition and recognize the partitions of time and the different fronts of reality that grammar accentuates and drives us further into all are to be incorporated into what Rosenstock-Huessy proposes as a new science, that is a break with the ways of knowing which have failed—and which can be seen to have failed if we can see through the noise and moral self-righteousness, and observe the conflicts both regionally and globally that now beset the West.

The spiritual bifurcation mentioned above has continued on its way with its appeal to rights on the one hand—the abstract spirit of idealism, whose best metaphysical cases are to be found in the contestation between the a priorism of “practical reason” [Kant] and logic [Hegel])—and materialism which plays out in the twin perversions of scientism and economism. Scientism is science deprived of an understanding of its “why?” and “for whom?” Which is also to say that it is science unhinged from a culture in which the bonds of real solidarity have been fragmented into the same nervous bundles and isolated atoms monstrously compounded by economic gain irrespective of the spiritual worth of a project (funding and tenured employment), ambition, pride, honour and the other diabolical temptations of the spirit—it splits, dehumanises and terrifies, and annihilates (from the alienated lonely soul to the concentration camp); its rewards are as ephemeral as they are grace-less.

For Rosenstock-Huessy, this is the Greek legacy, shorn of the constraints that accompanied its initial resuscitation and direction under the auspices of the trinity. The metaphysical drive to know and control the world, without a break, is the great juggernaut of technē and calculation. Like the Greeks we moderns in entering into this pact with these diabolical powers that can be unlocked by the “metaphysicilization” of the material world into its scientifically reductive and economically productive components are driven onto find slaves to do our bidding and pleasures to slake our empty time. There are deep affinities between Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and Rosenstock-Huessy’s, but they drastically depart on the issue of what saves us from it. The pairing of Descartes (science) and Nietzsche (aesthetics) mentioned above is the sterile pairing of a world losing its faith, hope and love in what is worth having faith in, hoping for, and loving. It is the blocking out of grace that comes from being indifferent to the living person and delivering the self to its own emptiness and abstractness.

It is against this horror we are blindly running into as we can no longer distinguish between the living and the dead, between human loving lives animated by a common spirit and promise of future in spite of tensional differences and zombies whose utility is to be calculated on a vast spread sheet and whose moral worth is the purely sterile one of self-worth that Rosenstock-Huessy raises the spectre of Saint Paul and his meaning for science in Der Atem des Geistes. There he pits the legacy of Paul’s devotional development of his understanding in its wholeness, with the Platonic desiccation of life into ideals and world, and the subsequent cultural and social truncations and deformations that come from tearing the world into mental strips and bits to be inserted into an idealistic/ technocratic design. One may recall the picture Plato presents of the philosophers having to switch babies around when the eugenics program designed to improve the natural likelihood of philosopher kings being born goes awry. The horror of it is so much that there are Platonic scholars who see it all as a warning against utopia—completely downplaying why Plato admired the Spartans so much and how he was trying to improve upon what he saw as the best of Sparta and Athens by eliminating the family and private property for philosophers.

In a section that strikes me as amongst the most profound of Rosenstock-Huessy’s insights into the gift of the Christian way of creation, revealing and redeeming life, we see how it matters whom Paul serves and what follows from that faith and devotion.

Paul is the non-idealized teacher of the Gentiles, believing the “incarnated Word” instead of his ideals. Pagans have ideals, academics have values, but men have ancestors of their soul journey. Thus Paul simply says: Scio cui credidi. I know who I have faith in…. Paul is the first normal, modern scientist. He knows whom he is serving, whom he has believed. If we do not recognize the mysticism of the apostle Paul as the sound sociological truth of research, then the freedom of science is lost. Because only on the Pauline basis of “Cui cogitatur?” where the one knowing thus serves the loving ones, can vice be banished from the schools… the Christian peoples believed Paul was right. Paul has been at work in every school and college for the last nineteen hundred years… Thanks to Paul we knew what still concerned us in Plato and what didn’t. Thanks to Paul we knew what still bound us in the Old Testament and what had passed. Today’s scholarship, however, deals with Paul instead of being based on him. It is to him we owe the freedom of science.

And a page or so later, he continues:

Paul is the normal thinker, and the liberal theologians are the originators of all tyranny. For in tyranny, whether that of Hegel or Marx or Hitler, the deadly thirst for knowledge reigns supreme over life-hungry individuals.

However, in the normal order, love reigns over death and knowledge. Both desires are unleashed today – those which consume the antediluvian individual, the thirst for knowledge and the thirst for life, the will to power of the knowledge-hungry, the thirst for life of herd animals. The Lord had overcome the thirst for life; Paul had overcome the thirst for knowledge. The two desires condition and produce each other. Hackel and Hitler belong together like Jesus and Paul. Hitler’s mysticism and Häckel’s rationalism together have perverted the relationship between thinking and speaking: animals have become our models since we have forgotten that we only understand animals thanks to the language of our own love. But whoever recognizes Jesus and Paul as two generations of one and the same man formed together out of both of their loving—and that’s what they have required of us—sees that they came into the world against mysticism and reason, against Haeckel and Hitler.

Apart from the point that I have emphasised above, what is also worth noting in this passage is the way Rosenstock-Huessy makes his point by way of invoking the names of Haeckel and Hitler. While in the early part of the nineteenth century, the zoologist, biologist and eugenicist Ernst Haeckel was a household name in Germany, especially through popular science books like The Riddle of the Universe, he is now largely forgotten; Hitler’s name though has become synonymous with political evil.

Rosenstock-Huessy constantly emphasizes the living name over the primacy of the concept. And it is noteworthy how in Plato’s attempt to provide an answer for everything important from the structure of the cosmos to the way in which to live one’s life, he insisted on the primacy of the idea over the name (see his Cratylus), only to disprove everything he was saying by making the man with the name Socrates the model of the best man who had ever lived. Plato had ridiculed Protagoras’ claim that “man is the measure of all things,” only to make the powers exhibited by one man to be the measure of all that mattered. Our names do indeed matter, and the fact that the name of Haeckel will send someone of a certain age back to google while everyone knows who Hitler is indicative of how a name and its mattering is also bound up with time—how it may become a cipher of significance over a certain period of time.

In conclusion and on a personal aside I will also say, that every time I reread Rosenstock-Huessy I discover something not only inspirational, but something I have never previously seen. Much of my life over fifty years as a university student, academic, and writer was spent reading philosophers. None have had the same effect on me. I do make exceptions of Hamann and Herder, when I say no matter how brilliant all the other great minds I have read, Rosenstock-Huessy, has remained an open-ended source of inspiration. The spirit always awakens something in me when I read him. I picture him beckoning me to show me something else I have never considered. I have written much on Rosenstock-Huessy. I do not consider myself to be an expert on him. I know as little about what it would mean to be an expert on Rosenstock-Huessy as to be an expert about a day I was inspired by the wind and a walk in the forest or a thrilling conversation. He is too vital for that. I have written this because he not only changed my life, his presence has remained constant throughout it.

I hope that through our common love of this man we might keep his spirit alive for a future generation, who living beyond the hells that are now upon us, will hear the wisdom of his way, and participate in delivering future generation from the mental entrapments we have adopted over multiple generations and the particular horrors those entrapments have unleased.

For us, we have prayer. And I thank Rosenstock-Huessy for showing how necessary prayer is when we are at the end of our tether.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


What Conspiracy? On the Nefarious Purpose, Means and Ideas of Globalist Imperialism, Part 3

Read Part 1 and Part 2.

The Modern Metaphysical Roots of the New Technocratic World

Introduction

In the first two parts of this essay, I focused upon the globalist purpose behind the destructive domestic use of disinformation within the US-European imperial axis which has asphyxiated liberal democracy, and some of the major geopolitical machinations that have proceeded on the back of fake news. This third part of the essay addresses a larger philosophical set of concerns that might superficially be seen as of little relevance to the crisis of the West today as it sits amidst civil wars and a world war.

This third part is a reflection upon the destructive drives within modern metaphysics beginning with its reconstitution of the cosmos as one in which faith in God is replaced by faith in the powers of our own mind. That faith has come to reveal behaviors as monstrous as any summoned by the human spirit—from the death camps of the all-knowing leaders (Dostoevsky’s God-men), Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol-Pot etc. to the deluded sense of sanctimony of a people caught up in the abstractions of rights’ talk that has fueled the West’s support of a war against Russia in the name of Ukraine liberation to the battle ground now taking place over children as fully sexualized beings to be inducted into the larger culture of the West’s self-understanding as a rights’ and dignity based pleasure sensorium of sexualized identities. This seemingly recent outbreak of the war over childhood sexualism has a long pedigree. Decisions made about US school curricula in sexual education and explicit sex materials being placed in schools go back well over a decade, but the sexual revolution of the 1960s was also accompanied by various calls to lower the age of sexual consent and to overturn prosecutions of adults for sexual conduct with minors.

While it would be hard to argue against the idea that the smashing of sexual restrictions was not an important part of the call to “emancipate” children’s sexuality, one should not also neglect the fact that what was also being overthrown was the idea of the role of adults requiring taking on responsibilities demanding sacrifices. In traditional societies children become inducted into roles and the roles they take on are seen as essential to the group’s survival and well-being.

What happened in the West was the growth of an idea, going at least back to Rousseau, that children knew and should live in accordance with their own nature, albeit with the guidance of tutors such as Émile’s tutor who somehow are able to absolve themselves through their own thinking from the determinations which the rest of the civilized suffer from. As with so much else in Rousseau, the acceptance of this new idea required a break with all preceding social mores—and Rousseau always trusted his intelligence more than the collective intelligence of human beings that preceded him, because they were simply products of human nature deformed by private property, inequality and self-interest.

While Rousseau still had ideas of some sort of transcendence needed for the child’s development, in spite of his determination to liberate the child from prejudice and be more in tune with its innermost nature, he opened up a way of thinking in which the liberation of the self was predicated upon the liberation of the child. And instead of the child being exposed to and required to perform daily acts of the self’s transcendence, instead of experiencing the important lesson that the self becomes a worthwhile self by bowing to higher things of the spirit, and thereby slowly being raised by that spirit, the infant became the center. Freud would christen that infantile center the Id, and whilst doing so, make the sexuality of the infant an important clue to the development of. a person. To be sure he did concede that society could not exist if it merely catered to the sexual drives, and in Civilization and its Discontents, he claimed that it was precisely because the sexual drives were cordoned into more productive enterprises that civilization existed.

At the same time, the core article of faith of Freudian psychology was that the repression of the sex drive from infancy on was the source of most of our psychological distress. How to achieve a balance between our urge to satiate our sexual appetites and how to be civilized required a new kind of priest, mainly Mr. Freud and others who offered the ‘talking cure’ that he had pioneered. It was the kind of thing that appealed to people who like that kind of thing, but it certainly had social efficacy—and to repeat, it placed the desires of the infant at the center of all our psyches and hence at the center of society.

When Herbert Marcuse wrote Eros and Civilization he had hit upon the perfect match—Marx plus Freud—which would supposedly satiate the needs of the modern soul—a social means of production in which as Marx would put it, “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs,” which is to say we could have all the stuff we needed, as well as a grand sex life, provided we got rid of the ruling class and their need to repress our sexual desire so that we could live our lives playfully pursuing our desires. Marcuse was, of course, a huge hit with the youth of the 1960s, and his social “philosophy” is really an adult child’s view of what life has to offer.

The youth he taught were also the beneficiaries of the scientific studies being conducted by the Kinsey Institute and hitting the book stores in 1948 and 1953, respectively, with the Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female. Kinsey’s “scientific” studies confirmed Freud’s observation infants were sexual beings, and had orgasms.

As Kinsey reported “Orgasm has been observed in boys of every age from 5 months to adolescence. Orgasm is in our record for a female babe of 4 months. After describing in detail the physiological changes that occur during orgasm as well as the aftermath Kinsey discloses that “there are observation of 16 males up to 11 months of age, with such typical orgasm reached in 7 cases. In 5 cases of young preadolescents, observations were continued over periods of months or years, until the individuals were old enough to make it certain that true orgasm was involved.”

Defenders of Kinsey’s studies dismiss the idea that these studies suggest pedophilia must have been happening. Given that Kinsey’s studies were based on “observations” one can only conclude, as Judith Reisman has noted, and as one of Kinsey’s colleagues, C.A. Tripp, in a 1991 interview with Phil Donahue, claimed, that Kinsey’s “trained observers” were pedophiles.

The arc from Kinsey’s reports to sex education courses containing graphic content of children leaning about cunnilingus, anal sex and such like is part of a hyper-sexualized infantile culture, a culture in which adults dress up and play out their fantasies even in the institution of the military. The sexualization of children that proceeds at such a pace today and is lauded by public officials, corporations, teachers, medical professionals, the media and entertainment industries is but one further expression of a culture that has been built upon the expansiveness of the infantile self. The infantile behavior of the adults is best gratified by behaving with children, and as the most meaningful part of the adults’ lives is their pursuit of pleasure, it would be wrong of them not to have children learn what they know—or be what they be. The child has the right to the sexual identity it wants: the rights of the child are the expression of the childishness of the rights being demanded by people who think their suffering in not having their sexual fantasy or not having the pronoun they want is akin to genocide.

This en-culturalization of the infantile self is, though, but the inevitable development of what happens when a society’s faith in technicians who can manipulate bodies as they deem fit for the maximization of one’s own sense of self, and the array of pleasures that await that self if the adequate technological adaptations are made. That self is nothing more than an appetitive bundle of mechanistic processes. All differences between persons are purely of a mechanical order. Thus, too, the difference between an adult and child is only one of the imagination’s prejudices.

Sex with and torture of children was a regular feature in the Marquis de Sade’s stories of gargantuan sexual horror rituals—the children’s role was to be the ultimate stimulant to burst beyond the social limits and curtailment of the imagination. But de Sade understood, as he never ceased to tell his audience, that he was only acting in accordance with reason which was attuned to the mechanical laws of the universe. For much of the twentieth century philosophers and authors have celebrated the transgressions of de Sade, from Sartre and de Beauvoir, to Bataille, to Klossowski, to Blanchot, to Derrida—his admirers are a virtual list of the French intelligentsia. They, though, rarely appreciate what Sade incessantly reminded his readers of, that his philosophy simply expressed the natural conclusion of mechanistic metaphysics.

The post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze is one of the more self-aware of the modern mechanists. His philosophy draws upon numerous precursors, but his reworking of Spinoza’s pan-immanentism and Leibniz’s dynamic monadism is used to develop a philosophy of excess and surplus generating endless difference. In one of his best known works, Anti-Oedipus, cowritten with Félix Guattari, Deleuze holds that Freud tries to constrain desire so that it tapers into the confines of the family. For Deleuze humans are not a “thou” nor an “I” (for Deleuze anything which spelt of a metaphysical privileging and ascribing any kind of transcendence to human beings was a regressive philosophical step) but just another “it.” And this: “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.”
If this is reality, then how can Sade be wrong? Why should children not be part of the pleasures on offer to what Deleuze regularly refers to the “desiring machine?” What is a child in any case?

At the risk of repeating a point I have made in a previous essay, it is worth mentioning that many of the most prestigious philosophers, authors (Jean-Paul Sartre (his book Nausea had used the character of an autodidactic paedophile as a tragic example of authenticity thwarted by a judgmental society), Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, André Glucksmann, Roland Barthes, Guy Hocquenhem, Alan Robbe-Grillet and Philippe Sollers) in France were signatories to a 1977 petition calling for the decriminalisation of all “consenting” sexual relations between adults and minors under the age of fifteen (the age of consent in France at that time). That same year also saw a public letter in Le Monde (January 26, 1977) on the eve of the trial of three men accused of having sex with 13 and 14 year old girls and boys, calling for the court to recognize the consent of thirteen year olds as they were treated as having legal responsibility equivalent to adults in other spheres of life.

In addition to the letter being signed by the figures above, it also included the signatures of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, the surrealist poet Louis Aragon, Michel Leyris, the film, theatre and opera director Patrice Chereau, France’s future Minister of Culture and Education, Jack Lang, and Bernard Kouchner, who would become France’s Health Minister and a co-founder of Doctors without Borders, as well as various psychiatrists, psychologists and doctors. The signatories were, in short, the very cream of French society, and what the petition and letter showed were the priorities of the pedagogical and professional class.

The petition and letter are an early symptom of the same kind of priorities which bestow upon the child an urgent sense of its sexual identity and needs that is now exhibited within medical and psychiatric and school boards and legislative bodies in the US, and elsewhere. If a child is taught how to pleasure “itself” by being exposed to the kinds of pleasures available—from masturbation, to cunnilingus, fellatio and anal sex, through Sex Ed courses in schools and school library books—why should they not also decide whether they want the sex organs they have—and, of course, why should they not also take their sexual pleasure from an adult who is attracted to minors?

That last point is central to the cultural wars, which have reached such a pitch of unmitigated defence of the progressive class which wants to rear its children to be fully exposed to sexual needs and identity that it has responded to the recent film about child sex trafficking, The Sound of Freedom, by denouncing it as a right-wing, Q-Anon movie inducing mass hysteria.

Not all the philosophers mentioned above who were signatories to the petition or letter saw themselves as mechanists, however all intellectually operate within the Godless view of world that gave birth to modernity and whose two philosophical poles can be traced back to Réne Descartes. Those two poles to the metaphysics of determinism (everything can be strictly understood as the result of mechanical causes complying to the laws of nature) and voluntarism (the will is the decisive source of our knowledge and hence our world in so far as it is knowable and in so far as we make it, in J.G. Fichte’s terms, a non-I that becomes the material for the fact-acts of the I). They are at the root of modern philosophy’s technocratic and ideological streams. They might on the surface appear to be radically opposed to each other. But just as in Descartes we find the two coming out of the philosophical mind’s desire to control the world to get what it wants—they develop in relative conjunction to each other, something evident in how swiftly the mechanistic metaphysics is deployed for political objectives. The two poles ultimately require cooperation involving the division of labour in which the scientists work focus on the material relations and resources to be hammered into place, while the ideologues administer the human resources (their sentiments, habits, values, organizations, institutions and classes) to be incorporated into the technological assemblage that is the world.

Let me state at the outset, that there is much to admire in Descartes, and that his philosophy is a response to the horrors of almost a century of religious wars in France and the Thirty years wars in which he fought. He was a man seeking a way out of hell. Unfortunately, he created the clearing for a new kind of hell, and just as Marx had no idea that he would be contributing a way of thinking leading to the mass murder of the peasantry (how else could their private property be expropriated if they wished to keep their land?), Descartes may have been astonished to think that what he intended to be so helpful may have turned out to be so diabolical.

1. Descartes and the Metaphysical Foundations of the Modern World

In the annals of philosophy I think no passage has been more fateful than this seemingly innocuous section from the sixth of René Descartes’ Discourse on Method, a book written in the vernacular and for the educated public who might be interested in developing his ideas further.

But as soon as I had acquired some general notions respecting physics, and beginning to make trial of them in various particular difficulties, had observed how far they can carry us, and how much they differ from the principles that have been employed up to the present time, I believed that I could not keep them concealed without sinning grievously against the law by which we are bound to promote, as far as in us lies, the general good of mankind. For by them I perceived it to be possible to arrive at knowledge highly useful in life; and in room of the speculative philosophy usually taught in the schools, to discover a practical, by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature. And this is a result to be desired, not only in order to the invention of an infinity of arts, by which we might be enabled to enjoy without any trouble the fruits of the earth, and all its comforts, but also and especially for the preservation of health, which is without doubt, of all the blessings of this life, the first and fundamental one; for the mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body, that if any means can ever be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in medicine they must be sought for. It is true that the science of medicine, as it now exists, contains few things whose utility is very remarkable: but without any wish to depreciate it, I am confident that there is no one, even among those whose profession it is, who does not admit that all at present known in it is almost nothing in comparison of what remains to be discovered; and that we could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age, if we had sufficiently ample knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies provided for us by nature…..

But in this I have adopted the following order: first, I have essayed to find in general the principles, or first causes of all that is or can be in the world, without taking into consideration for this end anything but God himself who has created it, and without deducing them from any other source than from certain germs of truths naturally existing in our minds In the second place, I examined what were the first and most ordinary effects that could be deduced from these causes; and it appears to me that, in this way, I have found heavens, stars, an earth, and even on the earth water, air, fire, minerals, and some other things of this kind, which of all others are the most common and simple, and hence the easiest to know… turning over in my mind… the objects that had ever been presented to my senses I freely venture to state that I have never observed any which I could not satisfactorily explain by the principles had discovered.

Descartes always delivered the most breathtakingly novel ideas in a combination of sardonic wit, self-effacement and false modesty, and the Discourse is a rhetorical masterpiece in philosophical irony, as he entices his readers into joining him in forging the new world that lies before us if we but follow his method, while at the same time conceding, that his own talent is but mediocre and his ideas may be but “a little copper and glass,” which he mistakes for diamonds and gold. He has simply made use of the natural reason which all of us have, and with that little bit of reason he has discovered a philosophy that cannot only be applied via experiments to eventually explain everything in the world, but we will be able to live in comfort as we live off the fruits of the earth put at our disposal by labour saving devices—and we might be able to live forever.

The idea of creating a new world did not begin with Descartes—Bacon had already written the New Atlantis some eleven years earlier and, like Descartes, Bacon had dreamt of science opening up the pathway to a new future. But whilst Bacon believed in the importance of experiment Descartes had reconstrued the entire universe so that it complied with a method he had uncovered in part thanks to the metaphysical principles which guaranteed a law-governed universe—for that is what he finds in the innate idea of God, a guarantee that the universe will not play tricks on his mind if he proceeds aright. God is perfect and he is not a deceiver, which also means, as I will pick up again below, that the universe runs according to impermeable laws.

What Descartes envisages is a universe in which all relationships are physical and causal and are spatially arranged—everything is an extended substance, everything except the cognitive operations of the mind-soul (he equates mind and soul, as if this were simply the most natural equation in the world to make) whose function is to identify the requisite method for studying the causal connections between the machine components. Being extended the bodies in motion, ever impacting upon each other, can be geometrically represented. The importance of analytical geometry (number can be represented as figure and vice versa) in Descartes’s corpus was such that his book Geometry was published with the Discourses.

As with Galileo, Descartes believed the book of nature was written in number. And while it is true that his own experiments often ignored the primacy of number, for Descartes being able to dissolve bodies into figure and number gave them the stability that could ensure their manipulation. Unlike sense data which was invariably confused and needs to be better understood—e.g., the sun looks small, and only when we take cognizance of its distance from us can we form a more accurate picture of its proper size—mathematics allows no room for sensory distortion. Mathematics provides us with the most clear and distinct ideas that we can have, and hence in a world of confused sensations, to present the truth as number/figure is to represent the undistorted truth. The truths of testimony, witness, the panoply of truths of the human world, the truths that are historically and culturally revealed, are all dissolved into the vast spatial plenum that is before the eye of the observing subject armed with the Cartesian method.

The great hyperbolic doubt that Descartes enters into before coming out of it by virtue of the rock certainty of him being a thinking being, and thereby moving onto other ideas whose certitude can be identified is like a vortex in which all cultural and historical truths are swallowed up, only to be released if they themselves are capable of being confirmed by the method of analysis and synthesis, and it is with this method, as well as the objectives of its deployment, Descartes launched the Enlightenment. In fact, as we shall see further below, it is also the initial onslaught of what will eventually be the overthrow of Christendom—both of the beliefs and narratives (the ‘ideas’) that hold it together as well as the values that it had cultivated for so long. The preparation for that onslaught is prepared culturally by the new metaphysics and politically comes to fruition in the first anti-Christian revolution since the establishment of Christendom, the French Revolution in which idea of liberty, equality and fraternity replace the Christian virtues as the scale of social, civic, and political importance.

The method of analysis and synthesis, the breaking down of bodies into their simplest parts and then reassembling those parts in order to identify the causal mechanisms at work in a particular phenomenon—the phenomenon is really the epiphenomenon, and the causal mechanisms are responsible for it appearing the way it appears. However, once we identity how the things of the world work, we are better placed to discovery ways that may help us improve our conditions. The mass social deployment of scientists using laboratories to invent new cures, “machines,” and technologies is the great forest seeded by Descartes slim philosophical volumes.

The application of that method requires, as is evident in his works on Optics and Meteorology, that one must make models of the bodies to be studied in order to derive the laws governing their interaction. The making of models involves the use of the imagination. But it is the imagination in service to the faculty of ‘the understanding’ whose task is to coordinate and organize the data presented to the senses which is invariably deceptive via the method he supplies so one can identify the regularities of what Galileo had already identified as primary qualities, and thereby focus upon them as the causes, as opposed to the secondary qualities, or mere epiphenomenon.

In the pre-Galileo and pre-Cartesian world where Aristotle still reigned, bodies had specific qualities such as lightness or heaviness, dampness or dryness, heat or coldness and such like, and hence the study of Physics proceeded by investigating bodies on the basis of those qualities, and making generalizations about them. The great break-through in Physics came when it is was realized that the underlying agitations, motions, repulsions and attractions, velocities and masses held the key to physical properties and the laws that governed them.

Ernst Cassirer in his Theory of Knowledge has pointed out that what distinguished Bacon from Descartes, was that while both saw Aristotle as the great stumbling block to physics (Galileo also made little secret of his hostility to Aristotle, and paid the price for it), Bacon still proceeded experimentally along Aristotelian lines, while Descartes dissolved the world of senses into the motion of bodies that could be geometrically and numerically represented.

As I have indicated Descartes was, up to a point, following in the footsteps of Galileo. But as the above passage illustrates, the real innovation of Descartes was (analytic geometry aside) not so much in the specific scientific discoveries he made, and the reason he is still studied today in universities, and why he is the grandfather of philosophism as technocratism, is his expansion of the significance of the ideas coming out of developments in astronomy and physics going back at least to Copernicus, and providing a metaphysics, a view of the entire universe, which would enable us to literally start again and turn the world—and by world he meant the universe—into an object for us subjects. The task is a grand one indeed. It requires an army of researchers pooling their results so that one day they may truly be able to make of the world what they will, which as the passage above suggests would be a more comfortable world. As is typical of Descartes, the rendering of philosophy into what is essentially a utilitarian enterprise in which we study the world to achieve greater comfort, the radical nature of the meaning he ascribes to this new philosophy is passed over as if it were of little consequence.

To be subjects—i.e., the potential lords and possessors or masters of the universe—required cognizance of the method to be deployed to make us so powerful. It is the importance of that method that is behind what is to this day still thrown out to philosophy undergraduates as a major mystery in which Descartes has two substances—body and mind—and a metaphysics that can readily be resolved if it were merely appreciated that there is no mind as such, which so the argument goes is where Descartes went awry. The mystery of Descartes’s dualism does not preserve though, if one pays attention to what he says and does rather than to the more traditional meaning of the soul as a thing or substance in the Platonic, or Christian traditions (even allowing for the fact that the Platonic and Christian soul are also not the same thing).

Descartes uses the language of substance to describe the mind, thereby giving the impression it is a “thing.” But the entire division between mind and body is to distinguish between what are cognitive operations and what has spatial extension. The point of Descartes drawing philosophical attention to the cognitive functions is to dispel the false way of thinking in which sensation overpowers the understanding and the imagination becomes overpowered by sensations which leave our minds caught up in the confusion that his philosophy was designed to dispel.

When Descartes’ “student” Father Malebranche writes, “Imagination is a lunatic that likes to play the fool. Its leaps and unforeseen starts distract you, and me as well,” he is being a diligent student of Descartes, the same is the case for Spinoza’s various disparaging comments about the imagination. Reigning in the imagination, and making it a servant of the capacity to understand is the decisive undertaking of the Enlightenment launched by Descartes. Indeed, the importance of identifying the operations of the mind and soul is inseparable from using a method for properly conducting one’s reason—i.e., properly conducting one’s reason means not being misled by the senses and the imagination. Now the point of this is that it would be meaningless—what the 20th century philosopher Gilbert Ryle would call a “category mistake”—to speak of method in the same language as one addresses extended substance. The division between mind-soul-cognitive functions-method and extension-bodies in space-nature-what we know thanks to the application of the method is total and being total Descartes can say he has proven that the mind does not die: it does not die because it is not a substance in the same way that a body is, but the dummies (for Descartes his enemies really are dummies) speak of it as if it is. It is a substance precisely in the terms that Descartes says it is—and it is purely a combination of operations, whose purpose is to have clear and distinct ideas about the world so that we can master it.

Now, as is clear in the Passions of the Soul, we can indeed talk about the mind impinging upon the body and vice versa. But that is not when we are speaking about rightly conducting our reason according to a method. When though we want to carry out a bodily action in accordance with an idea of the mind we are now in the land of a mind in union with a body, and the only way that union can take place is mechanically/corporeally, which is why Descartes believed he had located the point of union in the pineal gland. Irrespective of the particular location, the Passions of the Soul is an utter physicalist account of the soul-mind. It is a pioneering work in behavioral psychology in which, just as in Psychology courses today, we are introduced to the idea of the brain being divided into various parts which serve different mental functions.

In other words, and to sum up at the risk of repetition, just as Descartes’s philosophy is dualist—it provides a method based upon the operations of the mind-soul, and it presents observations about the world (the extended substance) based upon that method, it also provides a dualistic account of the mind-soul: in one the mind-soul is a bundle of cognitive operations, which will be taken up by philosophers from Locke to Kant, who will follow him and develop a “logic” (i.e., they will try to identify the various “elements”) of the “faculties” of the mind, in the other it is essentially the brain. The questions one is asking will lead one to one or other—if I ask how should I generally proceed to understand some phenomenon of nature I am led to consider the mind as a substance having no connection to the extended world which I wish to survey; if I ask why can I no longer speak after an accident, or even how is the mind involved in talking or seeing, even in identifying forms, colours etc. then I am in the realm of extension, and have to investigate the brain to understand what is transpiring within the mind.

Philosophers who commence with Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God and the soul, or who rip these arguments out of the larger cloth of his philosophy invariably ignore (a) how his philosophy introduces new content into these two names and (b) where they fit into the larger purpose of his philosophy of freeing us from the confused imaginings that we have made of the sensations we have accepted as true because we have hitherto not properly understood them.

The metaphysics especially as presented to the schoolmen in the Meditations may appear traditional, but what is done with it is as untraditional as the aims of the philosophy are. Apart from the fact Descartes says in various letters that he is advancing his teachings behind a mask, that he is pouring new wine into old bottles, that he only spends a few hours a year on metaphysics, and apart from the even more obvious fact that his attempts to seduce the school men still pre-dominating in the universities in France did not work, at least initially, and that the Catholic Descartes was far freer and safer in Protestant lands, it is the content of his metaphysics that shows just how remote from anything traditionally Christian his philosophy is. Indeed, that is nowhere more obvious than when Descartes is presenting himself as most “orthodox” as he wants to prove the existence of God and the soul (and of the soul I have said enough).

Although Christian philosophers, commencing most famously with Anselm, had long since been sufficiently influenced by Greek philosophy to make an argument for God’s existence, thereby making him commensurate with our God given powers of reason, traditionally God’s existence is based upon testimony not demonstration. That is the required reading for understanding God’s ways and deeds is the bible not any work by a theologian. That becomes of fundamental importance when we inquire into the deeds of God as opposed to merely wishing to satiate our intellectual curiosity over the question whether God exists.

Generally scholastic philosophy uses reason to try and mediate between seemingly contrary passages in scripture. The problem of scriptural contradiction was thrown down by Abelard, and the most all-encompassing attempt at a major resolution was Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. Luther’s animosity to Aquinas would be due to what he saw as a deranged concession to paganism that elevated reason far above its station. Irrespective of Luther’s critique, Aquinas was more interested in reconciling reason and faith so that reason could not tear faith apart, rather than simply making reason the pilot for scouring the all-encompassing totality of the universe. Aquinas respected Aristotle, for Aristotle was an intelligent seeker of truth, but the truth that offered salvation was a revealed truth. Thus too, for example, Dante must leave Aristotle in the first circle of hell—which is actually not that unpleasant, but dwelling there is to be dwelling in a condition where one has been satiated by one’s own intelligence more than God’s grace.

With Descartes God’s grace is completely irrelevant as indeed is prayer, or indeed any kind of personal relationship. God is an idea, an innate idea of reason to be sure, but an idea of perfection that offers the promise of Descartes and those who join him eventually being able to understand the universe. The traditional understanding of Christian salvation simply has no place in the God of Descartes. Pascal would put his finger on the central issue when he said, “I cannot forgive Descartes. In his whole philosophy he would like to dispense with God, but he could not help allowing Him a flick of the fingers to set the world in motion, after which he had no more use for God.” God serves a function in the larger project of philosophical understanding by providing a metaphysical reason to accept a law-governed universe—and without that principle the entire Cartesian-modern scientific enterprise is useless.

We should note also the primary take away that Descartes has in focussing upon God’s perfection, viz. that God does not deceive. This gives Descartes the go ahead to carry on studying nature in accordance with the method of analysis and synthesis, in spite of the delusionary nature of the appearances that leads him to undertake his hyperbolic doubt. He has used theology to make a metaphysical claim in a system that, apart from its underlying metaphysic and the method which he lays down, could eventually give us knowledge of everything.

With respect to the claim that God does not deceive, there are indeed scriptural references to God never lying e.g., Hebrews 6: 18: “[it is] impossible for God to lie,” Titus 1:2: “God, who never lies.” Yet God also puts “a lying spirit in the mouths” of unrighteous prophets (1 Kings 22-23; 2 Chronicles 18:22), and in 2 Thessalonians 2: 8-12 we read:

Then shall be revealed the Lawless One, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the manifestation of his presence, [him,] whose presence is according to the working of the Adversary, in all power, and signs, and lying wonders, and in all deceitfulness of the unrighteousness in those perishing, because the love of the truth they did not receive for their being saved, and because of this shall God send to them a working of delusion, for their believing the lie, that they may be judged—all who did not believe the truth, but were well pleased in the unrighteousness.

As this passage, and indeed all the passages cited indicate, the matter of God’s veracity or willingness to have the lies and deceit of the unrighteous be turned against them has absolutely nothing to do with what it is Descartes is seeking, viz., confirmation that the world is not created by an evil genius but conforms to laws laid down by a perfect being. But rather the matter of God’s veracity as it is broached in the bible has to do with the relationship between Him and His people, his believers. It is a matter of the veracity of the word, but Descartes’s philosophy has no real interest in the word as such, nor in any covenant with God, nor in eternal salvation.

Kant, who is the beneficiary of more than a century of metaphysical disputation will demonstrate why Descartes’ and indeed any other ontological argument about God’s existence defies our knowledge, and hence why God is only a “mere idea,” which for knowledge may serve a heuristic idea for faith in the systemic unity of our knowledge. Unlike Descartes he disengages the idea of the world-universe being a totality of laws from the existence of God, by making the cognitive components involved in the formation of knowledge the source of law. That is, he is even more consistent than Descartes himself in his elevation of the role of the subject in the acquisition of knowledge. And further the idea of God is retained only to the extent it is a matter of rational faith—not knowledge as such. But in this as so much else Kant simply has a more profound understanding of what a law governed universe along strictly causal principles must mean than Descartes who is simply using the metaphysics to get to the real work of science, and in doing so attempts to draw the faithful into a new, and far more restricted, far more rational understanding of God as a perfect being.

Unintentionally—and to his ire, because he was witness to the early developments by Fichte and the young Schelling in this direction—Kant had inspired the birth of the romantic approach to knowledge in which the “I” is not simply, as in Descartes, the basis of a proper foundation for gaining knowledge to master the universe, but the source of its making, for nature in itself is but the I writ large (this will be a step too far for Schelling who retrieves Spinoza in his battle with Fichte).

But tarrying with Descartes, his talk of God not being a deceiver ultimately leads to a claim that simply must be the case if Descartes’ philosophy is followed consistently. And it is a claim that he would only disclose in his book The World, a work that appeared in print only after his death, viz., that there are no miracles. If there were miracles then God would be intervening and thereby disrupting the infinite causal chain that makes the world the way it is.

Those who want to take Descartes at his word and see his demonstration of the proof of the
existence of God and the soul as acts of a pious man are stuck with the fact that their man of piety has completely changed the nature of God to fit his idea of who and what God is. One may think that is terrific, but it cannot be passed off as either Christian or Catholic in any traditional sense.

Christianity is based upon the centrality of the miraculous in our lives: from the miracle of creation itself, to the miracle of the triune God, to the miracle of God sending his Son to redeem the world, to the miracles that Jesus performed on earth, to the miracle of the resurrection, and indeed to the miracles that transpire in our everyday life thanks to God’s grace and the Holy Spirit. Irrespective of the fact that some philosophers who lauded Descartes such as Father Malebranche believed his philosophy was compatible with their faith, there is simply no way of bypassing the issue that Descartes’ Deism—and indeed all subsequent deists—are introducing an idea of God that has no place left for any of the most important teachings of the Christian faith, whether that be a personal loving triune God, or a God that so loves the world that he sends his only begotten son, or that his son performed miracles on earth and was resurrected.

This was the grand take away from a philosopher who was so determined to rebuild the world on the basis of clear and distinct ideas that he went in search of the indubitable, and that indubitable starting point was not as it is for Christians, faith itself, but his own thinking. That was, as has often been noted, a variation of an argument originally made by Augustine, about the impossibility of refuting that one is a thinking being when one is thinking. But Augustine uses that doubt to then move to a God who does not simply dispel his doubt but gives his life a mission and purpose—Augustine serves his God because his God saves him from sin and offers him redemption. Such a God has nothing in common with a God who is an innate idea and not a person. Likewise, the self of Augustine is not akin to the Cartesian self. The self in the Christian tradition is not a fulcrum for building a universe, but a dependent, fragile and sinful creature caught twixt the flesh of its “warring members” and the soul’s salvation that may be granted by God’ s grace. For Christians all souls have the prospect of redemption open to them by virtue of God Himself being the sacrifice.

The world in which the followers of Luther and Calvin did battle with each other as well as with the Roman Church was one in which the seemingly smallest differences concerning interpretation of a piece of scripture, or the ritual of the mass, or even the appearance of the Church, and even larger differences such as the role of the priest-preacher, how the body of the faithful should be organized and practice their rituals, which prayers they should say or sing, which parts of the Bible might need to be withdrawn because they were “false” and so on were matters of such extreme importance that they would even trigger men to make war with each other.

The young Descartes, as mentioned above, had himself fought for three years, initially signing up with the Protestant Prince, Maurice of Nassau, in the war that had been the culmination of religious wars. I think it impossible to ignore the importance of that war which wreaked such devastation in Europe as playing a major part in the formation of philosophical deism, as a way of bridging confessional divisions within Christendom. Moreover, philosophical deism of the Cartesian sort was but one attempt to create a synthesis of religion and science. A more occult variety, which Descartes was aware of, existed in the writings of the members of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross.

Descartes’ early biographer Adrien Baillet mentions that Descartes unsuccessfully tried to contact them. Though it was questionable whether outside of such writings as, The Confession of the Rosicrucian Fraternity (1615), and The Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreuz (1616), there was any actual fraternity—it was rumoured that its members were chimerical, which, as Descartes reasoned, would explain why he could not find them. As I pick up below the development of secret societies in Europe, particularly the Free Masons and Illuminati, would play an important role in spreading ideas that deviated from Christian doctrine whilst being far more compatible with the kinds of theological ideas that accompanied the new metaphysics.

2. Anti-Cartesian Metaphysics in Spinoza, Locke and Kant

With respect to the larger cultural and intellectual landscape in the aftermath of Descartes’ metaphysics, in spite of the plethora of metaphysical disputations about what God and the soul are and do, whether space, for example, is an organ of God (Newton and Clarke) or not (Leibniz), the analysis of clear and distinct ideas which can enable us to identify the inviolable mechanical laws which constitute the world and our experience as properly identified by the understanding is a constant. And the division between what would become known as the dispute between rationalists and empiricists is not about whether one group is genuinely dispensing with the use of reason in making inferences to the extent that experiment is not warranted, but the extent to which experiment is dependent upon principles, including mathematical ones.

This is, though, another way of also saying that all post-Cartesian metaphysics, whether the raw materialism of Hobbes, the pure idealism of Berkeley, the dogmatic empiricism of Locke, the parallelism of Spinoza, the ‘panlogism’ of Leibniz, or the transcendental idealism of Kant (which is an attempt to reconcile all by showing the point up until which they are right and where they then go wrong) make reason and its comprehension of the laws of nature the touchstone of truth. Some of these philosophers, like Spinoza, Hobbes, and Leibniz see a miracle as either a word for what has not been properly understood, or, what is essentially the same thing something explicable via natural and scientific means.

Others who are outspoken defenders of the faith like Locke, Berkeley and Malebranche also see the new philosophy as consistent with occasional miracles. While a work such as Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity, a work largely consisting of biblical references lends support to what seemed to be his public attack upon deism, a more cautious reading as provided by Cornelio Fabro in a book I consider to be the most masterful examination of the philosophical roots of modern atheism—God in Exile: Modern Atheism, A Study in the Internal Dynamics of Modern Atheism, from its roots in the Cartesian Cognito to the Present Day, makes the compelling case that confirms the total cleft between what Pascal delineated as the God of the philosophers and scientists, and the God of Abram, Isaac, and Joseph.

Fabro calls Locke’s theology a “Deism of the right,” which, as Fabro indicates, is a defense of Christianity that does claim that scripture and Christianity are true—but that is only to the extent that the truths revealed are what Locke the philosopher identifies as reasonable. As the very title mentioned above of Locke’s major work on the topic, this requires contingency to be reasonable. But human stories are not strictly the result of mental inferences, they involve encounters. And encounters are contingent, particularly meaningful ones might be called miraculous. That is not because the miraculous is reasonable (Locke’s argument for why we should accept miracles), but because the meaning of the encounter is of such a magnitude that we can only attribute its occurrence to God’s grace. And God’s grace has nothing to do with what our reasons make of it.

In keeping with the reduction of Christianity to a rational religion, Christianity in Locke’s hands is, as Fabro rightly points out, the same as we find in Kant, a natural religion and ethic. As Locke puts it in The Reasonableness of Christianity, Christ “inculcates to the people, on all occasions, that the kingdom of God is come: he shows the way of admittance into this kingdom, viz. repentance and baptism; and teaches the laws of it, viz., good life, according to the strictest rules of virtue and mortality.” Try making sense of the redemption of the thief on the cross by resorting to “the strictest rules of virtue and morality.”

The centerpiece of Locke’s thought, and where he hopes not only to correct the faulty metaphysics of Descartes, but to establish once and all for the nature and limits of “the human understanding” is his sense perceptionism, and as Fabro points out later English deists such as Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestly, and the rest, were to sweep away the last theological restriction adhering to Locke’s sense-perceptionism.

Irrespective of the particular emphasis of any of the post-Cartesian metaphysicians they all concur that whatever mental constraints there are upon us will need to come from reason itself, and where God is invoked it is the God of philosophers. This, though, is predicated upon another element of faith that contravenes the Christian tradition, viz. it dispenses with original sin, at least as far as reason is concerned, and it also radically reconfigures value.

That reconfiguration is played out through various influential philosophical positions, and invariably they involve disputation.

I will just mention a few that have enormous consequence in ensconcing what we now live within, a hybrid culture of a mechanical understanding of what humans are (and hence how they can be technologically superseded) and an idealist value system in which dignity (respect), equality (equity), freedom (emancipation) and the like are invoked to legitimate the world we are making and our behavior in it.

Descartes himself had initially indicated that the new philosophy would provide the content for ethics, and that his philosophy had opened up the prospect of humanity finding a new dwelling, though he was quite content to counsel obedience to customary authority—implying as he did so that those authorities and those customs might not be deemed consistent with reason’s natural light.

Spinoza was Descartes’ most openly radical student, and anyone who doubts the extent of his intellectual influence in attracting readers to a more enlightened and non-Christian view of society should read Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, and his more recent, Spinoza, Life and Legacy. Whereas Descartes was cautious, Spinoza was bold—even Hobbes (whose Leviathan is a mechanistic account of the political body and the source of sovereignty), is reported in the brief biography of him by Aubrey to have exclaimed when reading Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise, “I durst not write so boldly.” Spinoza uses the principles of the new philosophy to write an Ethics, reimagine the structure, and purpose of the state, primarily so that it may function in order to protect the work of philosophers and scientists like himself. He would also argue that the bible was a collection of myths, whose true grounding and history would reveal what a human-all-too human book it was.

Spinoza is invariably taught in Philosophy classes as a metaphysical opponent of Descartes. But such a reading magnifies the metaphysical differences between the two (Spinoza is a monist, not a dualist, and allows no scope for the free will—though the free will in Descartes is also just a cognitive operation of acceptance or denial of the information to be incorporated into one’s understanding about the material being studied) to the extent that it smothers the far larger affinity of the purpose and rationale of establishing the metaphysics. And, as with Descartes, it is to render the entirety of nature as one vast body of laws which the philosopher-scientist (at this time a scientist was still considered to be a “natural philosopher”) will study in order that we live better. Like Descartes Spinoza allows no room for miracles, for that would require departing from a strictly causal chain of bodies/powers.

Most radically Spinoza would simply dissolve God into nature. Strictly speaking Spinoza is a pantheist, rather than a deist, but in the bigger picture of cultural transformation that is merely a moot distinction of importance of philosophers, but not to how religion figures in life. Also, of great importance in the subsequent transformation of European culture was the claim in Spinoza’s Ethics that pleasure is the good, and pain the evil. Utilitarianism—which forms the basis of modern economic thinking—takes off from this position, and the self simply becomes a pleasure maximizing agent.

Sade was, to pick up on my earlier point, the most transgressive and unrestrained because he took pleasure in pain, both receiving it and inflict it—his thought was the consummation of a mechanistic view of life in which pleasure in its most extreme forms is the purpose of life.

To be sure, one would find it difficult to find a character less like the debauched Sade than Spinoza, and Spinoza’s Ethics is a work devoted to improving the human understanding, so that improvement of one’s understanding by being attentive to nature and its laws, and living in accordance with what the mind has understood is virtue itself, and that is the genuinely pleasurable life. But to a Sade, Spinoza simply seems too tame, unable or unwilling to throw everything into the furnace where life and death are all part of the same tumult of appetites, drives, and desires that are intrinsic to a cosmos which endlessly begets and devours life itself—and is evil. By embracing evil Sade takes his revenge on the cosmos by playing and embracing the game of endless extinction, by taking joy in it. The cosmos is evil—and so is Sade.

If Spinoza had laid down an ethic in which freedom is simply living how we must, as our lives are determined, Kant’s philosophy would pick up on the more normatively developed claims that were intrinsic to the those politically inflected philosophies which were appealing to rights. Whereas the arc from Spinoza, Hobbes and Bentham saw rights, and the natural law theories they derived from, as simply surrogate words for power, or as Bentham put it bluntly “nonsense on stilts,” Locke, and Rousseau, albeit in different ways, were making “rights” the basis of their respective critiques of traditional, i.e., monarchies invested with prerogative power, political orders they wished to be rid of.

Kant’s moral theory would have political implications—all constitutions should be republican, but he saw the larger problem of mechanism in its view of human beings as lacking freedom and thereby any moral purpose, or dignity. If morals are but powers, as they would be if we are but links in a great causal chain, then all we are talking about is force. Kant sought to defend moral right, and human dignity, by locating their source in reason itself. To this end his philosophy is genuinely dualist, and even more consistently and rigorously so than Descartes’ (though he does attempt to explicate how the faculty of judgment—in matters of biology, art and ideas about moral progress—serves to mediate between the phenomenal [what can be experienced and hence known] and noumenal [what is but the mind’s own rational creation]).

Kant’s dualism consists in arguing that the nature and legitimate scope of the elements of the mind’s forms and functions—the gathering of knowledge and the creation of moral ideals—can be strictly identified. Philosophers have heretofore failed to recognize that the elements of cognition that have an indispensable function in enabling our sensory representations to become knowledge have taken on a false reality thereby deluding us into thinking we have knowledge of God, the immortal soul, and moral freedom—all of which are but ideas that come from the faculty of reason’s own operations. They are not objects of possible experience, and not being so, we cannot disprove their existence. We can identify that they serve a moral purpose and thus we may accept these ideas as forming the basis of a rational faith.

I do not want to go into the details of Kant’s flawed arguments except to say the elements Kant insisted were unassailable all became assailable within the next century. More specifically, developments in geometry and logic rendered the Euclidean nature of space and time (the bedrock of his analysis of the a priori elements of the faculty of “intuition”), and the Aristotelian logical elements he thought settled that had provided the key to his table of categories of the “understanding,” as superseded. Kant’s constructivist theory of mathematics, which had to be true, for the rest of his theory of knowledge to work, convinced none of importance then or later. The very next generation of post-mechanistic metaphysicians were done with the strictures of Descartes and the investigations of those who “led” to Kant.

But, irrespective of the adequacy of Kant’s argument, his claim that the rational nature of human beings warrants that we should morally see ourselves as a member of a moral commonwealth, a commonwealth of ends and not means and thus deserving dignity and respect has subsisted along with a view of selves as driven by appetites is conspicuous in how readily the contemporary mind flicks a switch between rights and respect talk to talk of pleasure, appetites and determinations. The contradictions of an age or group do indeed provide the key to their motivations and priorities. Kant’s dualism is also built upon his recognition that our empirical selves are prone to what he would call radical evil, which simply meant for him, our propensity to have our moral principles tainted by our desires and drives. On the surface, this seems to be Kant’s rational concession to the Christian doctrine of original sin—except it is not. It is his way of making reason itself impervious to appetite—so that if we but apply the moral imperative to any circumstance we at least know what we should do.

The problems with the categorical imperative were exhaustively demolished by Hegel who notes that no example provided by Kant does not already draw upon the communal value in the sheer nomenclature and indeed in the very examples themselves of what constitutes a moral dilemma. Kant’s account of “practical reason,” or moral theory, is predicated upon him having adequately delineated the “bounds of experience,” by establishing which elements of reason are essential for perceiving, judging, and making inferences about experiences, and then which kind of claims are not strictly beholden to those elements, but to what reason itself supplies as ideas of its own making that do not contravene the requisites of experience: God, soul and freedom, he says don’t, because they are “mere ideas of reason.”

On the surface, by arguing that our moral claims are but judgments expressing what we all ought to do (categorical imperatives) and accepting that one can never rule out the impure motive of why someone is appealing to the imperative it may look as if Kant is simply recognising that we can only ask of reason that it helps us aspire to our ideals. And that is a good thing, surely? But frankly Kant only muddies the waters by having such an absolute severance between ideal and motive. If we are prone to radical evil then why bother thinking our morals suffice to make us God-like? Kant also claims that a just constitution that simply requires we observe the laws, irrespective of our motives, is a good thing. Kant once famously framed the task of politics as creating a constitution for even a race of devils, forgetting to account for the fact that those who administer it would still be nothing more than devils, and thus use the constitution for diabolical gains. The constitution of pure reason is but an occasion for diabolical interests to act behind the idealist smokescreen of the delusions of those satisfied by their own reasons and gullibility.

The technocratic vision of being lords and masters of the universe might seem to have been based in the pursuit of knowledge alone, but it was inevitably a political vision. And while Rousseau and his epigone, including Kant, thought they could ensure a politics of moral rectitude if they but redesigned our institutions so that liberty and equality and the general will would prevail, there were a few insurmountable problem—humans just aren’t that good, and nor are their reasons that compelling when it comes to trying to get agreement. The French revolutionaries justified their behavior on the basis of their reasons, and what they delivered was civil war, terror and the creation of the greatest military regime on earth at the time. Ideas and reality, what we want and what we do—they refuse to match up.

3. Concluding Note on Philosophism and the French Revolution

Augustin Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism is one of the most brilliant critical accounts of the French revolution ever written—Edmund Burke was one of its admirers, and as someone who regularly used to teach Burke’s Reflections of the Revolution in France, I think Barruel’s a far more important work. It is often disparaged as being but the father of modern conspiracy theory thinking. That is primarily because Barruel documents the involvement in the revolution of the French Free Masons—an involvement that few historians of the French revolution say much about, even though pretty well all are aware of the fact that the lodges along with the salons and political clubs were a major place of political intrigue and discussion—and, as well, the Bavarian Illuminati.

At much the same time as Barruel was writing his book, the former Mason and Scottish natural philosopher John Robison had written his Proofs of A Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Government of Europe Carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati and Religious Societies Collected from Good Authorities. Both books are meticulous researched and draw upon reams of quotations of writings and letters from Free Masons, and Adam Weishaupt (“Spartacus”) and other members of the Illuminati about the program and political involvement of the Illuminati and Masons. Both organizations adopted mythic foundations thus claiming ancient pedigrees.

Barruel also makes a convincing argument about how a number of key masonic beliefs and objectives have antecedents in the Manicheans and Knights Templars—which is very different from claiming as some modern conspiracy theorists as well as Masons think that there is a direct lineage going back to antiquity, and the secret attempt to control the world has been going on for millennia. While the Illuminati were happy to infiltrate the Masons, not all Masons were interested in revolution, indeed there were royalist Masons who seemed to have no idea of what subversive purpose the Masons could be serving. Barruel also emphasizes that the French and British lodges were completely different beasts and that the politics of the French lodges was far more radical. Barruel argues throughout that the Masons, at its highest levels, were an anti-Christian, as much as they were an anti-royalist, force. And, indeed, the supreme being recognized by the Masons is identical to the deism of the philosophers, as well as Robespierre and his faction. While Barruel and Robinson both see the Masons and Illuminati as pernicious social forces which circulated ideas that would contribute to the destruction of throne and altar, neither are saying that there were not other factors which made the revolution.

The various crises in France—its debt, its dysfunctional administrative and taxation “system,” the class antagonisms especially with respect to tax payment and avoidance, and various events of panic and violence that made the revolution—had little if anything to do with the Masons or Illuminati. But the secret societies provided forums of discussion and deliberation for those seeking to take advantage of the chaotic circumstances that enabled a new ruling class. I will not enter here into which particular moments Barruel thought involved conspiratorial machinations of the Masons or illuminati, but generally
Barruel sees the philosophes, most conspicuously Voltaire and D’Alembert whose works and correspondence he was steeped in and Montesquieu and Rousseau as playing the major role in generating the ideas that would hold sway in the revolution.

Today we would not usually think of a conspiracy taking place when philosophers in class rooms or in conferences openly talk about creating a utopia and overthrowing this oppressive society. Indeed, it is now seen as completely normal that people pay taxes to have people use the university as a platform for the radical overthrow of that society’s foundations and traditions. But when Voltaire and friends—that included Frederick the Great, who Barruel detests for his vanity and willingness to tarry so long with such explosive ideas—speak of overthrowing throne and altar they are generally aware that these are things that must be aired with circumspection and delicacy. And Barruel devotes much of his effort to bringing to light the more revolutionary ideas that are to be found in the correspondence of Voltaire and D’Alembert, the ideas of Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Encyclopedists.

While the professional classes involved in the revolution were as much responding to circumstances as creating new ones that invariably overpowered them, their decisions were also fueled by the heady concoction of ideas that had swept them together—and not too much later divided them in blood.

All of this notwithstanding, the role played in the French revolution by philosophy, not only in shaping the appeals and narratives of the revolutionaries but also in the drafting of the constitutions—was unlike anything that had ever preceded it. (Though philosophical ideas had played an important role in the American Declaration of independence, it is hard to make the case that the American war of Independence was primarily driven by philosophical ideas.) One only has to consider how Locke’s philosophy comes after the English revolution, while the most important philosophers whose names were invoked during the French revolution preceded it.

Surprisingly Barruel says nothing of Descartes in his Memoirs; and whilst he mentions Descartes in his Les helviennes, ou Lettres provinciales philosophique, there is no indication of the founding role of Descartes in the revolutionary ideas and spirit of “philosophism.” In part. Barruel’s silence on Descartes may be explained by the ambivalence in which Descartes was held by many after his philosophy came to become accepted within the institutions which had once been the fortress of scholasticism, as well as the royal patronage his ideas received from the later part of the seventeenth century. Thus, Stéphanne van Damme notes in his “Restaging Descartes. From the Philosophical Reception to the national Pantheon”: that in the second part of the Eighteenth Century, “Descartes ceased to represent a renegade” and was seen “as a representative of the Old Regime.” Van Damme provides a concise but important account of the role of princely patrons in helping the circulation of Cartesian thought. The following is a pertinent part of the story:

In a rare process, by surpassing the limits of aristocratic sociability, by moving into princely circles, Cartesian philosophy became a truly cultural phenomenon during the seventeenth Century. First, Cartesianism was integrated into noble educational practices. Thus, Rohault, the Prince de Conti’s tutor, and Jacques Sauveur, the Duke d’Enghien’s tutor, contributed to this aristocratic passion for Cartesian physics. The Prince de Condé’s Jesuit tutors led the way in teaching Cartesianism. In January 1684, the Jesuit father Du Rosel spoke of the philosophical education of the young Duke d’Enghien: “We continue to examine the questions of place and space. We read what the Principes of Descartes have to say on this subject, and what they can contribute to an understanding of the difference between the old and the new Philosophy.”

Another pertinent part of the story which is indicative of the ambivalence surrounding Descartes’ contribution to the Enlightenment, was the central weakness in his physics, and—weaknesses which were often connected with the metaphysics—most brutally exposed by Newton. Indeed the triumph of Isaac Newton’s physics meant the complete defeat of Cartesian physics. In Newton’s De gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum, a paper written in 1666 on hydrostatics, a very large digression (about four fifths of the paper) occurs in which Newton provides a detailed critique of Descartes’ conceptions of motion, space, and body (a translation by the philosopher Jonathan Bennett can be found here.

It is worth citing the following passage which exposes how the deficiencies in the physics and metaphysics are of apiece:

We take from body (just as he (Descartes) bids) gravity, duration, and all sensible qualities, so that nothing finally would remain except what belongs to its essence. Will, accordingly, extension only remain? Not at all. For we reject additionally that capacity or power by which the perceptions of thinking things move. For when the distinction is only between the ideas of thinking and extension so that something would not be manifest to be the foundation of the connection or relation unless that be caused by divine power; the capacities of bodies can be rejected with this reserved extension, but it would not be rejected with the reserved bodily nature. Obviously, the changes which can be induced in bodies by natural causes are only accidental and not denoting the substance actually to be changed.
But if anything could induce the change which transcends natural causes, it is more than accidentally and has radically attainted the substance. According to the sense of the demonstration those only are being rejected of which body, by force of nature, can be void and deprived. But no one would object that bodies which are not united to minds cannot immediately move their perceptions. And hence
when bodies are given united to minds by nothing, it will follow (that) this power is not among their essentials. The observation is that this does not act by actual union but only by the capacity of bodies by which they are capable of this union by force of nature. As by whatever capacity belongs to all bodies, it is manifest from it that the parts of the brain, especially the more subtle by which the mind is united, are
in continual flux, the new ones succeeding to those flying off. And it is not lesser to take (off) this, whether regarding the divine achievement or bodily nature, than to take (off) the other capacity by which bodies in themselves are able alternately to transfer mutual actions, that is, than to force body back into empty space.

The decisive victory of Newton over Cartesianism—to put it in its most simple and stark terms—was Newton’s demonstration of the fact that bodies did attract and repel each other at a distance and hence that the strictures Descartes placed upon the contiguity of bodies was false, and his vision of the universe as consisting of a plenum filled with vortexes, it was a universe in which no space was not filled with matter. Newton would famously say in his Principia, “Hypotheses non fingo” (“I feign no hypotheses”). Those three words would suffice to render Descartes’ physics a monstrous concoction of rationalism not much better than Aristotle’s concoctions.

Throughout the 1730s and 1740s Voltaire entered into the “wars” between the Newtonians and Cartesians (most famously in his Lettres philosophiques Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton), as a champion of the empirical genius of Newton (and Bacon, and Locke) against the reactionary rationalist Cartesians holding back progress. Notwithstanding “the Newton wars,” Voltaire’s overall assessment of the value of Descartes indicates that in spite of the various errors made by Descartes, his importance in the making of the new world cannot be ignored:

He pushed his metaphysical errors so far, as to declare that two and two make four for no other reason by because God would have it so. However, it will not be making him too great a compliment if we affirm that he was valuable even in his mistakes. He deceived himself, but then it was at least in a methodical way. He destroyed all the absurd chimeras with which youth had been infatuated for two thousand years. He taught his contemporaries how to reason, and enabled them to employ his own weapons against himself. If Descartes did not pay in good money, he however did great service in crying down that of a base alloy.
I indeed believe that very few will presume to compare his philosophy in any respect with that of Sir Isaac Newton. The former is an essay, the latter a masterpiece. But then the man who first brought us to the path of truth, was perhaps as great a genius as he who afterwards conducted us through it.
Descartes gave sight to the blind. These saw the errors of antiquity and of the sciences. The path he struck out is since become boundless.

Voltaire’s tribute to Descartes’ importance is also echoed by Condorcet, who unlike Voltaire actually participated in the revolution, only unfortunately to be on the side of the losing faction of the Girondins. Whilst in prison, where he died, he wrote his Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress, whose “ninth epoch” bears the title “From the Time of Descartes, to the Formation of the French Republic.” Like Voltaire, Condorcet noted the errors of Descartes and sides with Locke, but, also like Voltaire, he praises him for the new path he opens up:

From the time when the genius of Descartes impressed on the minds of men that general impulse, which is the first principle of a revolution in the destiny of the human species, to the happy period of entire social liberty, in which man has not been able to regain his natural independence till after having passed through a long series of ages of misfortune and slavery, the view of the progress of mathematical and physical science presents to us an immense horizon, of which it is necessary to distribute and assort the several parts, whether we may be desirous of fully comprehending the whole, on of observing their mutual relations.

Thus it was that Descartes would, as Van Damme notes, be the third writer to be listed in the decree founding the Pantheon on April 4, 1792” and “in 1792, the monument of Descartes was deposited in a new musée des monuments français organised by Alexandre Lenoir, and cenotaphs to his honor and other great men’s erected in the garden, jardin Élysée, around the museum.” Van Damme makes much of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, a member of the Council of Five Hundred denouncing Descartes’ “Pantheonization.” What he neglects to point out, though, is that during this post-Thermidor phase of the revolution the rhetoric of the revolution remained whilst the attempts to stabilize its momentum was taking a far more conservative direction. Further, whilst Mercier had been a disciple of Rousseau and an anti-cleric, with his revolutionary fervour chastened by the bloodbath of the Jacobins, Mercier turned upon everything he saw as a source of the “terror,” and at the beginning of it all was “the free thinking “Descartes. By then Mercier was no less hostile not only to Voltaire’s attacks upon religion, but more generally to philosophy itself as a subversive power within the people.

Of course, the French revolution was predicated upon normative appeals, including patriotism, that have nothing to do with Descartes. But my point in this essay has been to focus on the mechanistic metaphysical pole of the bifurcated modern self. That other pole, as I have said, is the one of reason no longer simply studying nature’s determinations but conjuring ideas which provide legitimation for political and social authority. This pole is even more destructive of liberties than the technocratic, for those who insist that their authority is based upon the moral or ethical values that give them authority in deciding what we may or may not do invariably, originally in communist and fascist and now in liberal democratic regimes, attack any who question their decisions and policy priorities.

The ruling political class and the class that devotes itself to the accumulation of scientific knowledge form a bond in which the authority of the one class facilitates the authority of the other. The politics corrupts the science, and the science corrupts the politics. Together they make a world far more frightening than any produced by an evil genius. Together, they dissolve the soul into a bifurcation of machine and empty abstraction, in which the spirit of tradition and place are also rendered of no importance unless they serve the larger narrational purpose of an identity to be inserted into the design. In that design machine and norms are magically revived and unified. What has been lost in the transmutation is the soul.

Frankenstein’s Monsters is what we are in danger of becoming as we are but machines with ideals that dictate our identity—for anyone who is black, a woman, a gay, etc., who deviates from the script of what that identity should be is no longer defined by their identity marks, but by their betrayal of the essence and the narrative that has been dictated to those who have that essence by their political saviors. This is the rational moral faith that dictates how we should be in our world of pleasure and material satiation delivered by the world as a great calculative resource. It is the faith that has enabled the globalist progressivist view of life in which all the resources of the planet are to be managed and all traditions to be rendered redundant.

The world is an occasion for the profit and pleasure of those who are able to preside over the technocratic forces that do their bidding. Nietzsche had used the phrase “God is dead,” and Heidegger “the gods have fled.” But the living God never dies, and humans always find gods to serve. The god of one’s own identity is though one of the most pitiful that has ever been conjured. Descartes would, I think, have been horrified to see how thoughtless the new thinking subject is, and how infantile the world it is making has become.

Read Part 1 and Part 2.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


Featured: Presencia Inquietante (Unseetling Presence), by Remedios Varo; painted in 1959.


What Conspiracy? On the Nefarious Purpose, Means and Ideas of Globalist Imperialism, Part 2

Read Part 1 and Part 3.

The Disinformation Racket of US/European Imperialism

1. The Rule of Lawfare and the Military Industrial Complex’s Animosity to Trump

Part 1 of this essay focussed upon the purpose and some of the means of the US/ European Axis globalist imperial project. Some of those means veered into what is simply dismissed out of hand by the media and those, like academics who parrot what they say, as conspiracy theories. As I indicated in the conclusion of Part 1 the facts are the facts, and if there is any larger theory about why those facts are occurring then it is reasonable to ask who is behind them, who benefits, as well as what are the benefits of making a cluster of things happen which all form a pattern. That cluster is one in which oligarchs and technocrats preside over a neo-feudal global order. The vassals who serve them do the dirty work of censoring, economically and socially ostracizing, fining and imprisoning those who are obstacles to the expanse and implementation of this order. On the domestic front, the oligarchs and their vassals keep pressing on. The most recent development are, as reported by The Epoch Times (one of the rare newspapers that was debunking Russiagate as it was being concocted):

31 counts of wilful retention of national defense information; one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of withholding a document or record, one count of scheme to conceal, one count of corruptly concealing a document or record, one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, and one count of false statements and representations, information about the national defense, lying to federal investigators, obstructing justice.

The intricate legalities are all being explained by politically legal scholars and fact-checkers so that if the former President is sentenced to a prison sentence of a hundred years it would be perfectly legal as well as reasonable. The serious charges come under the Espionage Act. It would be hard to get more serious. Then there are the obstruction of justice, document concealments and lies told to agents who themselves worked for bosses who routinely lied and obstructed justice. People who don’t take their truths from CNN and the cabal of oligarch-intel agency funded media are pretty much all asking the same questions, which all point to the US operating under two sets of laws. The most often asked ones are:

  • Why is it that state intelligence officials who are publicly opposed to Donald Trump such as Peter Strzok, James Comey, James Baker, Andrew McCabe, John Brennen and James Clapper have lied under oath and never been charged with obstruction of justice, while Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone have served time in prison for that? And why does the mainstream media not only not care about such double standards but employ these people to offer political commentary?
  • Why has the use of a private email server for conducting affairs of state so that personal and state affairs can be intermingled without public scrutiny or historical record, so that, for example, a pay (the Clinton Foundation) to receive special US government favours might be concealed, never been subject to any serious media scrutiny? And why was it simply dismissed by James Comey as “extremely careless” instead of a crime?
  • How is it that a story fabricated in a presidential campaign about the opposing candidate being a Russian operative was not only so effective that it was repeated as if it were true in the media, but also used as the basis for spying on that campaign and imprisoning people for ‘process’ crimes is treated as if it were perfectly legitimate? How is this act of spying on a Presidential campaign not worse than Water Gate?

In the latest Trump case the big issue was why what seemed to be a case about classified documents moved to one in which the centrepiece was NDI documents. Given the proximity of its timing with the Durham Report, and the ramping up of people pushing further into the Biden money trail, ever more questions about China spying and the Biden family (all to be found in the laptop from hell stuff, which high ranking CIA, FBI and military officials conspired to dupe the public into thinking was a Russian Psy-Op) to those who sit back and wonder why now—it wreaks like a two month old abandoned fish factory still full of fish in a record drought year. Not that I think it will make a scrap of difference to how Trump is politically parsed. For those who hate him it confirms “He was a spy;” to those who don’t, some will think he has behaved very foolishly, and given his enemies a great opportunity to be rid of him once and for all—possibly; and for those who think the deep state has been at him from the day he announced his presidential campaign run, this will only confirm that Trump is seen as threat to the deep state.

The one piece that everyone knows about in the NDI bits was Milley’s plan to conquer Iran. Once upon a time, a President who stopped that, and kept evidence about the kind of shenanigans the MIC was up to he would have been carried aloft by professors and journalists chanting “No More Wars.” Now they tut-tut over their coffee and granola nodding beneath the Ukrainian flag they have draped in their kitchen along with the commentary that a President who had the temerity to hang onto evidence of a general plan to invade Iran is a danger to world peace. By the way—does anyone know how many Presidents have previously held onto any NDI documents after leaving office? Has anyone ever cared about this before? That’s the kind of question tens of millions are asking right now. And their answers are why Trump is still their preferred choice for President. And, funnily enough, they are the people who identify as patriots, while the people invoking the espionage act are the ones who think the flag, the national anthem and 1776 are embarrassing or just plain rancidly racist symbols.

Bill Barr, and Judge Napolitano have weighed in about the seriousness of these charges. But even if so, the DOJ has long since lost all credibility in terms of who it prosecutes and why. For those who want to know if the legalities of locking away a President are open and shut because not even a President is allowed to keep such secrets as what Milley was plotting on behalf of the USA and the rest of the world, I refer the reader to the legal analysis by Will Sharf. He is “a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, who worked on two Supreme Court confirmations, and clerked for two federal appellate judges.” The most important part of his argument comes down to intentionality—which by the way was the aspect that Comey said absolved Hilary of any criminality. The following two sections from Sharf’s analysis are the most pertinent:

Did he really think these documents, like years old briefing notes and random maps, jumbled together with his letters, news clippings, scribbled notes, and random miscellaneous items, “could be used to the injury of the United States”? Or did he just think of them as mementos of his time in office, his Personal Records of the four years, akin to a journal or diary?

If he thought these boxes were his Personal Records, he may have believed that NARA simply had no right to receive them at all. Meaning that he did not willfully withhold anything from an official he knew had the right to receive them. Because he didn’t believe that anyone had the right to receive them.

By breathlessly bandying around classification levels and markings, the Special Counsel is trying to make this case seem much, much simpler than it is. Classification levels do not automatically make something NDI, and having classified documents in your possession is not enough to convict here.

Just because something is classified—even Top Secret, SCI, NOFORN, FISA, pick your alphabet soup—does not mean that it is National Defense Information (NDI) within the meaning of the Espionage Act.

NDI, for the purposes of an Espionage Act § 793(e) prosecution, is defined as one of a long list of items “relating to the national defense which information the possessor had reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

A lot of the documents listed in the indictment are older, or seemingly random. Would Trump in 2022 have had reason to know that a 2019 briefing document “related to various foreign countries, with handwritten annotation in black marker” could harm the US or help foreign countries?

Tough to say, because we can’t see the documents, but that’s a question the jury is going to have to decide in the end, and Trump’s legal team needs to drive home this point over and over again

Just as I write this essay Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty to minor tax offences and fire-arm possession. None who are not working for the uni-party see this as anything other than a blatant play to make the charges on Trump look “fair,” which is what Trump said and which is yet another example of why he still garners supporters when he should have been dead and buried after Pussy-gate, though contending against the wife of an adulterous President who had been accused of rape put boys-locker-room- dirty-talk in perspective.

The media, like the Democrat Party, carefully picks its women victims—Tara Reade no good; Juanita Broaddrick no good—they accused a man from the party of all things wise, and noble, and loving; E. Jean Caroll very good. She targeted a threat to the entire world; even though the story of sexual abuse (not rape) in the changing room of a Manhattan luxury department store during opening hours might leave someone who has ever been in a luxury department store, and noted the lack of privacy that you might want if you just could not control your urges at that moment, somewhat sceptical—surveillance cameras? could she not cry for help? It did not take long for the “me-too-movement’s” slogan “believe every women” to segue into the formula: “believe every woman who is a victim of a predator the press does not approve of.” That shows just how morally serious Hollywood and mainstream journalists are in their defence of anyone who claims to be a woman (even when it is so they can beat penis-less women at sports, or perve on them in nude spas and showers and toilets). Trump supporters include women, gays, and trans, blacks, Latinos and whites. I have heard dozens of them say why they support him—and what they all have in common is that they deeply resent being made fools of, and would much rather someone who kicks back rather than fold.

The Donald Trump phenomenon exists for one simple reason—a massive number of people think the country has gone mad and bad, and that they would rather support a deeply flawed man who sympathises with them, even if they have nothing else in common with him than people who mock, deride and try to use them as clients for building a world where they are the ones to be disposed of. Trump is a symbol of resistance to the disintegration of the USA. One might think surely there could be a better symbol—and surely his time has gone. I do not know if the latter claim is true or false, but the reaction to him and his support base seems to be just as deranged as it ever was, and the dirty tricks just as dirty. And yes there are far more eloquent critics of what is occurring who might throw their hat into the electoral ring. But political destiny has a funny way of clearing away the strictures of the more pure among us, and providing someone who can fight in the mud. The thing, though, that always puzzled me was why did so many former celebrity friends who begged him to be on their tv or radio shows (including the biggies like Letterman, Colbert, Winfrey, Stern), who fawned all over him as they encouraged him to run for president, then turn on him when he actually decided to act in line with their advice and run? They all shared his politics. It was the politics of the Democrats for decades: let’s employ Americans instead of off-loading manufacturing to where wages are cheap; let’s side with the little guy at home and not do what Republicans do—give free reign to multi-national corporations who are responsible for the industrial wasteland occurring in our town and cities. Trump’s run in 2016 could have been lifted straight from the Warren Beattie movie Bulworth, a film that was basically a piece of 1990s Democrat agit-prop).

Trump’s politics never changed—he was saying this in the 1980s and being slapped on the back by the same lot who called for his impeachment, or whatever it took, to free the nation of this plague resting under the world’s worst comb-over. Of course it was not that much of a puzzle really. They followed the money—and as much as Trump had, it was peanuts compared to his opposition. They and the people who paid their salaries were part of a much larger global sweep of oppositional forces, that included the world’s wealthiest men and their companies, as well as the globalist political and administrative classes, and all the vassals on the globalist private and public ticket. Their motto was not America first in Trump’s sense of creating jobs in America, and developing prosperity for the American working class, but America and Western Europe first—in the sense of supporting policies for the world’s wealthiest oligarchs and an America-led (first) alliance with Western Europe to impose its values, its priorities, and its access and control of resources. To that end it requires the Military Industrial Complex, that also includes the creation of a standing world army (NATO) under its supervision to be ever-ready for the endless wars which it helps fuel, as it runs over or undermines any regime that is in its way.

That is why Tucker Carlson, in his third Twitter show, and racking up 30 million tweets in 12 hours, made the salient point that the line Trump crossed had been to position himself against the Industrial Military Complex. For Tucker the moment Trump sealed his fate and galvanized the Military Industrial Complex against him was when he said, in his campaign, that the “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a lie.” Everyone knew that. Anti-Republican journalists and anti-war academics—which is to say most of them at that time—had been saying this for years. But it was then the propaganda machine against Trump as Hitler went into full effect, as the story that was endlessly repeated was how much less safe the world was with the reckless orange-haired Hitler having the authority to press the button.

According to Hilary, and her cheer squad of journalists, it came so very, very close when Trump called Kim Il-Jong “Little rocket man” at the UN. So dire was the situation that eventually, after Trump had “lost” the 2020 election and hence was bound to pound the blow-up-the-world switch out of a temper tantrum, that one of the MIC’s very own men, General Milley, phoned China to tell them that the world was in safe hands—his.

The pressure from the MIC, though, did feed into some of Trump’s very dangerously deluded and rash diplomatic decisions, like the assassination of General Soleimani, discussed below, and the bombing of Syria because of faked and staged chemical attacks attributed to the Assad regime.

Unfortunately, it was precisely these acts of reckless and ill-advised international aggression that gave Trump a moment or two of respite from the media and military officials doing their baying for Trump’s blood. That tells us a lot. Whereas when Trump met with President Putin in what, to me as someone who has spent much of his life teaching Political Science, saw as a fairly well conducted piece of public diplomacy, the press acted as if Trump and Dr. Evil were ghoulishly gloating over the latest plan for Russian nuclear devastation of the USA.

One would never know from the press, who, as Tucker rightly sees, have become the Military Industrial Complex’s propaganda wing, but one of Trump’s worst failures was that in trying to revive America’s industrial base and keep the US out of new wars, he handed over the state department to neo-cons, who had gravitated around Trump like flies to cow-dung, only to dump on him as soon as he either decided not to go along with some scheme or other that they had cooked up, or had blithely walked into some other scheme aimed to derail him. In any case, no matter how many qualifications we may want to add to Tucker’s general claim, I think it fair to say he has a point. Trump was definitely seen as an existential threat to the military industrial complex.

Pat Bet-David (not a Democrat, but no Trump fan-boy) also made a point that is even more telling in an excellent interview with Whitney Webb. Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail is possibly the most important work on politics in the US I have read—ever. Its research is meticulous and the case she makes about the role of organized crime within the government of the USA is rock-solid, as is the account of the elaborate list of players and their political connections involved in the financial crimes and blackmailing sting being run by Epstein (who is the centre of the two volume work) and Israeli intelligence. She is no partisan, and pulls no punches about presidential corruption, and the corruption that runs through the most powerful political and financial families in the US. She tends to lump Trump in with the rest of the mobsters, blackmailers and laundromat operators running the country. While she notes that the mainstream media has protected—by lying about the extent, and dates of—the Epstein-Clinton connection (as they have also done with the Gates-Epstein connection), and have exaggerated the Trump-Epstein connection (which were financial rather than Trump seeking young girls, though Webb also rightly draws attention to just how the press has neglected the financial arm of Epstein’s/Mossad operations), her negative appraisal of Trump—unlike the disinformation of the mainstream oligarchic- funded jeer-squad—is well made.

The essence of Webb’s critique of Trump is that he is too influenced by Israel, and that his administration was heavily staffed with people with very close ties to Israel, that he did not pardon Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, that his business interests have crooked ties (the Scarfo and the Pritzker families), which also connects with him being mentored by that blackmailing sleaze-bag friend of J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn. But for all that, Bet-David posed the right questions to her, which go some way to understanding why Trump has the support base he has. “Why,” he asked “have the top 10 organizations in the USA and globally hated Trump so much?” And “What institutions that have hurt America so badly, and that hate America, love Trump?” Whitney did not have an answer to that.

David’s podcast has a huge audience, but not as huge as Tucker’s; so for the mainstream media David might as well not exist. But when Tucker made his point—with great applause from George Galloway (yes that is the kind of alliance that is occurring which tells you that all old political categories are total junk for making sense of the world now)—the rest of the mainstream media chimed in immediately calling Tucker Carlson a conspiracy theorist.

Just as the word conspiracy now means anything your eyes and ears inform you of that has not been authorised by the media and the various state agencies of the uni-party behind it, the word theory has lost any meaning. Tucker was not laying out a theory. He was providing an insight, which to be sure was based upon a conjecture. But unlike those denouncing him as a conspiracy theorist, he was trying to identify why all these actors have done what they have done. And what they have done is destroy the rule of law by making politics take primacy over procedure. In doing this they have essentially criminalized what half the population or more value and think. And worst of all, without even realizing, let alone caring that they have done so they have broken the bonds of social unity that provide the requisite cultural condition for a functioning republic, or liberal democracy.

This is why increasingly, people who are all too aware of Trump’s policy errors and disasters (the most egregious of which, outside of international diplomacy, is another one that his enemies supported, was giving control of the pandemic to Anthony Fauci) and personality, are coming around to the position (which has always been my position) that this is only about Trump in so far as he has been a catalyst in exposing the powers who have had as little compunction in destroying the US constitution as they have had in claiming that half the country is a domestic terror coalition of “white supremacists,” homophobes, transphobes, and whatever nasty prefix plus ist or phobe occurs to them. The same concatenation of political crimes has now spread far beyond the USA.

In the USA, the first amendment is nothing but a quaint reminder of the racist and unemancipated ruling class who came up with a constitution so disturbing that the National Archive has to provide a warning about the harmful nature of its language. Fact checkers justify this by pointing out that it is not only the Constitution that gets a trigger warning, which is one more symptom of what a mad-hatters tea-party our “fact-checkers” merrily engage in.

The occasional instances and slithers of constitutional victory still give hope to those who think that politics in the USA is anything other than lawfare. Politicized law, though is not only bad law, it is law that spells the end of democracy. When it is commonplace it indicates that the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of lawfare. The United States—and much of the Western world—has adopted the rule of lawfare. The death of the rule of the law, and the transformation of the rule of lawfare is the result of the organizations and institutions that are essential to the information that enable citizens to make informed political choices becoming nothing more than sites of mis- and disinformation that target enemies and protect friends. There is nothing new about academics being ideological lunatics, nor partisan and stupid journalists, it is the active suppression of any countervailing voices that has turned the sites of information gathering and flow and framing into propaganda agencies.

The reason that the ruling class of the US opts for lawfare not warfare against the recalcitrants who prefer Old Glory to the 22 pride flags available to choose from is because their resistance to the world where elections don’t amount to anything anymore is restricted to some placards, irate podcasters and off grid journalists, and a generally politically docile group whose time is not devoted to white supremacist bivouac, and shooting black people practice, nor to figuring out which hair dye, gender operation, or pronoun they might come up with as they invent ever new ways to sexualize children, run down cities, destroy citizenship, and take out their political opponents. Astonishingly—and shhh, I will let you into a big secret that the media will never tell you: their time is largely taken up with work so they can keep putting the ever more expensive bread on the table, whilst having to react to the latest intrusion into their children’s welfare at school and their parental rights, along with the destruction of their personal safety and public order.

When lawfare does not suffice, though, the ruling class sends out the right signals to a client underclass which it keeps in drugs, squalor, and dependency, on the streets, while also giving them the green light to physically harm who they want and just steal stuff as the need comes upon them. Thus employees who oppose shoplifters will lose their job and possibly go to court. Woe betide anyone who might just happen to want to prevent a black person committing a crime. The ruling class wants blacks to be criminals as well as clients, though it also offers career paths for blacks who want to preside over and make a political living off ensuring the black client-underclass stays a client-under class. Black crime is not crime, and the most productive black citizens are ones that protect blacks so they can be unleashed from squalid neighbourhoods so they can commit crime.

The contender for the greatest North American writer of the Twentieth Century, Ralph Ellison, in his masterpiece, The Invisible Man, wrote about how the communists had used the resentment of the black under-class to make their own political advancement. This is no longer the strategy of communists, but of the American political class, and it has become institutionalised and corporatized in almost every organization that trains and employs professionals. The self-interest and political delusions of that class are so entwined that to even dare to say it, or which is the same thing, to criticize DEI—and all the variant formulae in social circulation—as a package of abstract inanities entrenching clientelism, polarised identities, managerial technocratic authority and the death not only of democracy but of a society in which intelligence, spontaneous solidarity based upon shared loves and sacrifices, and the cultivation of talents and initiative is hammered into fragments of divided groups, each grasping for more of the resources available to a diminishing number of them, is to become unemployable within any large scale private or public organization. It is also to be potentially accused of a crime—a hate crime.

Nothing illustrates where the United States and its vassal states is going and how the media has become the instrument for lawfare better than the mainstream narrative about the “insurrection” that took place on January 6. It was the world’s first insurrection that ever took place without any attempt at a military coup, without anyone trying to control any media, without guns, and without plans. It was an insurrection of disgruntled mostly middle aged, out of shape, typical Americans in good humour, balancing their hotdog, and cokes (the black fizzy stuff you drink, not the white stuff cut up on credit cards and snorted by celebrities, lawyers, politicos, bankers and others who generally hate MAGA types), and placards or flags whilst wandering outside the capitol. They would have all been home for dinner, after believing they at least had the opportunity to express their point of view about how the election was stolen, had it not been for the Antifa and deep state plants turning the party into a violent opportunity for the police to beat the living daylights out of them, whilst killing a couple to show that they meant business. They did so knowing full well that the media would make out that it was the protestors who were responsible for the deaths.

As far as the media were concerned protesting about election irregularities in the US was a white supremacist take-over of the nation by hotdog wielding flag-carrying, red baseball cap wearing coca-cola heads—it was absolutely terrifying for anyone who did not want to use their own eyes, who did not see the line of protestors being quietly ushered by police into the capitol building from the back, or missed the footage where something generally terrifying was police-instigated and deadly—at least for Rosanne Boyland crushed amidst the police induced mayhem, and Ashli Babbitt, shot at point blank range, for trespassing in the capitol, and caught up in the push and shoving by a policeman who was never endangered by her, or anyone in the capitol. Fact-checkers and Wikipedia will make their deaths out to be their own fault. Brian Sicknick’s death, from stroke, incurred after the riot, was, on the other hand, widely reported to have been caused by the protestors before any retractions occurred.

Though, when the protests against Trump winning the election went down that was not only reasonable but something to be proud of, as a beaming James Comey, employed to be a public servanta, said of his wife and daughter protesting against a President whose administration he was supposed to be serving. Attacks upon the supreme court building were not insurrections, nor were the protests outside the white house when the George Floyds protests were peacefully burning down various shopping areas with the approval of various senators and congress members. The mainstream media thinks that everyone has the memory of a gold-fish, and it does so because it mostly employs journalists who do.

2. Media Lies and Warfare. And Just to Refresh your Memory, Some Examples from Jacques Baud’s Governing By Fake News

That some half of the population of the United States see a tremendous amount of conspiring taking place is because there is a tremendous amount of conspiring taking place. And it has changed the entire social fabric and political culture of democratic nations in the West. Though there is one great irony in this: the same kind of machinations that the CIA have engaged in for decades against regimes seen as inimical to US interests, with the media reporting their disinformation, are now par for the course in the US itself. Not that long ago it was not that easy to find a Professor working in the area of geo-politics who was unaware of the nefarious extent of the CIA and the work it did in cooperation with some less than illustrious companies such as United Fruit. Likewise, when the Iraq wars happened there could be found plenty of professors and even a few journalists who thought something stinky was going on. But when it comes to the Russian war, the academics and journalists speaking out against the role of the US and Western Europe in igniting that war are a tiny handful. From the mainstream, Tucker was the only person I can think of who thought the whys’ and wherefores’ of the war deserved scrutiny, and from the universities there is Mearsheimer and a couple of others. The main ones I am familiar with are podcasters, or independent analysts who do regular interviews with podcasters.

But of all those who have spoken out about the false information being spread by the mainstream media about the NATO led war in Ukraine, none in my opinion has laid out the most compelling case against what the US and Western Europe have done in the region than Jacques Baud, a Colonel, “ a former member of the Swiss Strategic Intelligence, a specialist in Eastern Europe and former head of Doctrine of the United Nations Peace Operations. Within NATO, he was involved in programs in Ukraine, including after the Maidan Revolution of 2014 and 2017.” He has on the ground experience of the region, and knows NATO and how intelligence services work from the inside. Plus he has the courage to speak his mind when he sees stupid decisions drawing the world into unnecessary wars. And the internal turmoil now transpiring in the US is a reflection of the confused imperial mind-set which has been interfering in global events to the detriment of the world as a whole, as well as Western civilization which now rallies behind pride flags, crushing inflation, lawfare, infantilism, broken cities and neighbourhoods, race and ethnic hostilities, and hyperbolic moral and meaningless slogans howled by angry and blue-haired non-binaries, their professors and fogged-brain old hippies, and spouted out in more “professional” form in media sites and policy documents to be used by doctors, dentists, corporations, schools, universities, law firms—all of which it passes off as emancipation.

The present war in the Ukraine is but the latest in a long list of US adventurist disasters, and it may very well be a prelude to the big event, War with China, something that is even floated by leading US military officials. And the blue haired non-binary/ professional coalition are perfectly fine with it. Getting the military to go gay and trans was a masterstroke in getting the usual anti-war lot to become another front for the MIC.

Jacques Baud’s Operation Z, and his earlier book Governing By Fake News: International Conflict: 30 Years of Fake News Used by Western Countries provide what I consider the best account of how US imperial foreign policy consists of a great tapestry of disinformation spread by a Media that has abdicated all commitment to researching and reporting on the truth of things.

In this essay, I have drawn attention to deliberate decisions undertaken to achieve strategic objectives in disinformation, but I have also emphasised throughout that it is the amalgam of contradictory interests that is intrinsic to the sorry tale that we are now caught up in. However, I have also mentioned—as I frequently do—the importance of ambition and lack of knowledge in shaping the world. That is one of the lessons I have carried over from Plato—“evil is ignorance” was his (Socratic) formulation. Not being a metaphysician (and having a strong antipathy to most metaphysical enterprises and claims) I am happy to rephrase it to “evil is often ignorance.” I also think that folly is the footman of evil, and there is none so foolish as they who think they know what they don’t (that’s also Socrates), and live by and fight for false convictions. This is what Baud concentrates on. Thus in the concluding section of Governing by Fake News, “A problem of democracy” he writes:

It would be wrong to believe that fake news masks a will. That would be a “conspiracy” interpretation. In fact, the opposite is true: we act without understanding the situation or in haste, and then, in order to hide the errors of governance, we invoke fake news. As a classified presentation by the UK’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) on influence operations states: People make decisions for emotional reasons, not rational ones2024. This is what happened during the Coronavirus crisis in most countries: by ignoring the Chinese experiences, precious time was lost in preparing for the crisis, and emergency measures (generalized containment) had to be taken with catastrophic consequences. The real problem is not the “infoxes” that “get the buzz,” but the subtle distortions of facts that lead our democracies down the wrong path. Our opinions are deliberately distorted by assumptions or mere suspicions, framed in such a way that they appear as established facts.

I agree that Baud has identified a real problem. But one cannot dig away at fake news and not constantly hit a wall of wills as one runs into PSY OPS and false flags, a panoply of gaslighting techniques and examples, endless examples of disinformation created by intelligence agents, and countless lies wittingly told by government officials. All of this exists alongside of the commonplace refusal of media outlets to demand journalistic protocols that would prevent falsehoods of great magnitude and implications for the fate of a nation. Media outlets routinely air false stories, so much so that they are now playing a major part in the Industrial Censorship Complex by protecting the false and denouncing the true. So in spite of his disclaimers about wilful intentions, and a preface that suggests incompetence is the greater crime, in page after page he speaks of the lies that have been told in the West’s fight against its enemies. Thus on the very page after he the citation I provided above, he also writes “Tony Blair will go into Iraq knowing that the charges against Saddam Hussein were false.” And earlier in the book he also noted:

There are very few verifiable and irrefutable facts to support our picture of countries like Russia, Iran, Syria, etc. Gaddafi was probably a dictator, but where are the mass graves of the massacres attributed to him? Omar Bashir was probably a dictator too, but where are the mass graves of the 400,000 deaths in Darfur between 2003 and 2006? By having created and accepted these lies without batting an eyelid, we have generated hundreds of thousands of other deaths and an immigration that we can no longer control.

Indeed, in a book which is possibly the best single compendium of the disinformation about nations and events involving those leaders or nations which have thwarted the geopolitical objectives of the West—objectives which are now impossible to disassociate from globalist liberal progressivism—the word lie accompanies the narrative like a bass drum does a rock song.

But, it is true that many of those, indeed the overwhelming majority, who participate in making up the wall of wills, ambitious as they are, are not very bright, and act out of ignorance. I do not blame Baud, a man with an extraordinary military and peacekeeping career who has taken a stand on the Ukraine war that leaves him marginalized, and open to denunciation and humiliation, for framing the problem the way he does so that the added debris of being a conspiracy theorist is not also piled upon him. And Baud wants his readers to join him in being rational and objective about the information he has presented. Thus he sees

The inability of Western intelligence services to analyse situations objectively and factually is a vulnerability on two levels. The first is the disproportionate influence of the American, British and Israeli services, which are said to have far superior analytical capabilities. The second is that a rumour or the action of a group of individuals could well lead to a major conflict. Our services lack the method and experience to understand strategic realities. Faced with the complexity of security problems, Western services have sought answers in the accumulation of data. Paradoxically, however, data has become their weakness. Pseudo-experts attribute this to the growing inability of the services to process the mass of information. This is incorrect: the problem is their inability to see the bigger picture.

Unlike Baud, I think reason is something everyone thinks they have, and, as I detail at more length in the third part of this essay, the Enlightenment dream of creating a perfect society out of the kinds of creatures (for in spite of our virtues, it is the lack thereof that never disappears—our weaknesses, and susceptibility to laziness, superstition, ambition, lust, greed etc. are perennially with us), is akin to a child trying to move the ocean into a hole with a teaspoon, and, indeed, nothing was ever going to be more irrational and more assured of creating a totalitarian society than the attempt to build a “rational” one.

But I tarry too long with where I think Baud is both giving away too much to his enemies, and hoping too much for where and how much reason figures in our lives. For when faced with the kind of reader who most needs to read it, he will be met with the self-satisfied smugness of closed mind who thinks him a Putin stooge, so maybe his strategy is a way to get a bit of listening space. For the rest of us, though, who want to know what is going on, Baud’s downplaying the intentionality behind fake news has little bearing on what is a rigorous and compelling account of the disastrous nature and direction of Western foreign policy and geopolitical objectives and tactics. I urge the reader of this essay to get a hold of that book, and work his way through the fake news that has operated in tandem with the geopolitical objectives, policies and interventions of the USA and, more generally, the Western imperial alliance. For I can only cover a small sample of the examples that his book provides to make his case.

Let’s start with the lie that Al Qaeda emerged as a response to the Soviet invasion, when the Soviet invasion was itself a response to the “American attempt to destablise the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul with jihadist movements six months earlier. The chaos that followed once the US had achieved their strategic objective of rolling back Soviet influence in Afghanistan led to the emergence of the Taliban. Hardly anyone in the West had ever heard of these goatherders with machine guns in one hand, and a Koran in the other until 9.11. Then, when the attacks upon the USA were interpreted as being master-minded by Osama Bin-Laden the Taliban was ostensibly a party to a global jihadist movement.

In fact, goats aside, it was a regional Sunni sectarian power intent in federating the different ethnic groups that made up the Afghan resistance. I am not saying I would like to be ruled by the Taliban. But the nature and cultural undergirding of social groups, and their existential and political priorities, options and choices in Afghanistan are what they are—and in the 20 years or so of US led post-Taliban occupation, nothing was done that created a more viable or more Western orientated government with a strong support base. The Taliban were the government prior to the US-led invasion and they are again now—after all the killing, the sequence of corrupt governments and the debacle of the US abandonment, leaving those who had cooperated with them to their, fate along with the billions of dollars’ worth of weapons they also left behind for the Taliban (the mainstream figure now touted is $7 billion—I don’t know whether that is closer to the mark than the 80 plus billion claimed by critics of the withdrawal—though I do know if Snopes says it is 7 billion I am more inclined to believe the 80 plus figure). But let us see Baud’s account of the Taliban’s response to the US demand for them to hand over Bin Laden after 9.11. For it is just the kind of fact that most people either never knew or have forgotten:

The Taliban’s position is clear: they are ready to hand him over, but demand proof of his guilt. The Americans provided evidence, but the Afghan High Court of Justice ruled that it did not prove his involvement and refused to hand him over. The Taliban then asked the Americans to make a “constructive proposal” to resolve the crisis. But this request was never reported as such in the Western media and the Americans did not respond. Yet the Taliban sought a solution. On 21 February 2001, they offered to extradite him to the United States in exchange for an agreement on the sanctions affecting the country, but for reasons that were never fully clarified, the US government refused. After 9/11, the issue of OBL’s extradition came up again and the Taliban envoy told the US chargé d’affaires in Islamabad that if the US provided evidence of his responsibility, the “problem could be easily solved.” But in reality, the evidence of OBL’s involvement is of little interest to the Americans, as they had already decided to intervene in Afghanistan long before “9/11.” On 4 September 2001, exactly one week before 9/11, the National Security Presidential Directive 9 (NSPD9)52 was submitted to President George W. Bush for signature. Classified SECRET, it is entitled Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States53, and in a TOP SECRET classified annex, it directs the Secretary of Defense to plan military options “against Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including leadership, command control, air defence, ground forces and logistics.“ It was approved on 25 October 2001.

There is much more to that story that Baud tells and that the mainstream US journalists either never knew or never cared to discover, but let’s move onto the Dafur “genocide.” I leave aside the intricacies of the conflict there, and the details Baud provides which indicate what a ridiculously simplistic summary of the issues and events have been spread by the media—and will just cite this passage from Baud:

At the outset of the Darfur crisis, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) mentioned the figure of 180,000 dead. By early 2005, when the UN mission was established, the most common estimate was 200,000 dead. During this period, when the author had a very good overview of the situation and collaborated with the main Western intelligence services, no major clashes took place and humanitarian access was generally good. However, in 2008, Jan Egeland, the then OCHA coordinator, stated that 400,000 was closer to the reality. However, ten years later, the figure most often put forward is 300,000 dead, while remaining purely speculative. Despite numerous rumours and the claims of some humanitarian NGOs, no mass graves, mass graves or evidence of massacres on this scale have been found. In fact, these figures are derived from statistical estimates and projections based on unverified and unverifiable testimony. But this does not prevent the international community from accusing the Sudanese government of “genocide.” To justify this accusation, two notions are played on alternately: mortality due to the consequences of violence (lack of hygiene, lack of water and food, etc.) and mortality due to the acts of violence themselves. In fact, they are mixed. In addition, the role of local armed actors is deliberately minimised in order to attribute their violence to the government. Between early 2005 and mid-2006, at the request of the head of UNMIS, the mission’s intelligence unit (JMAC) carried out four studies on violent mortality in Darfur. All available sources are used: international (such as WHO and ICRC) and non-governmental organisations, the African Union mission (AMIS), the UN security service (UN DSS), Sudanese security services, Western intelligence services and the rebel groups themselves. In most cases, there are photographic documents or detailed reports (police, medical, military, and/or human rights bodies). The results are surprising: Period Number of deaths: June 2004—March 2005 400 April 2005—July 2005 1 200 August 2005—January 2006 500 February 2006—July 2006 400 Total (June 2004—July 2006) 2500 . (JIC Assessment, International Terrorism: Impact of Iraq, Joint Intelligence Committee, 13 April 2005, TOP SECRET (declassified January 2011) Table 2—Victims of violence in Darfur (2004-2006)) These figures are probably still too high, but they include all forms of violence, from simple crime to tribal skirmishes.

The point of this is simply that while a huge number of people in the US don’t know anything about the world, including their own world, those that think they do, when they hear or see the word Darfur, will associate that word with some completely fabricated figure that is supposed to lend support to there having been a genocide. Information is inseparable from association, and when the information is so shoddy, so are the associations and hence the judgments relying upon those associations are bound to be ignorant. And the judgments made so forthrightly by all sorts of influential people are often shockingly ignorant when it comes to commentary upon the enemies of the US. One might add, there is a reason why such a bunch of half-baked brains dreamt up the neo-con disasters that have plagued the US, and, the irony, is that their equally half-baked brained liberal opponents invariably end up just doing a variant of the same thing—thus was the Obama supported/ assisted Arab Spring really just one more stab at regime change that was supposed to make the Middle East the latest democratic flower child to join in US/ European progressive cultural wisdom.

Since the USA abandoned the Shah of Iran to his fate, thereby giving further confirmation to the famous line of Kissinger that “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal,” Iran has become viewed by the West, as George Bush Jr, put it in 2002, as part of the axis of evil. Whether true or not, Baud makes a convincing case that at least from the time the story of Irangate broke—where the Regan regime was secretly selling arms to Iran to finance the war against the Contras in Nicaragua—the West has been spreading fake stories about Iran. Thus, for example, in 1988 when the US shot down the Airbus of Iran Airflight 655 that killed 290 people 66 of whom were children), the US government and media concealed the fact that the US cruiser which bought down the airbus was in Iranian waters and then concocted the story that the airbus was really an Iraian F-14 “in a dive against the ship.”

Most people in the West have no idea that Iran had tried to improve relations with the West at the end of the Cold War, that it was neutral during the first Gulf War (given its earlier history with the US backed invasion by Saddam, that was about as good as an “alliance” was like to be), that hostilities with the Taliban, who had assassinated nine Iranian diplomats in 1988, led to it providing intelligence to the Americans, as well as supporting the US invasion of Afghanistan. And for their thanks, as Baud points out a month after James Dobbin at the Bonn Agreement had “thanked Iran for having convinced its Afghanistan allies go join the coalition of national unity,” Bush Jr. identified Iran as belonging to the axis of evil. That old imperial American gratitude yet again.

The following point raised by Baud is also an excellent account of the sheer stupidity of the US when it comes to even thinking though its own geopolitical interests:

By intervening in Iraq in 2003, with the support of the country’s Shiite majority, American strategists did not understand that they were creating a continuous axis between Iran and Lebanon, which they reinforced by isolating Syria after 2005. They thus generated a feeling of encirclement among the Gulf monarchies, as evidenced by a SECRET message from the American embassy in Ryadh, dated 22 March 2009108. This is what will later push Saudi Arabia and Qatar to reassert Sunni influence through the revolutions, which affected secular Arab countries. The West perceived them as democratic outbursts, whereas they were essentially a defensive reaction of the Gulf monarchies that felt threatened. This is all the more true since most of their oil wealth is located in areas where their Shiite minorities are in the majority.

Baud’s analysis of Iran is astute and raises issues rarely noted by Western journalists, but before passing onto briefly look at what he says about Syria and Venzuela, I should mention his account of the assassination of General Soleimani, an assassination much trumpeted by President Trump. Baud has nothing good to say about the impact of Trump’s presidency on global affairs, and whenever his name occurs in this book, it is because of the recklessness of Trump’s interventions. The case of Soleimani is a very good example of a presidential decision making tenuous and fraught diplomatic relations even worse. As Baud points out Soleimani’s assassination was rooted in Trump’s

claim to American authority over Iraqi oil, in payment for investments in the country! In order to put pressure on Iraq, Trump proposed to Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to complete the reconstruction of the country’s infrastructure in exchange for the transfer of 50 % of the oil.

The refusal to accept this by Abdul-Mahdi led Trump to respond that he would help internal Iranian opposition overthrow the regime. Subsequently violent protests erupted in Baghdad.

In December of that same year an Iranian-made missile hit a base housing Iraqi and US units fighting ISIS and killing a US mercenary. Although there was no definitive proof of who was behind the strike, Trump accused the Iranians for it, leading to a retaliatory strike in Syria against Iranian backed soldiers. These strikes in turn incited rioters storming the American embassy in Baghdad, while Soleimani was accused of being the brains behind the storm along with plotting operations against four American embassies in the Middle East.

Unable to provide any definitive proof to Congress, the government segued from lie to lie—even claiming “that Soleimani had helped the terrorists prepared for 9.11” (obviously relying upon the fact that most Americans would have no idea about the hostility between Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and there was never the slightest evidence for the involvement of Iran, just as there had never been anything reliable linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein). On the day that Pompeo was reduced by journalists wanting to know more about the “imminent threats” to the US embassies he could only bluster that the plans were real, though none knew where they were supposed to be, President Trump changed tack—the issue was not the threats—but Soleimani’s “horrible past.” Baud continues:

On the same day, Donald Trump confessed that this “imminent threat” was not the problem, but rather the general’s “horrible past “! He is referring to his alleged responsibility for the death of 600 American soldiers in Iraq since 2003. An accusation relayed in France by the pro-Israeli media, like Dreuz. But it is false: the Pentagon spokesman confesses that he “has no study, no documentation, no data to provide to journalists that could confirm these figures. Unverified, the number of 600 was not originally attributed to Soleimani, but to Iran. This is also a lie: it originated in January 2007, when US Vice President Dick Cheney was looking for pretexts to strike Iran.

After the generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously and categorically refused to strike Iranian nuclear capabilities about which there was no intelligence, Cheney claimed that Iran had supplied directional anti-vehicle mines (responsible for the deaths in question)274. Another lie: the devices were made in Iraq, with equipment purchased from the United Arab Emirates, as confirmed by the very serious Jane’s Intelligence Review.

Baud has no illusions about there not being any internal opposition to the Iranian regime—though he is right to point out the inanity of thinking that the government’s lack of support translates into Iranians in any way supporting US/Western geopolitical intrusions in the Middle East. What is a fantasy is that Iran is today considered to be a global supporter of jihad—any dreams that the Ayatollah may have had of a possible Shia led pan-Islamic alliance seem ridiculous in light of the enmities within the Islamic world—and that is aside from the fact the Iranian form of government is not even universally supported by Shia Muslims.

But the fantasy about Iran is widely held and Baud gives the example of the French writer and philosopher Michel Onfray on the popular program in France “On n’est pas couché,” claiming that “Iran rejoiced, after the Charlie Hebdo killings.” But, as Baud rightly points out: this was not the case at all; “it was unequivocally and publicly condemned by the Iranian President.”

On that front I think a far stronger case can be made that it is the Saudis, a US ally, that have helped sponsor global terror—as it maintained a revolving door of terrorism, geeing jihadists up to leave the country, then locking them up or providing intel to the US as they returned. Further it has spent a fortune funding mosques and imams sympathetic to their Wahhabism in a hegemonic attempt to spread Islam globally. We know why the US lets the Saudis get away with what they do, but apart from it being a dangerous game, the double standards are not lost on anyone who doubts that the US is bringing more order and peace to the world.

Baud also rightly draws attention to the real issue—already mentioned—the Tehran Damascus axis “which frightens Gulf monarchies.” And while there are undoubted hostilities between Iran and Israel, Baud argues that the threat to Israel is persistently overplayed by Israel and the USA and exaggerated by the media.

As with America, Israel’s bungling, and indiscriminate responses to attacks have often played a role in unnecessarily increasing hostilities between them and other regional players. Unlike the US though, the very existence of Israel is precariously poised given its very regional location, so it is more understandable that they overreact or operate outside international norms that they too give lip service too. But however much sympathy one may have for the plight of Israel, bad decisions are still bad decisions, and the law of unintended consequences does not bypass a people simply because of the past horrors they have experienced, and sought to avoid again. That Israel unnecessarily created a fierce enemy for itself can be seen in the creation of Hezbollah in the context of the conflict with the PLO. The settlement of some 300,000 refugees in the aftermath of the “67 war and Black September in Jordan in 1970 had exacerbated Shiite hostility against the Palestinians. Israel’s attempt to put a stop to the PLO “launching attacks into Israel from Southern Lebanon was disastrously handled. Instead of taking advantage of the local schisms and tensions, Israel indiscriminately fought against Lebanese Shiites and Palestinian Sunnis “quickly creating unanimity between them.” Up until then the Lebanese Shiites had not had any particular beef with Israel—and anyone familiar with Sunni-Shia hostilities in the Middle East knows that the religious divisions between Sunni and Shia can be every bit as acrimonious as between Muslims and Jews. If you have not done so find some Sunni-Shia scholarly debates and sit back with the popcorn—it is a theological equivalent of UFC.

Baud’s chapter on Iran also discusses the widely reported claim that President Ahmadinejad, quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, had called for Israel being “wiped off the map,” when what he said was that “the regime that occupies Jerusalem must be erased from the page of history.” The difference may seem moot. But I think Baud is right to draw attention to a mistranslation which calls for the extermination of a people rather than a geopolitical call for regime change. Certainly no journalist in the USA seems to think that their support for what is de facto support for Russian regime change is a call for genocide, even it goes along with Lindsey Graham gloating over money being well spent when it leads to dead Russians. But it is precisely because such conflations between regime and a people are made by choosing to be inattentive to what is actually said that the media de facto endorses perilous geopolitical political adventures. Likewise, the conflation is also at the heart of the unconscionably cruel and stupid tactic that has become commonplace in the West and is part of the armoury to be used against Russian and Iran amongst others to deploy sanctions as a means of inducing regime change. The tactic itself only shows the utter contempt for the ostensible morally based grounding of the West—its willingness to use people, who simply want to get on with living their lives under the conditions they have been thrown into, as cannon fodder in creating a world that fits their picture of the good and the true.

Another primary piece of disinformation discussed by Baud is that surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme. Baud points out that Iran had already abandoned it nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that this had been confirmed in 2007 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council, and reinforced in 2012 by Mossad and the CIA. Neverthtless, the US intelligence agencies had disclosed that they were seeking a pretext to overthrow the Iranian government and that Prime Minister Netanyahu went on record to the UN General Assembly saying that Iran would soon have nuclear weapons, thus contradicting a memo from Mossad to South African intelligence saying that Iran was not presently engaged in the production of nuclear weapons.

While it is true that Iran frequently has engaged in bellicose rhetoric about Israel, Iran, nevertheless, signed the Vienna agreement in 2015 in the hope of having sanctions lifted for reducing nuclear capabilities. But the sanctions were not lifted, and in 2018 Netanyahu, a Prime Minister caught up in domestic scandals that may still end up sending him to prison, falsely claimed that Tehran had been lying about its nuclear program. In fact he was using documents dating back to 2002! Trump would follow up on Netanyahu’s falsehood, and adding few of his own in a tweet of July 10 2019: “Iran has long secretly “enriched,” in total violation of the terrible $150 billion deal signed by John Kerry and the Obama administration. Remember that this agreement was due to expire in a few years.” Baud continues:

In a few words, he manages to lie on three points. Concerning enrichment activities, it should be remembered that for military use, uranium must be enriched to 90%. Iran never exceeded 20% before the JCPOA. With the treaty, Iran had agreed to limit itself to 3.67% for a period of 15 years; and in its report of 31 May 2019, the IAEA confirms that Iran has kept to these limits. Moreover, in January 2019, during her hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA Director Gina Haspel confirmed that Iran had complied with the JCPOA, thus contradicting Trump. As for the $150 billion, this is not the amount paid by the US, but the total of Iranian assets that should be “unfrozen,” and the total is probably much lower. In August 2015, in an audit to the Senate Finance Committee, Adam J. Szubin, Treasury Undersecretary for Financial Intelligence and Terrorism, estimated the amount at “just over $50 billion.” Another lie. Finally, as far as the timetable is concerned, Donald Trump seems not to have read (or understood) the JCPOA. He claims that: In seven years, this agreement will have expired and Iran will be free to create nuclear weapons. This is not acceptable. Seven years is tomorrow. This is another lie. While some of the treaty’s provisions do indeed expire in 2025 (e.g. on centrifuge development), the most significant clauses (e.g. on the prohibition of nuclear weapons development, nuclear fuel reprocessing or the application of IAEA safeguards) do not have a time limit.

The absurdity of sanctions being imposed upon a state for doing what it is not doing is only matched by the absurdity of what it hopes to achieve, regime change. That is supposed to occur because “the people” will supposedly think that a primary cause of their economic woes, the US, by imposing sanctions are really their friends. There may be cases where this strategy has worked, but off the top of my head I cannot think of them. What is far more common is that the US then gets caught up in fantasies of its own making about some genuinely popular leader of a government in waiting that is pushed by the media.

This is the line being pushed about Alexei Navalny, the subject of another book by Baud, The Navalny Case: Conspiracy to Serve Foreign Policy. Navalny is an oligarch who had received five year suspended sentence for engaging in a scam with his brother (who went to prison for 3 and ½ years) that involved sweeping up state companies at a pittance and then making a killing by (illegally) selling them privately, the most notable of which was the cosmetic company Yves Rocheter. Reading about Navalny in the West today one gets the impression he is a saintly victim and bastion of democracy, when he is just another profiteer operating a network of accounting trails and shelf companies concealing illegal activities. For some reason, the kind of fraud that everyone in the West accepts as fraud does not count as fraud for Western journalists and officials if perpetrated in Russia. It is amazing just what location does to someone. We all know now that a Nazi is not a Nazi, if he is a Nazi in Ukraine.

Likewise Navalny’s xenophobic and racist involvement in the far right “Russian March” has no impact upon him being held up as the liberal alternative to dictator Putin. Nor does the fact that his popularity rating with Russians hovers around the 1 percent mark—a complete irrelevancy for the Western media. What really matters is what is ostensibly his most important credential, viz., he is yet another example of mad Vlad’s poisoning escapades—which seem to convince everybody, except anybody who actually investigates them, and discovers, as is the case in this instance, the whole story is yet one more concoction by British intelligence agencies. Anyone wanting more details about Navalny’s “poisoning” should read chapter 4 of Baud’s Navalny book. For my part, I would really like to know how much Russian mafia/oligarch money makes its way into the British secret service. Our journalists, though, will not report this because they will never receive intelligence briefings about such national secrets.

Sometimes it is not just the nefariousness of the fake news that astounds one about the fakery the US is willing to engage in to try and bring about regime change but the sheer stupidity of the claims, that can be uncovered almost instantly. That is certainly the case with Juan Guaidó’s claim to be president of Venzeuela. One does not need to be a great fan of Chávez or Maduro to see that the US interest in Venezuelan democracy has much to do with oil, and that the support shown for Guaidó comes straight out of Keystone casting who were responsible for those Kops who bear such a striking resemblance to US neo-cons. The recognition of Guaidó as President of Venezuela, by Mike Pence and Donald Trump, though, made any electoral shenanigans that Maduro and his cronies might have been up to mere child’s play, because while Maduro is not universally beloved, he does a have a strong enough support base (as do pretty well all socialists in Latin America). But there was not even the need to have a skerrick of electoral legitimacy for declaring Guaidó to be President. Indeed, as Baud points out, the day after his self-proclamation as President of Venezuela more than “80% of the population had never heard of him.”

Apart from hardly anyone knowing who is Guaidó is victim to another bit of reality that his Western enablers either don’t know or don’t care about, viz. the opposition in Venezuela, which may amount to some half of the country, is not unified into a common program or political spearhead. Whether Maduro should be popular is one thing, but he is popular is another, and, unlike Guaidó, the people of Venezuela at least know who he is.

Baud also recounts the comical spectacle of February 2019 when Guaidó “had called for a million” volunteers to distribute aid at the Colombian border, and a concert organized by Richard Branson was supposed to attract 250,000 spectators—to which Maduro responded by having a concert of his own. (Why one might ask would Richard Branson, the very vocal supporter of the Ukraine war, the great supporter of a global energy renewable reset ever on the search for the right minerals and materials to keep his aviation industry afloat, be meddling in Venezuelan politics ?) In any case, on the big day “there were only a few hundred activists on the Tienditas Bridge, and the concert attracted only about 20,000 people.” But it gets better, the money collected by Branson and the funds from international organizations “had been squandered by Juan Guaidó’s confidants in hotels, luxury clothes, and with prostitutes.” You have to love the Latino crooks, they really get their priorities right—party, party, party all night long!

This, though, was a mere prelude to an even more burlesque piece of political theatre involving Guaidó and his political handlers—the April 2019 coup, “the final phase of operation freedom;” a call for a mass insurrection no less. Again Baud recounts the US led coup that turns out to be one more comic caper of the Keystone variety:

On 30 April 2019, there are two rallies in Caracas: one by supporters of Juan Guaidó and one by supporters of the government; but the international media only picks up on the opposition demonstration. The repeated announcement of the possible defection of high-ranking military personnel had encouraged insurgents to try to enter the La Carlota military base in Caracas to rally the armed forces. CNN reporter Jake Tapper tweets that the government military is firing on the crowd. Problem: he uses photos of pro-Guaidó soldiers, clearly recognisable by their blue armbands! The media is playing a loop of images of armoured national guard vehicles ramming into the demonstrators. This could be an outbreak of violence, as we have seen elsewhere in the world; but no one mentions that Guaidó supporters stole identical vehicles the same morning and that they could have used them to stir up tension. In fact, we don’t know anything about it, but no media outlet is in any doubt.

As USA Today reported, “as the hours dragged on, opposition leader Juan Guaidó stood alone on a highway overpass with the same small cadre of soldiers with whom he launched a bold effort to spark a military uprising.”

In the hands of USA Today this looks more Hamlet than Malvolio or Buster Keaton. But it is a stunning indictment of the utter inability of the US to find competent friends to get the regimes it wants. But given the kind of regime the US itself is perhaps that is simply one more confirmation that what we are witnessing is an imperial power that having found itself through picking up spoils from the imperial fall out of European powers all but destroying themselves, has simply over reached itself, in part by failing to fathom and cultivate what kind of resources were needed to live up to its promise of being the global defender of a way of life in which freedom and initiative would ignite new achievements of the human spirit—that proved to be too hard, though, which is why they turned to the emancipation lot that now flies their flags.

Empires are nothing if not great sacrificial alters requiring serious priests, warriors, and the breeding of generations who themselves are made for sacrifice, and not simply for their own indulgence. Once the ruling class succumbs to indulgence it’s Goodnight Irene—get back into the darkness. Every political philosopher worth anything has warned against the dangers of indulgence, and the US went from a generation of greats to a generation of indulgent brats in the time it took to say Dr. Spock. None can doubt the economic power of the US at its height, but as far as empires go in the annals of history, it is the equivalent of a three minute chart topping pop song.

In any case, the fiasco of Guaidó is but a symptom of US incompetence compounded by relentless pursuing policies that are supposed to be in the national interest but keep on generating ever greater enmity. It might well be that there are better ways to run the economy than Maduro’s socialism, but the spirit of enterprise is not helped by out and out corruption combing international and national players who find loopholes for escaping taxes to pay for developmental infrastructure and social capital. The economic choices of South American governments cannot be separated from ruling class, landed and military economic interests, cooperating with foreign capital garnering its interests with military and police brutality. The class polarisations in Central and South America have deep historical rooted.

Those class conditions when combined with Cold War, and US interference—from the supply of weapons and training to coups, and the propping up of regimes with death squads—in the region, plus the political clout of cartels go someway to explaining why socialism seems to many to be a better option than what they have. A figure like Chávez is the product of a society that has a very different developmental trajectory to Western Europe, North America or Australasia. Baud is right to point to the economic success of Chávez’s nationalisation strategy :

A period of growth followed that no previous government had achieved. The gross national product per capita, which had stagnated between $1,000 and $4,000 for decades, rose to $13,500 in 2010. Poverty is reduced from 70.8% (1996) to 21% (2010), while extreme poverty falls from 40% (1996) to 7.3% (2010).”

But I am less sure than Baud that this strategy did not also come with economic problems down the road, much like Cuba’s initial successes may have not helped move beyond the jolt that was needed. For while US sanctions have made matters worse, I am not convinced that the imposition of one party rule over a nation’s economy and the obstacles for national capital investment have not created major problems. This is a big issue, but creating a political framework for a successful economy strikes me as the most difficult balancing act which ideological thinking does not help. But the cultivation of an educated political elite who can veer between the pernicious interests of global capital and the more locally brewed style of corruptions is an endless challenge, one which Western market democracies once seemed to rise to, but no longer. Nevertheless, what Baud notes immediately following the points about its economic success are indisputable:

In the last decade of the 20th century, the US was absorbed in the aftermath of the Gulf War (1991) and ‘9/11’, with a foreign policy focused on the Middle East and North Africa. Apart from a coup d’état that temporarily overthrew Chávez in 2002, the United States are abandoning the subcontinent, which is tilting almost entirely to the left in Venezuela’s wake: Chile (March 2000), Brazil (January 2003), Argentina (May 2003), Bolivia (January 2006), Ecuador (January 2007), Paraguay (August 2008), Uruguay (March 2010) and Peru (July 2011). One of the consequences of this shift to the left, dubbed the “pink tide,” has been the arrival of other players, such as China, which is taking advantage of this “vacuum” to aggressively move into the continent.

Note the last sentence. Of course empires are rivals—and I cannot help but see the Belt and Road Initiative as anything other than an imperial initiative. But it is a far superior initiative than what has been displayed by the countless decades of US economic and military meddling in Latin America which has done nothing so much as make it a hated country. One could respond with the question, if it is hated, why are so many Latinos flooding the borders? But the hopes of economic advancement, and opportunities behind the mass migration, not to mention the extent of criminal migration and the drug/human/ and child trafficking, do not automatically translate into a desire to embrace the constitution or values of the host country. Many who flood the border come carrying the flag of the country they are leaving behind. And it is very easy to justify breaking the law to enter into a country whose wealth, whether rightly or wrongly, is widely seen as owing a lot to the plunder and political interference in their own country. None can dispute the fact, though, that the existence of the cartels is directly related to the demand for drugs coming from North America, and hence has created unliveable conditions for those wanting to escape from the hellish concoction fueled by drug wars and drug lords.

Further, given that there are no values in the United States sufficiently robust to galvanize civic unity amongst the larger population—even the flag and national anthem are seen as racist by many of the pedagogical class—who could blame those clambering to enter the USA from its southern “border” for simply wanting to take what they can get? Which is exactly what the ruling class of the US teaches, albeit the getting is wrapped up in identity, being a Latino suffices to make one a client for those taking the progressive road to political power. In any case, the ruling class in the United States (using its pedagogical wing) sees the entire globe rather than its particular portion of it, as its rightful asset, which is why its journalists and academics speak incessantly about how the world should be, as if they had the knowledge and the right to run it. Their entitled and extremely grand aspirations, though, fail to take into account that it is highly likely in the not too distant future, possibly in my life time, that the border flood may well end up in territorial (re)annexation by Mexico and the cartels, as the US collapses amidst the race wars it has been creating for itself. The greater geopolitical explosions has been igniting may also ignite a great racial bonfire at home. That the US has created enemies of people and regimes it need not make enemies of seems to be its stock in trade. Another great example of that is the US treatment of Syria.

As Baud points out in his chapter on Syria in Governing by Fake News, Syria had been a member of the coalition against Iraq and had deployed 1,450 troops in Desert Storm. Although Clinton had helped broker a peace process between Hafeez al-Assad and the Isreali government, Bush Jr.’s and Sharon’s governments derailed that. After 9/11 Syria had also provided information that the CIA had admitted was extremely valuable about the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany, but John Bolton, who would briefly pop up as yet another neo-con spoiler in the Trump administration, in his role as Undersecretary of State “added Syria to the axis of evil.” Syria did not join the second Iraq war, rightly seeing that it would only exacerbate the problem of jihadism in the region, though it would have to bear the brunt of some 1 ½ million Iraqi Sunni refugees. In a country where the ruling elite has a leader from a minority Islamic sect, which is generally hated even more than Shiites by sectarian Sunni jihadists, the Alawites, which make up some 13 percent of the Syrian population, this was one more existential threat that the Assad regime had to face and which was primarily a US creation.

It does seem that while the US understands the existential threat due to surrounding demographics that confronts Israel, in the case of Syria, that is simply an opportunity to be used. And it was used. But rather than achieving any greater concord in the region, it was used for contributing to even greater chaos which would eventually create the opportunity for Islamic State. While nature also lent a hand—a drought that went for some five years from 2005, so did other political events, such as the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri which, with no credible evidence, was blamed on Syria, though as Baud rightly points out his death left Israel as the major beneficiary of the aftermath of the political vacuum it created in Lebanon. And, as Baud also notes, the regional break up of Syria has been a long term goal to enhance Israel geopolitical strategic advantage as laid out by the Yinon Plan in 1982 published by the World Zionist Organisation. It has also figured in long term US plans, as is evident from a CIA memo of 1986 which states that “American interests would be best served by a Sunni regime, controlled by moderates guided by business.”

Although Baud does not say this, it is noteworthy how the US government and reporters love bandying around the vacuous word “moderate” when dealing with value differences they have no idea of how to address. Under Obama the Muslim Brotherhood were rebadged as moderates, which is clearly nonsense if one takes into account their long term strategic political objectives, as say laid out in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, or any of the official declarations which call for a world living under Islam. The fact is that the differences between the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and even Islamic State is one of the constituency of its appeal, the tactic deployed, and the theological emphasis—Muslim Brotherhood is seen as a sell-out for being willing to use the political mechanisms available to it to be rid of the plague of sins which so horrified Qutb when he visited the West, while Islamic State’s hatred of the Shia and even Sunnis who did not wish to join them in the new caliphate, or who believed it had no theological legitimacy. While Islamic State’s (videod) beheadings are extremely shocking—it is difficult to argue that the use of bombs and assassination, or that anything about a world caliphate which would require non-Muslims being Dhimmis is moderate. Words like “extremist” and “moderate” are mobile classifiers—thus now an extremist is someone in the US who thinks one’s sexual organs are a biological not a voluntary condition—which tell us far more about the people using them than the person or group classified as such. And what is pertinent here is that a political program that is faith based and has local and traditional roots and tentacles is not something that CIA or US imperial meddling can simply modulate to suit its interests. Peace can only exist when there is a recognition of implacable or non-negotiable differences and a search by the different parties takes place so that common objectives might be found in some areas, and that the no-go areas be understood as such. This is what the West has done with its Middle Eastern allies, but refuses to do with Iran and Syria, both of which it absurdly portrays as more “extremist” countries that need to undergo regime change so they can join the good guys.

The US and West more generally has suffered under the massive delusion, perhaps nowhere more conspicuous than in its inane reading of the events taking place in the Arab world in 2011 as a democratic uprising of a liberal sort. In any case Syria offered opportunities for potential cooperation with Western powers because of the precarious nature of the leadership and the country’s demographics, but the West had no interest in pursuing those opportunities. Indeed it seems that the opportunities it and other supporters of the Syrian opposition happen to focus upon are energy related. More specifically gas pipeline-related. This summary from Lauren von Bernuth in 2017 is apposite:

Two competing oil pipelines vying to run through Syria. Both pipelines seek to connect the largest natural gas field in the world, located 3000 meters below the floor of the Persian Gulf, to … Europe. Qatar owns roughly two-thirds of the mineral rights to the Persian Gulf gas field and Iran owns the other one third. One pipeline starts in Qatar and runs through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey into Europe… The other pipeline runs from Iran through Iraq and Syria and into the Mediterranean Sea…The first pipeline proposed to Assad was the Qatar pipeline and he rejected the proposal. Assad then later approved the Iranian pipeline, which was expected to be completed in 2016, but the Syrian war disrupted that. Now let’s look at the Syrian war: Russia and Iran are supporting Assad, while the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Turkey are supporting the rebels. So the Qatar pipeline was rejected by Assad and it just so happens that the countries with a vested interest in that pipeline are supporting the rebels.

But back to Baud, the US had been funding opposition groups and clandestine activities since 2005—2006 to bring down the al-Assad government:

In 2006 the US government began funding the Justice and Development Movement (JDM), an opposition organisation inside and outside Syria. Between 2006 and 2010, the US spends $6.3 million to fund Barada TV, a TV channel designed to spread anti-regime news, and another $6 million is used to train Syrian journalists and activists. Based in London, it began broadcasting messages in support of an overthrow of the regime in April 2009. It will play a key role in 2011 through its coverage of the riots at the start of the revolution and its messages designed to inflame public opinion by disseminating false information about the reaction of Syrian law enforcement agencies, relayed by the Western media.

The so-called Arab Spring was a media event, an event that was partly due to protests occurring simultaneously in the region, albeit for different objectives. Western reporters were not interested in local grievances nor the local contours of sectarian conflicts and alliances, nor the precarious balances of power and opposition that the various ruling elites in the region have to grapple with. Like bulls in a China shop, Western journalists continued to do what they have largely been trained to do: act as a cheer and jeer squad on the basis of the propaganda they picked up from their media friends, who know as little as they do, and their mostly useless education. For them it was simply a matter of cheering on what they saw as a nascent liberal world order that they would have freely adopted had it not been oppressed by homophobia, racism, cis-genderist persecution, white supremacy, anti-feminism, imperialism, and Islamophobia, and tyrannical pronouns. The difference between liberal progressive la-la-land and neo-con la-la-land has nothing to do with genuine conceptual analytics, but much rather has to do with their preferred style of imperialism. That and the respective fantasies they like to tell each other in their respective grandiosely stupid conversations about how they will make the world. In any case Obama’s Arab Spring was simply a variant of the Bush dogma that the Arabs all wanted to live in democratic states and all that needed to be done was for the people to get together and overthrow the non-democracies under which they live—cut to Thunderclap Newman singing “We just got to get it together cause the revolution‘s here” and you get a good idea of the memory bank of the mental capacity of the more stately members of the Western ruling class today.

The fabricators of this nonsense were the kind of people who simply could not understand how difficult it is to keep peace in lands where sectarian differences affect almost every area of life, which is also why the political powers of the region would be either monarchs, or military dictators, and that eliminating strong men like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi would not open up more liberal, let alone more stable regimes with the people all merrily singing “We are the World.” Had the US had its way, Assad, would have had a fate similar to Gaddafi, and Syria would have come out of it like Libya. Surprise, surprise, Assad did not like that particular script. In any case, Libyan rebels linked up with Syrian rebels to fuel a civil war, in which the rebels mainly consisted of foreigners—which is to say it was a funny kind of civil war.

Although the Western media were spinning stories which would make Assad’s government seem like a total hell-hole—Baud compares the response of the Syrian government to ongoing Kurdish demonstrations between 2005 and 2009 to that of French authorities to the Yellow Vests in France—and while there were sectarian discontents with historical roots going back at least siege of the city of Hamah in 1982—where thousands, estimates range from five to forty thousand—died, which were preceded by the events involving the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in the 1970s—the protests against Assad were never going to bring down the Assad government. There was discontent but not insurrection—though to appreciate this differentiates requires the reader not to have accepted the super-updated definition of an insurrection as whatever journalists and the uni-party say it is. Moreover, the army which was predominantly Sunni was mostly loyal to Assad. That the dissident faction in the Syrian Army were mainly Muslim Brotherhood is part of the reason why the US had rebranded the Muslim Brotherhood as moderate. And while the Assad government is Ba’athist and a carry-over from the Arab nationalism of the mid 20th century, its constitution is not strictly secular, its head of state must be a Muslim, and it incorporates elements of Islamic law into its judicial system.

Assad himself is urbane and sophisticated (as is his well-educated wife), and I mean urbane in the best sense—a doctor by training, who has only been turned into a tyrant by a media happy to villainize anyone they are paid to. But he has had to work with the social values and priorities that operate in Syria. Given the forces his government has had to balance, that there would be discontentment is inevitable. But the fact is that some 70% of the Syrian Population (according to independent surveys recognized by NATO!) support Assad.

In the West the media misrepresents the scale of discontent by passing off fabricated examples. Thus, for example, a massacre of 260 civilians was reported to have occurred in Homs—but that number seems to have no definitive basis—and by the time the BBC reported it that number had become 55 deaths. Some people definitely died. But who were they, and who killed them? Baud points out that it is most likely that the dead were pro-government Christians killed by anti-government militia.

Another piece of news fakery was in 2012 when a BBC journalist tweeted that the Syrian air force was bombing civilians in East Aleppo with Russian “MiGs.” Except—the planes were not MiGs, but Su-24s or Aero L-39s which don’t carry bombs. And, and in any case, civilians were not bombed. Yet another false massacre report was in Al-Houla. And as in the previous example from Homs, the numbers shift around, so that as one zooms in on the facts they seem to evaporate, or turn into their opposite. Franceinfo repeated information about this massacre from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a highfalutin name for a Sunni Islamist opponent of the Syrian regime operating out of a London flat who is on the Saudi and Qatari pay roll (interesting isn’t it what alliances take place between enemies when money is involved). But, says Baud: “we see practically nothing: no place, no person, no weapon or date is identified. Eventually a journalist from Germany’s FAZ discovered that there were people killed in Al-Houla, and they were Shia converts, who had been knifed, not killed by heavy weapons, which suggests that it was not the Syrian army but opposition rebels. That there is the problem of reliability about the numbers of victims in the conflict, as well as who the victims really are, owes much to the fact that most of the information about the conflict comes from this guy in the London flat.

Of all the whoppers told in the Western press and governments about Syria, the biggest would have to be that Islamic State was somehow the creation of al-Assad. Anyone who knows anything about Assad and Islamic State would know just how crazy this is, but that was what the French Minister of Foreign Affairs was saying in 2014, and it was an idea repeated by the French philosopher Bernard-Henry Lévy, who has become a leading philosophical apologist for the US/ European imperial axis. This particular conspiracy theory ignores the most salient and disturbing fact that Western alliance of the French, British, and French and the Turkish governments and special services have, commencing with Muslim Brotherhood and Libyans mentioned above, armed and trained Islamists in their war against Syria, and that:

The militarisation of the Syrian revolution by the West forced the government to concentrate its forces in the west of the country. The result was a security vacuum in the east, which allowed the joining of Iraqi and Syrian Islamist forces, and the transformation of the ‘Islamic State in Iraq’ into the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’. A dynamic map of the Syrian war shows that the Islamic State has grown from Iraq and the Turkish border and has established itself on Syrian territory in the wake of armed groups, such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), supported by France and the United States.

Finally, while Baud’s analysis of what has occurred in Syria contains far more examples, I will conclude his discussion of Syria (and he has much, much more to say) with his discussion the white helmets, a topic that the journalist Vanessa Beeley has also covered in detail. The white helmets have a received a lot of press coverage, and they are presented as angels in human form. They were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. But given that Barack Obama, whose main claim to fame was being a black man who was the President, (lesser know was that he presided over some ten times more drone strikes than George Bush Jr.) , and that Henry Kissinger, who had been the brains behind the secret war in Cambodia that opened the way for the Khmer Rouge to take over the country, have won this prize founded by the inventor of dynamite, one might be wise to be a tad sceptical about just how peaceful they really are. Baud is sceptical:

In reality, the White Helmets only operate in areas hostile to the Syrian government and in the hands of Jabhat al-Nosrah. Numerous videos show some of its members participating in the beheading of little Abdullah Issa by militants of the Nur al-Din al-Zinki Movement, or with weapons and an Islamist flag in hand. British journalist Vanessa Beeley posted videos on YouTube showing White Helmets participating in the making of the ‘Mortars of Hell’, which project ‘barrel bombs’. Just after the recapture of East Aleppo, the young French development worker Pierre le Corf visited the White Helmets’ headquarters and noted the collusion with Jabhat al-Nosrah. This does not prevent Agnès Levallois, on France 5, from underlining the “quite remarkable” character of the organisation… which will be allied with Turkey during its October 2019 offensive against the Syrian Kurds!

In addition the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to report to parliament in 2018 that the one and half million Euros that had been given in aid to the White Helmets “was not traceable in the field and was likely to have been used to acquire weapons.”

What Baud’s book shows over and over—and with far more examples than I can recount here—is not only how absolutely unreliable the Western media is as a source of reliable information about the world events that appear in the daily news, but how time and time again it is simply a means of mis- or dis-informing the public about the truth. The process of disinformation has one overall objective—to create broad base support for military and intelligence interventions that serve the larger game plan of the US/ European imperial alliance. Were the players not such a bunch of duds and sad-sacks, who think they are super educated and have fine tastes in all the stuff they can get their mits on, were the outcomes ones in which the world was more peaceable and a better place because tyrants were now no longer amongst us, instead of a place where the Western Axis of evil tyrannically presides over its own internal chaos and spreads even more chaos to regions already caught up in their own conflicts, then one might wish to ignore books like Baud’s.

But all of the events discussed in Baud’s books are part of the long trail, which to be sure goes back much further than the end of the Cold War, but at least in the Cold War, the Soviets were an imperial power that were even worse on so many fronts than the US/ Western imperium—I know that could be debated, but I think the numbers stack up that way. But that is now irrelevant. For the US/ Western alliance was completely unprepared for what it would do after the Cold War ended, except more of the same. So they decided to keep on targeting Russia, adopting the narrative that it was just like the USSR, except there was a massive pile of wealth to be made.

It certainly did not take long for the US con-men to make their way into Russia and join in the asset stripping operation. Nor did it take long for US intelligence to try and destroy the more stable post-Yeltsin government that Putin was creating amidst a war, and terrorists bombing civilians, and organized criminals seizing the nation’s energy and commanding the information flow, after moving on from the more mundane operation of taking people’s apartments at gun point. Instead of the victor of the Cold War building a peace, it simply proceeded to build more wars.

3. Baud’s Operation Z And What the Mainstream Media Never Told You

Baud’s Governing by Fake News presents an excellent case of the diabolical fabrications and calculations that have step by step led to where we are today. And that is to a global war, partly concealed by the fact it is a proxy war. His Governing by Fake News goes into many of the details leading to the war, but his Operation Z provides a comprehensive account of the events leading to the war, as well as what has been occurring since it broke out. I will simply focus upon some of the key points that Baud relates which clarifies how Ukraine has split the way it has. Russia’s “Operation Z “is in response to a civil war on its border. It is the response of a government to persecuted Ukrainians who identity with their Russian roots, who do not want to be subjected to the rule and persecution of the Kiev government, and who when given a chance have chosen to join the Russian Federation. Were Kiev to allow the de facto now also de jure, from Russia’s perspective, boundaries of Ukraine to be redrawn, and to cease being a proxy member of NATO which is funding and helping conduct this proxy war, the war could end immediately. The reason it does not is no mystery. The American/ European Union Alliance wants regime change in Russia.

Baud commences with the emotional and cultural level of perception. Everybody I talk to who has a small teaspoon worth of facts and a belly full of bile with which to make their pronouncements about the war in Ukraine and Putin—“That animal!” exclaimed a recent visitor to my house—seems oblivious to the fact that their response is extremely emotional, that it is based upon images and ‘talking points’ that are part of a larger information war against Russia. The British empire has been at war with Russia since long before the USSR existed, and the British government continues to do all in its power to ensure the entire population accept its version of what the conflict is about and who is to blame.

The USA is a relative new-comer to imperial politics, though Woodrow Wilson thought it wise to dispatch some seven thousand troops to Siberia to contain the Bolsheviks, stave off Japanese expansionism, and help the Czech legion caught up in the civil war. It was also part of the larger liberal imperial vision pushed by Wilson which left a leading place for the USA as a harbinger of a new world order. The other members of NATO all have their reasons for aligning themselves with the US/ European imperial axis. But Baud also rightly identifies the fact a number of significant Western leaders “have a family history” which gives them a dog in the fight. They include Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister, the current President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, and US Under Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland. That is quite an astonishing group of people given the power they wield.

Baud says their political action “is guided more by emotion and ideology than by reflection,” and once again he announces his faith in the power of reason, at the juncture where the only reason we see is the reason of power politics, and heritage. It would be astonishing if this were sheer coincidence that the most important Western and European leaders—and let’s not forget Hunter and, Joe’s Ukrainian connections, which to be sure are more to do with veins of money than blood—all identify with a national heritage and identity which is defined by its denial and persecution of the Russian heritage, identity and language, of those who also have been born into the same land. Though none of these people grew up there, and none of them will die for the cause they have weaponized. That cause is not simply an independent Ukraine, but a Ukraine which is weaponised against Russia, and committed to breaking up the Russian federation. Baud quotes former director of the CIA, Robert Gates’s, recollection that Dick Cheney in 1991 wanted the Soviet collapse to be an occasion for the dismemberment not only of the Russian empire but itself. Moreover, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was accompanied with promises that there would be no NATO expansion Eastward. This has been a point repeatedly made by Russia, and it was confirmed by Robert Gates (Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser from 1989-1991) in 2000—now, of course, denied by Western propagandists.

There was also the problem of minority rights for ethnic Russians in former Soviet countries such as Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and of course Ukraine. It is precisely because of the Russian ethnic minorities in these countries and their mistreatment that these countries are fearful of Russian invasion. The fears are strongly enough felt. But Baud rightly points out that while it suits Western interests to publicly condemn China’s treatments of the Uighurs, allies who persecute Russians are not chastised. And it was the extent of that persecution—not just cultural attacks, but threats and acts of ethnic cleansing—that would lead to the separatist regions in the Donbas. This was all in the penumbra and aftermath of the Maidan of 2014 that so misleadingly reported in the West, as if almost the entire country supported ousting a legitimately elected president because he did not want to proceed with moving unequivocally to closer ties with the EU.

While it is understandable why Western urban Ukrainians were not happy with the decision of a President most of them did not want, a sympathetic understanding of the complexity of the political demography of Ukrainian society played no part in either Western interference or reportage. Isolated voices of formerly respected journalist Robert Parry and Soviet specialist Stephen Cohen were simply smothered or denounced by the mainstream pushing ahead with its blatant disregard of any facts that told a more complex story than one that could be supported by photo-ops of (nefarious) members of the Ukrainian resistance with John McCain and Victoria Nuland. The role of Ultra-nationalists and the foreign volunteers who joined in the attack upon the ethnically impure to build a more racially pure Europe was also not part of any official story. To be sure this was not the swamp out of which Zelensky arose—his was the private-media oligarchically built swamp.

In discussing the ultra-ethnic nationalists and neo-Nazis Baud introduces nuances which give a clearer picture of the sentiments of Ukrainian nationalists of today and of yesterday, and the mass murder of Jews that Ukrainian national hero Stepan Bandera engaged in. He points out:

The apparent ambiguity about the collaboration between Ukrainian nationalists and the Third Reich—especially in the massacre of Jewish civilians in the Ukraine—is probably explained by the fact that our view emphasises the Jewish character of the victims, whereas the Ukrainians of the time saw them as partisans who threatened the German rear in areas with a largely Jewish population. All this does not detract from the criminal nature of these organised massacres, but it could explain that they were not dictated by anti-Semitism, but by the desire for reprisals. This is not much better, but it explains the logic. In other words, there is a difference between Ukrainian militants and the Nazis of the Third Reich. This is reflected in the names “neo-Nazis” or “Ukrainian-Nazis.”

But anti-Semitism runs deep amongst Ukrainian nationalists, and there are reasons for it, which are closely bound up with the hatred felt toward the Soviet Union:

The “founding” element of Ukrainian antisemitism is the “Holodomor” (holod: hunger; mor: plague). It is believed to have caused between 4 million and 7 million deaths in 1932-33 and is considered in Ukraine to be genocide, often compared to the Jewish ‘holocaust’. Despite its magnitude, which makes it perhaps the largest massacre in history, it remains largely ignored in the West, and its character as ‘genocide’ is disputed, in part to challenge the presence of antisemitism in Ukraine. Whatever the reality, the over-representation of Jews in the Communist Party leadership and among the NKVD cadres has left the Ukrainian imagination with the feeling that they orchestrated the Holodomor. The result is a deep-seated hatred that targets both the Moscow leadership and the Jews. In 2021, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Ukrainian far right was demanding an apology from Israel for the Holodomor and the crimes of communism. Today, although not a ‘doctrine’, violent antisemitism is growing alarmingly in Ukraine.

I will not repeat points I have made in other essays in this magazine about the war about Azov and other ultra-right militias in Ukraine and their role in the larger political machinations in Ukraine which have led to the persecutions of those who ethnically identify with Russia and not with the post 2014 Ukraine, whose first legislative act was “the abolition of 2012 Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law, which established the Russian language as an official language on a par with Ukrainian.” This sparked off the rebellions in the South, which led the government to respond by sending in troops, which in turn generated the formation of a separatist political movement needing to militarise itself against the attacks directed at them. As Baud notes:

The army was largely composed of Russian speakers, who were torn between their duty as soldiers and their loyalty to their community, whose demands they shared. The repression of the demonstrations was not carried out willingly by the soldiers, who then tried to escape recruitment, committed suicide at the front or deserted to the rebels. The task of the armed forces is virtually impossible. Moreover, the Ukrainian army, which has been made up of professionals since 2013, does not have enough manpower to respond to the situation. It is undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoys the support of the population. According to a British Home Office report, during the March-April 2014 recall of reservists, 70% did not show up for the first session, 80% for the second, 90% for the third and 95% for the fourth. On 1 May 2014, the new government ordered the conscription of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 in all parts of the country, including the southern regions. Desertions to the rebel regions are becoming increasingly common. The problem became so serious that the Ukrainian parliament passed a law allowing officers to use their weapons against their men if they tried to desert. In October-November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the “Autumn 2017” recall campaign. This is without counting suicides and desertions (often to the benefit of autonomists), which reach up to 30% of the workforce in the ATO area. Young Ukrainians refuse to fight in the Donbass and prefer to emigrate, thus contributing to the country’s demographic deficit.

The vacuum created in the army by a combination of the refusal to fight one’s ethnic kin, desertion, and suicide opened the way for formally incorporating the ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi militias into the government forces. But those forces had played a crucial part in the Maidan, and they were not going to simply vanish into the background because the electorate wanted less tattooed, and fiercely pugnacious looking politicians. The Maidan had also opened the country to far right foreign volunteers seeing this conflict as an opportunity to build a racially pure white land not sullied by Slav, or Muslim bloodlines. There were also Russian orthodox and Serbian nationalists fighting alongside the republican separatists. The Western Press would happily note the presence of the latter, whilst, with the occasional exception, ignoring the explosion of neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist militias, beating up and killing Russo-centric-phile Ukrainians. The new government were happy enough for these thugs to go about their business as it concerned himself with a socio-economic and political lunge Westward accompanied by its punitive actions against those in the South/ East who were reacting to being treated as second class “citizens.” Though the Western press completely ignored this. Hence when Putin made eliminating the Nazi element in Ukrainians an objective of “Operation Z,” it was greeted with a combination of incredulity and derision by journalists who had got up to speed by reading intel briefs and each other’s propaganda.

There would be some 14000 victims in the war waged by Ukraine in the Donbass from 2014. Baud notes that UN reports 80% of civilian casualties came from Ukrainian strikes, and in the period from October 1 to March 30 2020 almost 85% of civilian casualties were from Ukrainian artillery shelling. The Western media also largely ignored all of this, and went with the story that all of a sudden Vladimir Putin woke up and decided to invade a peaceful freedom loving people led by a wise man so talented he once played piano on tv with his balls. (Ok they mainly kept silent about that particular skill-set that had been witnessed by everyone with a tv in Ukraine.)

The one story about the Donbas that Western media had been running with was a complete fabrication. It had involved disinformation being spread in a resolution by the European Union Parliament relaying unverified reports from Polish intelligence sources referring to “direct military intervention,” ceasefire violations “mainly by regular Russian troops” and claims that Russia has “increased its military presence on Ukrainian territory.” The Ukrainian Prime Minister Poroshenko would claim in the following year that Russia had sent 200,000 troops to Ukraine. A few months later he would claim to the UN General assembly that Ukrainians were having to fight heavily armed Russian soldiers. There were, so he said, some 75 Russian military units operating in Ukraine. Poroshenko’s reputation as an inveterate liar as well as a crook mattered little to those wanting to spread these stories, even though in the same time span other Ukrainian officials including the head of the Ukrainian General Staff and the head of the Security Service found no evidence to support these claims. It was true that some 50 or so young Russians had been captured who had come to fight in the Donbas.

In 2018 Alexander Hug, Deputy Head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Observer Mission concede that OSCE has made no observations confirming the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine.

Another story that went under the radar was the role of the West in pushing for reconquering the autonomous republics through economic incentives. As Baud notes:

In May 2014, the International Monetary Fund warned Ukraine that it would not get its $17 billion loan if it did not regain control of the east of the country: If the central government loses effective control of the East, the programme will have to be rethought. This is what is pushing Kiev to relaunch its offensive against the Donbass. Ukraine receives a first tranche just after the events in Odessa. There is therefore international pressure to push Ukraine to re-establish its sovereignty over the entire territory.
From the initial coup which had been abled and abetted by the CIA and US government officials to the civil war encouraged by IMF pressure, to the lies about Russian troops occupying the Donbas back in 2014 the fabrications surrounding the US all conspire to build the case of Russian aggression. The great value of Baud’s book is that it provides a one stop shop for refuting these lies. And it is particularly good at debunking the big lie which, to the mis-and dis-informed imbibers of fake news, is the definitive proof of Russia’s long term plot for Ukrainian conquest. The big lie, of course, is that Russia conquered Crimea, and Crimea now suffers under the Russian jackboot, which is why acts of Ukrainian sabotage in Crimea are treated as acts of liberation, the likes of which take us back to the French resistance in occupied Paris.

Baud’s debunking of the Crimea lies start with UN Resolution 68/262 which declared the annexation of Crimea to be illegal. The Resolution took its “legal” point of departure from the Budapest Treaty of 1994 guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine, which thus renders invalid the Crimean referendum in 2014 that overwhelmingly voted to join the Russian Federation, so it could be relieved from Ukrainian ethnic-nationalist persecution.

The first problem with US Resolution 68/262 is that it ignores the fact that Crimeans had on a number of previous occasions expressed their desire to be ruled by Moscow. Baud also points out that the initial transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 had no legal basis: it had not been approved by the Supreme Soviet of the USST, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic or the Supreme Soviet Republic of the Republic of Ukraine. Like so much else to do with the war, the mismatch between a war that is supposed to be a water tight case of legal violation, and the lack of a legal basis for Ukrainian possession of Crimea is something that has never been discussed, as far as I know, in the Western media. The transference was an act of fiat by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, i.e. its transfer was a dictatorial decree by Khrushchev. The irony that the great defenders of democracy against a(n elected) Russian President with a support rating (confirmed by independent sources) far surpassing any Western leader appeal to an act by a (non-elected) Soviet President who was a dictator that had neither the modicum of constitutional support that existed in the USSR nor popular support from a people who had never identified as Ukrainian is only matched by the same people who accuse all their enemies, including Trump and Putin, of being just like Hitler. But what should one expect from people defending a regime which has used, and gone along with the butchery of neo-Nazis against their ethnic enemies? How anyone outside the West can believe anything anymore the West says would be a mystery were it not for the fact that—with very few exceptions—they don’t.

As the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the people of Crimea were asked in a referendum in 1991, whether they wanted to be administered by Moscow or stay with Kiev, 93.6% went with Moscow. Only people who ignore Crimea’s history would be surprised by this fact. That referendum led to the brief restoration of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea, and this was essentially ratified by Ukraine who also voted in a referendum for the continuation of the USSR in 1991. The Donbas, by the way, is politically conspicuous by its lingering pro-Soviet sentiments. Some months later—in December 1991—Ukrainians held a referendum for independence from the Soviet Union, and in February of the next year the Crimean parliament declared its independence. Some two years later, in December 1994, Ukraine did a deal with Russia—it would surrender its nuclear weapons from its Soviet days in exchange for “security, independence and territorial integrity.”

At this stage, though, Crimea no longer considered itself legally a part of Ukraine. To emphasise the point: this was even prior to the persecution that led to the referendum after the Maidan. In the 1990s, in the eyes of the people of Crimea, it was not the Russians but the Ukrainians who had acted aggressively and illegally. That was in March 1995 when the Ukrainian government “abolished the Crimean constitution by authority, sent in its special forces to forcibly remove Yuri Mechkov, president of Crimea, and de facto annexed the Republic of Crimea.” The response in Crimea was to create another constitution reinstating the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Wanting to placate the situation, after it was ratified by the Crimean parliament, it was confirmed by the Ukrainian Parliament in December 1998.

Ukraine had also signed a guarantee offering protection “of the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious originality of national minorities on their territories.” After the coup and the repealing of the law on official languages, the Kiev regime had destroyed all semblance of having any legitimate claims over what the people of Crimea could not do. None of these intricacies were widely, if ever, reported in the West when Crimeans voted to become part of the Russian federation. Nor were the large scale demonstrations taking place in Crimea that mirrored what was going on in the Donbas, in response to the abolition of the Official Languages Act, given much cover by the Western press. As was also the case in the Donbas the solution of sending in armed forces to quell the protests triggered mass disobedience in the ranks of the Ukrainian army—some 20,000 out of 22,000 military personnel (and the majority of the army in Crimea identified as Russian). There were also mass defections among the police. Had this been in Venezuela the media would have been swarming the place. But information fakery and brainwashing are as much acts of omission as well as commission.

Those journalists who went on the ground to report the events taking place in Crimea and the Donbas are now all viewed as Putin stooges, traitors and criminals in the West, and are on Ukrainian kill lists. Gonzalo Lire was arrested (for the second time) a month or so ago and no more has been heard of him. Some have had their assets frozen. Such is the free world today. And the freedom is as fake as it is precarious.

The Western project is now as fake as the news it supplies about the war, and the war is conducted purely along the lines of fake moral principles. A fake war hero leading a fake democracy is fawned over by celebrities oozing fake care and fake morals all holding fake beliefs picked up from fake news cobbled together by fakes posing as journalists. The weapons are real and so are the bodies though the public is smothered in fake news, and endless jabber and talking points and descriptions of how the war is going—Putin is dying, is dead, is a hologram already, and Russia has lost and just keeps losing more and more each day—Russia is completely broke—and the sooner it wakes up to itself and accepts its own demise then the world will live as one, just like John Lennon’s ditty predicted. Meanwhile the US/ European hegemonic world order is as dedicated to stupefying the human race as it is a neo-feudal order in which every aspect of life is to be calculated and controlled. Sure the leaders of this ghastly future are a bunch of brainless fakes—their masters are cunning and have real wealth, but their souls are hollow and the world they are making is one vast fakedom. But anyone who says this is a conspiracy theorist spreading disinformation.

There are many reasons why the West now stands for what it stands for. The destruction of its cultural roots is one large part of the story. In the final part of this essay I will explore the role played in the philosophical attack upon Christian culture as it helped lay the basis for the kind of technocratic dehumanised world we have become.

Read Part 1 and Part 3.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


Featured: Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista (“Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst”), by Remedios Varo; painted in 1960.


What Conspiracy? On the Nefarious Purpose, Means and Ideas of Globalist Imperialism

Read Part 2 and Part 3.

Intelligence and the Global Imperialist Purpose of Disinformation, and Malformation

This is the first part of an essay in three parts. The second part is on the disinformation spread by the intelligence agencies and media of the US / European Alliance to destroy any nations that oppose their hegemony and the new world they are pushing for. It is also a ‘review’ of two books by Jacques Baud, Governing By Fake News: International Conflict: 30 Years of Fake News Used by Western Countries and Operation Z. The third part is a philosophical critique of the bad ideas that were the seeds of the modern metaphysical project that was the launching pad for the Enlightenment and the technocratic view of the world that accompanies it.

Introduction

The supporters of the world in which the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex, the Tech Industrial Complex, the Media Industrial Complex, the Censorship Industrial Complex, the Military Industrial Complex, the Mass Killing of the Unborn Industrial Complex, The Mass Mutation of Children Industrial Complex, the Mass Brainwashing and Infantilizing of Minds through Entertainment, Media and Academic Complexes, the Mass Use of Sport for the Political Agenda Complex, and the Mass Religious Industrial Complex, and so forth believe that what they are doing is achieving human progress and emancipation, while its enemies are brainwashed, haters, bigots, and conspiracy theorists, who must be set straight, silenced, or reduced to penury, or imprisoned.

Yet they hate with little or no understanding of what the criticisms against them are (i.e., they really are bigots) and they readily denounce those who criticize them as the dupes of conspirators such as Vladimir Putin or QAnon, or white supremacists—allying a world historic figure (like him or not Putin is undeniably that) engaging in a geopolitical struggle for the fate of a people with lunatics in the basement or a bunch of retards, whose numbers are sizably swelled by FBI informants, at a bivouac playing with guns comes easily to the mental pygmies who see themselves as the great harbingers of what the social philosophers like to call ‘the to come’, and whose idea of thinking and building community is yelling hater, racist, homophobe or whatever two syllable word makes its way through the sludge of their brain synapses and into their vocal chords as they then proceed to vape them. Now that I have got that off my chest, let us examine what kind of criticisms of the globalist ruling class and their paid-up enablers and dupes are being regularly dismissed as “conspiracy theories.” At the same time allow me to demonstrate that the disinformation spread by our intelligence services is creating a misinformed public that is now malforming the new generation and their world.

Yes—There is a Coalition of Interests working to Create a Globalist Empire Presided over by Oligarchs and their Hired Help.

The forces that direct or enable the unipolar world view of ‘progressivist’ globalist corporatism and the US/ Western European hegemonic imperial axis (yes the EU is an empire) involves an overlapping set of contradictory interests and immediate objectives. The forces are constituted by oligarchs and global corporations, unions, NGOs and philanthropic foundations, elected politicians and radical political activists such as members of Antifa, the BLM, and Extinction Rebellion, government officials, military and intelligence officers, journalists, academics, entertainers and sportspeople, business professionals, school and even pre-school teachers, students and members of minority underclasses, amongst others. That sure sounds like a massive coalition—and it is.

But in many, even most, of these organizations it is not a matter of everyone in it agreeing with the values or designs—lots of corporate people, academics, teachers, journalists athletes (especially women in sports having to compete against biological men), may think what their organization is now normalizing is madness and socially destructive and that DEI and ESG are rubbish. But they know they have to keep their views to themselves, because their organization is no longer simply in the business of making money, or accumulating knowledge and instructing students in that knowledge, or informing an audience about who has done what and how that came to be: they are beholden to the values designated by and represented by their organization. They are part of the brand and hence representatives of the social legitimacy, value, and justice of the organization.

What matters is the pyramid nature of organizations and institutions, i.e. the values and ‘designs’, the dominant ethos—the ethos that one must comply with if one is to be appointed, retain one’s job or get ahead within these organizations. What the Nazis called Gleichanschaltung, the coordination or alignment of institutions and organizations by the party leadership and those beholden to them to achieve their political objective, is now the norm in what were previously identifiable as liberal democratic regimes, as the major parties form broader policy consensuses that the electorate has no say in approving. Western political leaders who defy even some of these consensuses quickly find themselves denounced by the media and other politicians as being “fascists” and “Nazis.”

Employees who are openly critical of any number of the socio-political policies that leadership/ management ‘teams’ of institutions, companies, or organizations have signed up to will lose their job, or have their career “stalled.” The recent requirement in the first two divisions of the French football league to wear “pride” jerseys, or the WHO “Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe”—a “framework for policy makers, educational and health professionals and specialists”—which states that children under four should be instructed in the “enjoyment and pleasure when touching one’s own body,” “early childhood masturbation and discovery of own body and own genitals,” and “have the right to explore gender identities”—are indicative of how policy makers, educationalists, corporations, and organizations intertwine to ensure that no part of society be free from the values, symbols and practices serving their objectives.

These objectives are anathema to billions of people on the planet. China, and Asia more generally, Russia, and much of Central Europe, Africa, and all Muslim nations are firmly united against the values of the West, and their ruling classes make no secret of how degenerate they think the West is. This does not stop the West, though, from exhibiting its moral superiority, which ostensibly includes being respectful of cultural diversity. Thus when the US Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emmanuel, recently weighed in on a contentious bill declaring that there “should be no unfair discrimination” against the gay and transgender community,’”he marshalled ‘a group of 15 foreign ambassadors in Tokyo to record a four-minute video nudging Japan to embrace LGBTQ rights and, by implication, same-sex marriage. The response from a Liberal Democratic member of the upper house of the Diet, retorted by tweet: “If Ambassador Emanuel wants to use his position as U.S. ambassador to Japan in any way to influence Japan, we will take immediate action to make him go back to his country.”

Of course, there would have been no opportunity for Emmanuel to make such a tweet with another US ally, Saudi Arabia. But the fact that ambassadors from the West use their position to publicly comment on legislation is one further symptom of the West’s division of the world into allies, and suzerainties, and enemies. There is no room for international dialogue, just as there is no room for domestic dialogue. There are those who are on the right side of history and those of the wrong side, and the West is the right side.

Thus, as it is with Western ambassadors, it also the assumption of our political, corporate, pedagogical leaders that their job is to articulate and enforce values which have little or no connection to our historical and civilizational experience. The state and church have become one. The political class is also the priest class. It has a monopoly on the truth and its task is to instruct us in that truth, to lead us, and punish us if we refuse to accept it. The reach and power of the political class far exceeds that of the Church in the Middle Ages. For those who might object—but what about the Inquisition (and leaving aside all the historical ignorance and nonsense about the Inquisition)—I can only respond—Iraq? Or Afghanistan?

Within a generation we have abandoned a political and social consensus in which governments of free people existed to facilitate, not dictate, the choices of its citizens—there was disputation between parties over what governments should be doing to facilitate that—how much education, how much healthcare, how much welfare etc. But the political consensus was that the diverse range of social interests would be represented by political parties, that those interests had to be able to express themselves (that was why in the US, McCarthyism was viewed, even by many anti-communists, as a threat to the American way of life), and that the electorate would elect a government, which when in power, acted in conjunction with a public service generally providing advice on policy options that reflected the prevailing realities that a governing party needed to consider, realities that preserved the integrity of the nation.

Thus the government was not simply trusted to pander to the interests of the party’s constituents, but to represent the people as a whole. People complained, and were not persecuted because they did so. Number crunchers advised and parties wheeled and dealed—and compromised. Politicians knew that if they wanted to attain and retain power they had to have broad appeal. It was far from perfect. State and society were corrupt—very corrupt, and the secret deals between organized crime and the state infiltrated many areas of public policy (see especially Whitney Webb’s meticulously researched, One Nation Under Blackmail); but it was not a world in which we must comply with decisions made by leaders in almost every aspect of our lives. It managed to hold serious class differences and antagonisms together—in large part that was because identity politics had not become so widely circulated and influential, and having professional training did not then mean being ideologically inducted in every area of study and professional development into a world view where one’s best way to advance was to prove one’s victimhood. Even when governments were extremely polarizing, and protests were widespread, as say in the Thatcher government, none seriously thought the nation was on the brink of civil war—okay, the academic Marxists and some students banged on about revolution, but none listened to them, and they said the same thing no matter who was in government.

Western societies are completely polarized and that is reflected by that fact that some half of the Western population do not trust our institutions, nor the policies that come from the ruling class consensus. But the fact that the ruling class and those who work on its behalf only press down further on the most polarizing of issues, issues which are becoming exponentially crazier by the second—”women” with penises winning women’s beauty competitions, and sweeping up the trophies in women’s sports.

Crazy as that is, how crazy was the logic that not only demanded that people take a vaccine if they wanted to keep their jobs (even though, if the vaccine worked, why would the vaccinated care whether other people did not take a vaccine)? But even crazier was the fact that it was part of a general undertaking to ‘”give”’ (of course at a price) ‘this vaccine to the entire world”—and if that meant disrupting the entire global economy to get everyone vaccinated then that was fair enough for Gates, the logic being, until we get almost everybody vaccinated globally, we still won’t be fully back to normal.

As the craziness also keeps mounting up so does the frustration and anger, and political decisions to crack down against that hostility. Defiance of the vaccine mandate by truckers in Canada quickly segued into the state demanding asset confiscation. Who would have foreseen that in 2019? But that’s the thing. Increasingly we are presented with a present that was not only unforeseeable, and the unthinkable—at least to anyone who was not considered a lunatic. Likewise, if anyone had said to gay rights activists twenty years ago, that one of the major issues of the 2020s would the demand for the right for drag queens and skimpily clad transsexuals to perform or read to children under the age of 7, they would have been castigated for thinking that gay people would be so perverse as to dream up such a thing.

But this issue is pushed by the media, by legislators, academics and corporate and organizational leaders—and it is issues like this that make people who just want to go to work, put bread on the table, and have their kids well educated and well-adjusted to deal with the trials that adulthood will bring boil over with rage. And the media paints them as extremists, and the parent who wants its non-binary or trans child to be immersed in his world is presented as a fearful and persecuted victim of bigotry and cruelty.

That the American ruling class deemed a riot, far less destructive in terms of lives and property than riots which had been all but justified and sanctioned by the main stream media, to be an insurrection only illustrates the fragility and the extent of hatred of the ruling class and organizations in the United States—no wonder “hate speech,” and “misinformation” (which is synonymous with non-approved information, and opinions) are now part of the conceptual acid-baths to dissolve the first amendment of the constitution of the US.

In countries with no first amendment rights, hate speech legislation is well entrenched. And the same larger agenda and the values that hold it together accelerate as the social antagonisms mount. And as they mount the media and the ruling class and the amalgam of groups serving that class deal with the problem by further denunciations and laws and penalties.

The sheer scale and range of those involved in dismantling the nation and the various practices and values that held it together and replacing it with a globalist political order, as well as the vast inequality of opportunities and resources of those working for the triumph of a global order, based upon “progressive” (Western) rights-based and anti-traditional values defy the logic of a centralized command system, even if we can locate all manner of overlapping centralized command systems (leadership/management “teams”) within the various organizations and institutions.

This lack of any obvious overarching centralized command system is one reason why any criticism of the alliance of interests is so readily dismissed as a conspiracy theory. The parties doing the dismantling all have a stake in the globalist, liberal, totalitarian world we in the West now live within—i.e., they are, in the parlance of the globalists, “stakeholders” in this new world order. It is true that in spite of whatever conspiracies may take place when powerful people make decisions that affect entire nations, most of those involved in doing their bidding are not party to any conspiracy. They are just complying with what their rulers, their leaders, and managers have decided is for the good of the nation or institution, or organization.

Anyone who bothers to look more closely at the various agendas coming out of such forums and organizations, or foundations such as the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, the Bilderberg group, UN and World Economic Forum, the WTO, G20, G7, WHO, the Gates Foundation, to name just a few, or the financial donors partners and behind them—names like, or professionally linked to, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Gates, Soros, Warburg, Warren Buffet, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Ford, Kellogg, Mark Carney, Michael Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase, Google, Volkswagon, Coca Cola, Blackrock, Shell, Goldman Sachs.

These are just some of the names that everybody recognizes which provide financial backing for the kinds of priorities, policies and narratives which have been adopted by Western nation states, organizations and corporations.

One way that one can recognize whether a particular policy is globalist is to take cognizance of the oligarchical interest funding a cause, or rights-claim. Thus, for example, consider the following answer by Jennifer Bilek to the question, “Who is funding the Transgender Movement?”

These include but are not limited to Jennifer Pritzker (a male who identifies as transgender); George Soros; Martine Rothblatt (a male who identifies as transgender and transhumanist); Tim Gill (a gay man); Drummond Pike; Warren and Peter Bubett; Jon Stryker (a gay man); Mark Bonham (a gay man); and Ric Weiland (a deceased gay man whose philanthropy is still LGBT-oriented). Most of these billionaires fund the transgender lobby and organizations through their own organizations, including corporations.

Separating transgender issues from LGBT infrastructure is not an easy task. All the wealthiest donors have been funding LGB institutions before they became LGBT-oriented, and only in some instances are monies earmarked specifically for transgender issues. Some of these billionaires fund the LGBT through their myriad companies, multiplying their contributions many times over in ways that are also diGcult to track.

These funders often go through anonymous funding organizations such as Tides Foundation, founded and operated by Pike. Large corporations, philanthropists, and organizations can send enormous sums of money to the Tides Foundation, specify the direction the funds are to go, and have the funds get to their destination anonymously. Tides Foundation creates a legal firewall and tax shelter for foundations and funds political campaigns, often using legally dubious tactics.

These men and others, including pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. government, are sending millions of dollars to LGBT causes. Overall reported global spending on LGBT is now estimated at $424 million. From 2003-2013, reported funding for transgender issues increased more than eightfold, growing at threefold the increase of LGBTQ funding overall, which quadrupled from 2003 to 2012. This huge spike in funding happened at the same time transgenderism began gaining traction in American culture. $424 million is a lot of money. Is it enough to change laws, uproot language and force new speech on the public, to censor, to create an atmosphere of threat for those who do not comply with gender identity ideology?

The globalist agenda is not a spontaneous uprising of the “masses,” it is a paid for operation by the richest people of the planet. And although the PR machines and mainstream media work incessantly to create the image of being geniuses intent on saving the planet, the fact is that they are money people—frequently they belong to, or have been adopted into a dynasty, and their philanthropic work is invariably a way to make massive money. Bill Gates on one occasion talks of making twenty times the return on the work undertaken by his and his former wife’s Foundation.

These unelected people are the true global leaders, lifting up others who serve their interests along the way. They consider themselves wise enough to identify the most important problems facing the species as well as how to solve them, and they have the resources to buy people who do their will. The fact that their ‘employees’ may not think they are pursuing their agenda, or be critical of a system which is so inequitable is irrelevant—which is also why the alliance mentioned in the opening of this essay is so contradictory. But contradictions are as intrinsic to a person’s life as they are to that of any group or alliance. Thus it is, for example, that academic Marxists and progressivists generally think they are tearing down capitalism and contributing to a utopia, even though they are enabling greater corporatist control over the world’s people’s and resources. The narrative of emancipation has contributed to a reality of totalizing enslavement; the critics of capitalist society have been the builders of a world of total calculability—and it is simply a matter of time before no natural part of our world be accessible without someone owning it and renting it to us.

People rarely know what they are doing because they have not the patience to consider all the possible implications of their action, to see whose interests they may also be serving when insisting upon getting their way. Transgender activists insisting upon the legalization and normalization of hormone blockers or surgical amputations and constructions of children don’t particularly see themselves as being but the means for massively enriching and empowering Jenifer Pritzker, Pfizer, Janssen Therapeutics, Abbot Laboratories. VIIV, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, not to mention Google and Microsoft who are also investing heavily in the trans project. Nor do they generally have a clue that they are the means for creating a world not only in which natural child birth may only be granted to those deemed by the state to be worthwhile parents, but in which human beings may be a completely synthetic fabrication.

Likewise, those who support NATO supplying the weapons, training, and tactical information for the Zelensky government and its supporters in Ukraine’s war against Russia, are largely ignorant of the fact that they are supporters of ethnic nationalists intent on ethnic cleansing, though that is exactly what the post-Maidan Ukrainian governments in cooperation with various battalions, para-military groups etc. have been. They might also be the kind of people who think they are anti-militaristic, or opposed to Western imperialism, yet they are fully supporting the entrenchment of a globalist military industrial complex that is ever ready to attack any socio-political order that deviates from a globalist Western led hegemonic imperial order.

Likewise, the doctors and health practitioners and bureaucrats and citizens who attacked people critical of mRNA vaccines against COVID were certain that because the stakes seemed so high—mass death—this ultimately justified ensuring people comply with whatever health policy was mandated—lockdowns, masks, vaccines within certain professions being a requirement of continued employment and pushed upon the population as the sole way of successfully protecting people against the virus, channeling hospital resources in such a way that there was an economic incentive to conflate “death by” and “death with” COVID.

These people’s unwavering commitment to ensuring a better health outcome along with the support of the media, social media platforms, and the academy led them to denounce and destroy the career of anyone speaking publicly about the need for a better informed exploration of the scale of the risks involved in prioritizing these policies over alternatives, especially over the use of potential treatments, such as Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin which, for year had been widely available for treatment of other diseases and had been relatively free of malign side effects, were suddenly targeted as dangerous drugs. Studies which supported their value as partial treatments were discarded, while everyone had to trust a vaccine developed at “warp speed,” which simply meant one in which there simply was not enough time to observe potentially dangerous side-effects. People were pressured—and in many professions forced to take drugs created out of a relatively new vaccine technology—at least that is how it seemed.

While the coalition of forces intent upon, or enabling a technocratic corporatist globalist world occurs because people think they are pursuing their advantage, those who serve that coalition are also helping build a society, in which the sole purpose of the middle class, will be to monitor and punish an enslaved class which provides the bodies and organs, and labour power to service the desires of a relatively small ruling class in pursuit of transhumanist/ eugenically engineered lives, i.e., lives without sickness or death in bodies that are part nature and increasingly large part machine. A number of people, including myself, think that it is also becoming ever more apparent that the rest of us will also be increasingly made of machine parts that can be surveilled, programmed, controlled, and dependent upon those who design and run the machines. Just as the globalist future is transhumanist, it is, as the COVID experience demonstrated, a bio-political one—as COVID has fizzled out, WHO keep uttering dire predictions about what will be the next ‘plague’ requiring global compliance.

The irony, lost on most academic supporters of the new world, is that the most influential philosopher upon the project of radical emancipation, Michel Foucault, saw the great danger of bio-politics. Yet the academy is an institution that plays a decisive role in forming the professional technocrats whose livelihoods are increasingly dependent upon the administration and economization of life so that everyone becomes the clients of corporate owners, managers, and state officials who may oversee all aspects of our lives so that we may comply with the directives and dictates that will ‘save the planet’ and the species. The radical students, who played such a decisive role in the Russian and subsequent communist revolutions, as well as the rise of National Socialism, and the identity politics that would flow from the student revolution of the 1960s in the West, never doubted that they had the ability and right to dictate what the future should be. What they did not realize—because they did not care about it—was that their solutions were inevitably technocratic and elite driven (for they were the professionals in waiting), and as such would require the resources of others who would find some material use for them. That they thought they knew the way to improve the world, yet so easily gravitated into the service not simply of the capitalist class they taught were the cause of all social ills, but of those who had the greatest capital and social reach is indicative of just how indifferent or blind they were to their own role in world-making.

People are easily swayed, especially when they are swayed toward a position that builds upon commitments and priorities they already stand by. The mimetic effect of personal development, and social bonding is such that so many of the above issues have demonstrated that narrative conformity can emerge very swiftly amongst those of similar professions, backgrounds and social and economic stakes and interests. People do not need to bond together and say, “this is the objective and this is the plan of attack”—though as the WEF, UN etc. documents show some of that definitely goes on, and there is a class of oligarchs who openly “conspired” with intelligence agencies and vested political interests to censor information they disapprove of, whilst pouring money into elections and candidates, activist and ‘philanthropist’ organizations and foundations, educational institutions, etc.

It is not a conspiracy theory to point out the existence of what former Clinton administration employee, editor Foreign Policy magazine, and columnist for the Daily Beast, and contributor to USA Today, David Rothkopf, has, in his book of 2008, called a “superclass” (Superclass: The Global Elite and the World They Make)—the existence of this class is simply a reality. Like Bill Clinton’s one time teacher, the brilliant Carroll Quigley, who, in Tragedy and Hope, also wrote extensively on various groups and persons funneling resources to support government policies suiting their globalist and imperial interests, Rothkopf’s work is not a critique of this class, but simply an account of its activities. Take the two following passages, one discussing how members from the same pool of people are regularly found on boards and management of the largest companies, the other noting how they often even go to the same schools.

“With regard to the concentration of power among individuals, perhaps a more telling demonstration is how boards and management of the biggest companies overlap, linking the superclass in an extended network.

For example, if you were to take just the top three corporate executives (in most cases the chairman, CEO, and executive director) of the top five biggest companies as well as the members of their boards—approximately seventy people—you would find that they have active connections fanning out to more than 145 other major companies either through board memberships, advisory positions, or former positions in senior management. Of these 145, thirty-six are among the one hundred largest in the world and fifty-two are in the top 250. Sixteen of these companies have more than one representative from the top five companies on their boards. These sixteen are Akzo Nobel, ABB, Astra-Zeneca, British Airways, Deutsche Bank, Ernst & Young, Ford, GE, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Lloyds TSB, Pfizer, Royal Bank of Scotland, Sara Lee, Unilever, and Vodafone—all major, major players in their own right. Of these, which one has the most crossover to the top five companies? Goldman Sachs, with four links.”

And

“Networking among the corporate elite can thus take a variety of forms. Working together, doing deals together, sitting on boards together, even attending gala events together—all these things help forge the networks that empower and define the superclass. And these networks begin early. For example, take the Harvard Business School class of 1979. This class alone graduated Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay; Jeffrey Skilling, the former president of Enron; John Thain, former president of Goldman Sachs and currently head of the New York Stock Exchange; Ron Sargent, the CEO of Staples; George McMillan, the CEO of Palladium Group; Elaine Chao, the secretary of labor (who also happens to be married to Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky); and Dan Bricklin, who developed the first electronic spreadsheet. And because schools like Oxford, Cambridge, France’s École Polytechnique, the Indian Institute of Technology, and the University of Tokyo all perform a similar function, cadres of leaders emerge into the world with important linkages even before other layers of ties begin to form.”

Business and political interests are so entwined that where one ends and one begins is not that obvious, with lucrative careers open to politicians once they retire, whether through speaking engagements, or joining a board or the accruement of massive investment portfolios, and property ownerships gathered in a life of “public service.” The leverage of well-funded interest groups and lobbyists working on behalf of corporate interests are just part of the flow of modern democratic politics, in no small part because of the economic opportunities they provide for employment and national wealth. Journalists and academics and left-wing parties may well speak out against the dangers of huge wealth disparities—and there are grave dangers, not the least being how the ostensible critics of corporate control can be bought under their influences without even realizing that they have been bought. That there are economic/ material interests is a fact of life. But there are in every type of society a class of people who forego material advantage in favor of the things of the spirit is also profoundly important.

Journalists are often called the fourth estate, but along with academics those at least who were driven by a desire to make the society conscious of the powers being served through their reportage were aspiring to usurp the role of the first estate, by instructing the population in the ideas of the absolute they served. Over time they have not proved themselves to be less susceptible to corruption than the worst of the members of the first estate. The source of that corruption was the same as the source that did so much damage especially to the upper clergy by the time of the French revolution—viz., the betrayal of a very elementary demand of the spirit to serve the spirit of that part of life and our soul that requires a class of persons to instruct and help bond their flock (the public) in the first place. In the case of academics and journalists that spirit is the spirit of truth, the truth to be found in their respective areas of specialization or information gathering. And what has led to that corruption is the elevation of power itself above that commitment—their own power, and the desire for the power of whatever interest they purport to represent has become viscerally equated with the truth. But it is not. Representative systems always involve a devolution and dilution transpiring between the party to be represented and the representative. But even more importantly the representative class forms a set of interests due to it being a class of representatives. It thus becomes as natural to professional representatives as the air they breathe to assume that must first be well provided for so they can help the other members of their group. Of course, this is completely self-serving.

But material interests are by nature self-serving, and politics is a material before it is a spiritual power—something anyone can see if they but consider how political power originates in violence and protection rackets. In sum, the dangerous alliance of economic power, and political power, an alliance that is intrinsic—those with economic power need legislators to assist their enterprises, those seeking political power require economic assistance—could only be mitigated by spiritual resistance. That resistance previously took a cultural form. Its preservation required pedagogical cultivation—it required well educated teachers who understood the larger cultural and historical backdrop to the traditions of the spirit presiding over the group. The desire to completely overhaul the traditions by political means was bound to lead to corruption—and it has. What corrupt spirits with economic power have always known is that political power can be bought. The totalizing character of corporate power advanced in tandem with the totalizing character of political power.

Anyone familiar with what has happened to the university will know the story—neoliberalism merges with radical identity politics to create an economic-political alliance destroying all intellectual independence and any higher values of the spirit that do not fit into DEI or ESG or what university administrative leaders on an obscene salary dictate and bullying social justice warriors push in the class room. The latter think they are bringing down capitalism but they are so naïve that they take no historical cognizance of how corporations have pushed for exactly the same social outcomes that they preach—destruction of the traditional family, traditional faith, gender roles, the creation of open borders, greater ideological conformity, dismantling the nation state in favour of globalism. In some ways they are immediate material beneficiaries as job opportunities for the best of them open up globally. That they all push not only for the same political agenda but the very same party is just one other indication of how the very professions that pride themselves on opposing the corporatization and commodification of the world have so readily surrendered their critical capacities (and I speak of them en masse because almost all their members have surrendered) to enable that.

The disease of politicization of the spirit has also infected other state agencies that always had to be beholden to political authority as institutions, but which, nevertheless, required that their own personal political preferences be put aside. That requirement, i.e., to put aside one’s own political interests and beliefs, in service to an elected government also involved a spiritual component that was of far greater value to the preservation of the body politic that the various political representatives who came and went. Though, the entire society worked better when even the managers of corporations and political representatives bowed their heads to a higher power of the spirit than their own material interests. DEI and ESG are no substitutes for a higher power because they are simply means for getting power, and for forming a society in which its members tear at each other to get and to have. The better Marxist and leftwing critics—people like Erich Fromm and C.B. MacPherson—knew human betterment was not just having more stuff.

What we now have then is a society in which corporate interests, and political interests have indeed conspired to get what they want at any cost, and that means extinguishing any critical response to the nightmare world they are making.

The Spooks and their Megaphones

That intelligence agencies and members of the military have demonstrated their commitment to certain political parties which in turn are served by the mainstream media is not a theory about people conspiring, it is a reality, as are the walls of censorship, shadow-bans, algorithmic concealment and preference, media silence and the like. Take the New York Post (May 5 2023) story that Michael Morrell was attempting to give Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign some ammunition to “push back on Trump” during the debate as he urged John Brennan to sign on to the letter calling Hunter Biden’s laptop a possible Russian disinformation operation.’ That intelligence and military officers were ‘conspiring’ to have a party win an election is not a theory it is just what happened. As did the disinformation campaign about Trump and Russia—as I was write this even Jake Tapper from CNN momentarily thought that retrieving the credibility of the mainstream media might require some small amount of soul searching. Though The New York Times, having reporting the results of the John Durham Report, showed the way forward—the Russia stuff was all a big nothing burger of right-wing conspiracy theorists. There was, though, nothing new in the Durham Report—the report only makes public what people who explored the story 7 or 8 years ago, outside the mainstream media, already knew. That no prosecutions will flow from the various acts of conspiring with foreign parties to influence an election by spreading disinformation and lies, that the parties knew to be lies, is itself indicative of how successful the tactics of denouncing anyone who draws attention to the coordinated disinformation that transpired between the ruling party, the intelligence agencies, military officers, and the media as spreaders of disinformation has been.
The amount of disinformation involving the alliance of intelligence agencies and the media has been astonishing.

Allow me to cite some tweets from Mike Benz in December 2022 when he too was also noting the disinformation involving Michael Morrell and other CIA directors:

“Morrell was one of the 7 CIA directors—Michael Hayden, James Woolsey, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, Michael Morrell, William Webster & Robert Gates—on the board of the Atlantic Council, who DHS deputized to censor the 2020 election, & who was partnered with Burisma.” “The Biden Admin has given GWU (George Washington University) in government grants to censor the internet.” “The Atlantic Council is the anchor of EIP, part of its “core four.” When EIP published its 292-page report about how they censored tens of millions of conservatives with DHS in the 2020 election, they made their launch event an Atlantic Council event.”

Or take these from Andrew Lowenthal—link provided by Matt Taibbi in his “Report On The Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Lowenthal had spent 18 years as Executive Director of @Engage Media, an NGO formed “to protect digital rights and freedom,” and what shocked him was the pervasiveness within the profession to collaborate with the very powers that they should be scrutinizing. He writes:

“The (Twitter) Files show an uncanny alliance of academics, journalists, intelligence operatives, military personnel, government bureaucrats, NGO workers and more. Some I know personally… I had always understood “civil society” to mean ‘not the military.’ The former exists to check the latter. So I was shocked to see the depth of collaboration. For instance, “civil society” groups coordinating with Pentagon officials in an “election tabletop” exercise… Twitter emails and Slack communications suggesting heightened levels of data access for the military. Or military contractors like Mitre being part of the Aspen Institute’s “Information Disorder” report along with NGO and academic colleagues… Tech firms collaborate with each other, and the state. Companies organize “IndustrySynch,” “Industry comms,” “pre-sync,” and “Multi-Party Information Sharing,” collaborating on a ‘whole range’ of subjects, from election security to state-media labelling… Tech companies not only collaborate on content, they gather regularly for ‘private sector engagement’ with the FBI, DOD, DHS, House and Senate Intel Committees, and others, each agency getting its own meetings… Twitter staff ask for Twitter General Counsel (& former FBI Deputy General Counsel) Jim Baker’s blessing for EIP and Virality Project partner Graphika to “inform their partners in USG 3-5 days before publication’ of a report detailing Pentagon disinformation operations… Graphika receives money from the Pentagon, Navy, and Air Force, while simultaneously supporting human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch… As reported by @shellenbergerMD, The Aspen Institute combined WaPo, NYT, Rolling Stone, NBC, CNN, Twitter, Facebook, Stanford, and “anti-disinfo” NGOs like FirstDraft to practice an oddly prescient “hack and leak” exercise on the Hunter Biden laptop BEFORE its release… Last week Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was alleged to have instigated the “Russian” “hack” letter signed by 50 former intel officials. At RightsCon, civil society’s biggest digital rights event, Blinken spoke on ‘disinformation’ with Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa.”

These tweets report facts not theories. They are facts that once upon a time would have shocked enough journalists for them to become public scandals of such a magnitude that the ruling class would have had to respond to the public outcry. They refer to something involving infinitely greater collaboration, abuse of citizens’ rights, and consequence for the destruction of the republican constitution and democratic components of the United States than Water Gate. Yet, the mainstream media has remained silent on this, preferring instead to have journalists attack the owner of Twitter Elon Musk as well as those like Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger working on the Twitter files, and any other journalists reporting on what Schellenberger has called the Industrial Censorship Complex. Without free speech there can be no freedom—for freedom requires expressing oneself, however wrong (as opposed to libellous) one may be, in order to garner the information, one needs to navigate one’s way through life. Without freedom of speech, freedom of assembly to express dissent is impossible, and without freedom of assembly for peaceful dissenters there can be no collective political alternatives to the prevailing political order and party, and the dictates that it lays down. No matter how it is wrapped up the attack upon freedom of speech is a means for preserving the social and political interests that ‘conspire’ to suppress opposition to what they do with their power.

In a world where the partisan nature of journalists is a crucial component of them having a career it is difficult to know how many even care enough to look at the information that has come out of the Twitter files and elsewhere disclosing the scale of complicity between intelligence agencies, oligarchs, and media/ tech employees. One might think that in an open democratic society, the public would be extremely well informed about the alliance between intelligence agencies and oligarchs, or extremely concerned that that alliance has dictated what information is favoured and promoted, or banned or buried in the information algorithms designed by people who have a background or are openly serving commands from intelligence agents. That domestic intelligence agencies spy upon citizens deemed subversives —for that is what they were designed to do —may not be troubling if those people really are plotting acts of terrorism, but it is a different matter when they spy upon people who comply with the law and who are simply representing interests that have every right —deplorable as they may be —to be represented.

Yet when we see how the media and tech platforms are now operating it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the objective of intelligence agencies has long been to shape a certain kind of society, which is not simply one shaped by the wishes of the electorate. Certainly almost fifty years ago (1977) Carl Bernstein had written a widely read article on the CIA’s use of the media in Rolling Stone (when it was a magazine whose writers did not see themselves as working for ‘”The Man”), and that story was considered something of a revelation, and something that suggested governmental malfeasance. According to Bernstein:

The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalist operatives are still posted abroad.

Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of The New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with The New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

Matt Taibbi’s recent Substack essay, “A Century of Censorship” pushes the connection between an administration and media control back to Woodrow Wilson and the 1917 “Espionage Act.” As he points out “Wilson’s administration also decided that any publications violating the act were ‘non-mailable matter,’ and this rationale was used to suppress dissenting views by aggressively enforcing the postal codes so no subversive publications could reach their subscribers. At least 74 newspapers were denied mailing permits at this time.”

While, then, there is a long history of media being an outlet for government misinformation, the most conspicuous new development is the brazen openness of the connection between a political party and administration and the media. Thus the career movement between (former?) intelligence agents and mainstream media outlets is simply par for the course, nicely summed up in the Corbett report (episode 432):

“I mean could you imagine, if say, the ex-director of the CIA was currently a contributor to MSNBC that would be crazy wouldn’t it? Or could you imagine if a former FBI agent was now an active national security contributor to NBC News, or if a former FBI special agent was now the CNN political analyst there, a former Homeland Security official was a CNN national security analyst, or a former DEA administrator was an MSNBC legal and political analysts with his own podcast cheque it out folks, or James Baker, former FBI general counsel, if he was a CNN legal analyst, or if Frances Townsend, the former Homeland Security advisor for George W Bush, was now CBS News senior security and law enforcement analyst, or if a retired CIA chief of Russia operations with CNN national security analyst or if the retired FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano was now the CBS News security and law enforcement analyst, or Philip Mudd, the former CIA counterterrorism official, was now the CNN counterterrorism analyst that would be crazy wouldn’t it, oh yeah?’”

Crazy? Well, that is the norm today—and the reason James Corbett is simply dismissed as a kook, in spite of him constantly using public source and verifiable information in such documentaries as he has done on the CIA and the funding of Al Qaeda, or questions concerning all the weird stuff surrounding 9/11—that is the kind of stuff journalists and academics simply roll their eyes over. Unlike mainstream journalists—and on 9/11 Matt Taibbi has had plenty to say without showing he has really done any journalistic probing—I confess I was until relatively recently simply unaware of the extent of the serious unanswered questions surrounding the event. By the way, I am not saying I or anyone else, not involved in the planning and execution, knows exactly what happened, but someone like Corbett has raised important questions about 9/11 that are just not answered by repeating the name bin Laden ad nauseam. And once again it is a story covered up by the media rather than covered by it—and there are too many aspects about it to mention here, but it is just one other example where the media is simply serving as a public outlet for what intelligence agencies want the public to think.

Much less well known than the increasingly obvious fact that the mainstream media has a long history of being an intelligence outlet is the connection between the founding and funding of Google and the CIA. Alan MacLeod writes of this in his book Propaganda in the Information Age, (one can also hear him in discussion with Whitney Webb in Unlimited Hangout, and I cite from a summary of that show, where MacLeod notes that

“a prior investigation by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed found that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) were ‘bankrolling’ research by Sergey Brin at Stanford University, which ‘produced Google…’ Not only that… but his supervisor there was a CIA person. So, the CIA actually directly midwifed Google into existence. In fact, until 2005, the CIA actually held shares in Google and eventually sold them.”

It continues:

“Ahmed explained that Brin and his Google co-founder, Larry Page, developed ‘the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service…’ ‘with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI),’ a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and DARPA. In addition, the intelligence community’s Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, ‘essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources.’ Brin and Page ‘regularly’ reported to Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser, who were ‘representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining,’ Ahmed shared. Ahmed has argued that the involvement of intelligence agencies in the birth of Google, for example, is deeply purposeful: that they have nurtur[ed] the web platforms we know today for the precise purpose of utilizing the technology… to fight [a] global ‘information war’ — a war to legitimize the power of the few over the rest of us.”

Infowars

Anyone who is familiar with the magnitude of the audience (often outstripping the audience of The New York Times, CNN and the various confabulations of mainstream fabulists) reached by podcasts and podcasters who do address issues of disinformation and suppression of information—to take some at random, George Galloway’s MOATS, Glenn Greenwald, Whitney Web and Unlimited Hangout, the Last American Vagabond, The Free Thought Project, The Grayzone, PBD podcast, 21st Century Wire, the Corbett Report, Derrick Broze, Grand Theft World—knows that the attempt by the mainstream media to disinform them is only working on its own “stakeholders.” Unfortunately those stakeholders are running the institutions and governments within the West. And whether wittingly or not, they do so on the basis of either not informing, or misinforming, or disinforming people about world making events.

While the collaboration of intelligence agencies and the media may have a long history, it is only in the last seven or eight years that the majority of journalists and academics would simply be the mouth pieces of globalist oligarchs and their political agents, at least on domestic issues—international issues are, as I will discuss in more detail below, another matter. We now live in an age which, Alex Jones, in the late 1990s succinctly and brilliantly formulated as “Info(rmation) Wars.” Jones has made all sorts of wrong or exaggerated predictions, and wading into the Sandy Hook massacre, by his own admission, was an act of folly. But think what you will about his style and some, possibly even much, of his content, he is in the fight against globalist disinformation. His program has a vast audience and he was a driving force giving a voice to the huge number of anti-globalists in the United States who were responsible for Trump’s 2016 victory. His book attacking the WEF’s “recovery plan,” The Great Reset: And the War for the World has sold by the truckload—there are over 3500 reviews on Amazon, almost all positive. And it has sold because it informs his audience about the details of the social and technocratic plans laid out in Klaus Schwab’s book, The Great Reset.

While the policies and plans Schwab lays out suit those who attend Davos and believe in “sustainable development,” population control, and the kind of state control that was exercised to deal with COVID, the curtailments of liberty that their execution requires (not the least being freedom to criticise the plans and their authors) are widely detested. Jones is the establishment’s embodiment of “disinformation.” And as such he is a litmus test of what one thinks of the right to dissent. The mainstream media have cheered every attempt to destroy him. And the attempts reveal the extent of corporate statism in the Western World—if Jones really were just a nut job, how could he possibly be such a threat to the state?

The problem with Jones is that he expresses the concerns of millions of people who hate the direction their lives and that of their children are being dragged in—and that is why they not only listen to Jones but to his guests, some like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, and Judy Mickowitz, were prestigious scientific researchers whose careers were destroyed by research that failed to comply with some of the scientific consensuses that underpin the technocratic bureaucracy that demands complete obeisance.

In a world where inquiry into medical practices was not dominated by the outcomes required by those responsible for most of the funding exploring whether vaccines may lead to autism would be an extremely important subject. But Mickowitz’s career came to an abrupt end when she produced data which suggested there was a spike in autism that could be tracked to the proliferation of vaccines. I have no idea whether her research conclusions are scientifically correct. But her story is indicative of the fact that medical research today is inexorably linked to research grants, and grants are inexorably linked to outcomes which do not contravene the enormous investments made by pharmaceutical companies. How distant we are now from Karl Popper’s falsification principle being an essential criterion for any scientific endeavour can be seen in the imbecilic formulation that became a mandatory phrase during the pandemic, “I trust the science.”

Jones was the first to be censored by YouTube and other social media platforms, Mickowitz was not that long in following, and shortly thereafter so was the elected President of the United States. The media and the academy saw this as a victory. And for them it was, because they no longer cared what people thought—so long as they would shut up and do what they were told. Those of us who believe in the importance of freedom of speech know that the issue is not whether you like what someone says, or whether you think it based upon being well informed or being a complete dope.

Certainly, the people who impose censorship always think they are virtuous as well as wise. Of course, none who is not a journalist or academic, and has not been brainwashed by them, and has ever spent any-time with them suffers under such a delusion. I know the logic is circular, but not less circular than you should trust our opinions because we are journalists and academics and we trust each other’s opinions. When Alex Jones was banned from the various social media sites, people with a college education in the main thought it was a good thing because they had been informed that he publicised an outrageously hurtful and misinformed opinion on the massacre at Sandy Hook: he thought and said aloud that the massacre did not take place, and the photos and new items about it were staged.
Jones was not the original source of this “theory” which he was airing on his program—and which had never played a particularly important role in the more general arguments he was making about disinformation and how it is used by globalists and how the USA was losing the qualities that made it a free and prosperous country. It had been expounded previously by the philosopher James Fetzer (whose book on Carl Hempel is probably the definitive book on the fairly well-known philosopher of science) and Mike Paleck, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control. The title encapsulates the argument, and it included essays by other academics. The various contributors to the book supplied what they believed was compelling evidence against there being a massacre. The “evidence” had to do with the school buildings, various photos such as those of the car park and the students filing out of the school, and the school itself being closed. The argument combined with the photos do give the impression of Fetzer, Paleck and the other authors having a case. But strange as the circumstantial evidence may have appeared, that “evidence” would evaporate in the face of the testimony of anyone who was a first-hand witness of the event, or knew any of the survivors, and victims of the massacre. To publicly claim that their testimony should be discounted because they are actors or liars does seem to the lay person to be a strong case of defamation. Although facts are inevitably only notable in so far as they are meaningful, facts remain facts. And the case about Sandy Hook was a matter in which one’s opinions count for nothing when compared to the facts. So it is not surprising that Fetzer and Paleck and their publishers were sued for defamation, and that the publisher apologized to Lenny Pozner, whose six year old son was killed in the shooting. The settlement in that case was $450,000.

The lawsuits against Jones for defamation which commenced in 2018 culminated in the $1 billion verdict against him—it was the largest defamation award in US history. By that stage Jones himself had admitted he had been wrong, on numerous occasions. He was embarrassed by it, and he conceded that he had become over medicated and paranoid. He had, then, by his own admission, aired an opinion that was misinformed—and although he was repeating misinformation, he never claimed as far as I know to be the source of the idea that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. And there is nothing to indicate he believed he was lying at the time he expressed his opinion.

But what is most striking about the verdict is that there seems to be no sense of proportionality between crime and punishment. Jones did not murder the children—and there are no instances of civil cases against murders in which the plaintiffs receive anything even close to that amount. Moreover, there is nothing to indicate that Jones’ fortune was primarily due to his opinion about Sandy Hook. In various interviews I have seen e.g., with Joe Rogan, Michael Malice, Tim Pool, and Steven Crowder he consistently makes the point that Sandy Hook is but a very small portion of his work—he compares the “amount” of time devoted to talking about Sandy Hook as akin to a sentence in a large book. It is difficult to see how the amount awarded to the plaintiffs could be considered anything other than an attempt to destroy the potential for Alex Jones to have a livelihood, and that this decision was based upon his political influence, and he was being used as an example not of what might happen to people who expressed false or defamatory opinions—for the thing about this case, and the thing which makes it stick out as such a politicized judgment is that its severity has no parallel. When major media companies are sued, they are not targeted in such a way that they can never operate again. And even if Jones had underrepresented, had lied, about his worth, the idea that it is remotely close to a billion dollars is absurd.

For his part, Jones made the salient point that those responsible for using the false claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and sending hundreds of thousands of people in the US led invasion of Iraq to their death have not paid any financial penalty. Like him or hate him, there is no denying the truth of that particular quip. He also riposted with another salutary and brilliant quip consisting of two words—“Jeffrey Epstein?”—when journalists, going for the kill, cornered him for claiming there were paedophile networks that operated at the highest political levels.

The case of Alex Jones should concern everyone who understands that if we cannot express our scepticism and our criticism, even if we are mistaken, we can never have a society in which not only independent thinking is valued, but our own personhood is taken seriously. For no person can avoid mistakes, and the idea that there are a group of people who we should always agree with because they are our ‘leaders’ or truth czars or brilliant political pundits on television (forgive my oxymoron), or celebrities (forgive me citing just morons), or scientists, or professors—the latter of whom, on extra-ideological issues, at least rarely agree on anything—is simply childish. But that is what the progressivist globalist project requires—getting us all to think like children—imbecilic children (see my “Dialectics of Imbecility”). Moreover, their hold upon the world along with the world itself is so fragile that they cannot tolerate the cracks in the edifice that some crackpot might open up lest the whole world collapses. The problem they faced, though, was not that their schemes and objectives and policies were facing resistance from about as many people who were paid-up people making careers out of the narratives supporting globalisation were opposing it. Some of the opposition embraced social media, others expressed their dissent by voting for outsider candidates. Opposition voices with a large audience like Jones had to be either censored, outright, for good, or for enough time for them to change the error of their ways and get back in the flow of the main stream, or demonetized, or algorithmically buried. As for more mass opposition the media had to go on full attack deploying labels to highlight the disinformation they were using to denounce, break down, or when nothing else worked imprison dissenters.

Thus, critics of the COVID vaccines are anti-vaxxers. Parents who object to schools and librarians having their kids be ‘entertained’, danced to, read to etc. by drag queens or trans people are ‘anti-drag queen’ or transphobes, or parents who do not want school libraries carrying sexualized material are homophobes. People who are not of the opinion that the world will end by 2030 unless oil and coal are eliminated are “climate deniers.” People who express the desire to have border controls so that national sovereignty and citizenship are preserved are racists—those who illegally enter into the US are designated with the same terms as those who legally enter as migrants. Whites are all racists, and hence in need of training by others (often whites) who can get them to not offend or harm with their whiteness. Everybody is a white supremacist, or if black or Asian or something else, a lackey thereof, if they do not accept that the pockets of black poverty suffice to discount not only white poverty (which is larger in absolute numbers, though not proportionally), but the substantial black middle class, and hence who do not accept that racism is the cause of black poverty in the US, or that the cure for black poverty lies in employing critical race theorists to train the entire society. A white supremacist is also anyone who does not go along with BLM and has the temerity to point out that black on black crime, as well as black on white crime, is proportionally far higher than white on black crime. Being labelled a white supremacist also is equivalent to being a “domestic terrorist”—and the President of the USA has himself declared that white supremacists are the greatest source of domestic terrorism within the USA today. People who are critical of the fact that entire suburbs in Western Europe have become enclaves of Muslims who do not want to make cultural compromises with the host country are Islamophobes, as is anyone else who brings up the issue of the prevalence of honour killings in Muslim communities, and the problem of women being forced to wear the veil. Anyone opposed to supporting the Zelensky government in the war against Russia is a “Putin stooge.” A protest gone awry, in no small part due to government and Antifa plants is an insurrection.

On that front, Gateway Pundit, always dismissed as a source of mis- and disinformation by the media that wants to monopolize mis- and disinformation, noted that the FBI admitted having 8 informants inside the Proud Boys organization on January 6, whilst court documents put the number at 40 undercover agents, and the DC Metro Police had 13 undercover operatives —this is straight out of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday—and if this was not enough to make anyone with a modicum of information or good sense realize that the word “insurrection” should be synonymous with a government intelligence operation designed to terrify anyone thinking of participating in a demonstration against whatever the government, and the media and the corporate decide is truth, it was left to one solitary main stream tv journalist, now sacked, to show the footage of police politely ushering in protestors at the back of the capitol building. Any elected governments or presidents whose policies halt the progress of what Klaus Schwab and the Davos crowd and Justin Trudeau herald as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” are equated with Nazis. Every oppositionist position to what, in the once relatively free world, was a matter of potential policy for public discussion is now cause for some new denunciative label—even if one sided with the mainstream, one might think there might be some old school defenders of the English language somewhere who still believe words and names should be used correctly.

But as we can see each label is itself an example of disinformation—whether in the form of an outright lie, or in ensuring that anyone who wants public policy and debate to be better honed and pitched be presented as a bigot, or a monster. But it seems for the moment the worst kind of monster is the bigot who does not believe a woman can have a penis, or that someone born without one is really a man.

Pride: Dragging and Transitioning the Population into the New World Order

It has become very obvious in the last few years—and amongst those who also note this is Jacob Dreizen in his important (albeit belligerent and sarcastic) DreizenReport—that the LGBTQ pride flag is the symbol of Western led globalist freedom. Thus very early in the Biden administration US embassies were authorized to fly pride flags—in 2016 on his becoming Foreign Minister of the Conservative Party Boris Johnson had also overturned the decision not to allow pride flags to be flown from embassies. Pride flags have also been flown at the UK and US embassies in some Islamic countries such as the UAE which has incurred a backlash from locals. China has just recently demanded that pride flags, along with the Ukraine flag be taken down from visiting embassies, because they are simply Western propaganda.

The pride flag had also been flown in US embassies in Russia in 2020 and 2021, until Russia introduced laws in December of 2022 banning LGBTQ propaganda. The political significance of the LGBTQ movement as a cipher for Western progressive values was also driven home early in the Russia-Ukraine war by MI6 chief Richard Moore who tweeted, “With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights.”

The Western media has also been awash with stories about LGBTQ and the war in the Ukraine, whilst refusing to mention that Ukraine has never been a haven of LGBTQ freedom, and that when Western powers have tried to push Zelensky to legislate for same sex marriage—gay adoption is also prohibited there, he has refused to do so. He knows that it simply could not fly there, and he already has enough popularity problems on his hands (also unreported by Western journalists).

While, as the above examples illustrate, the West has used such symbols as pride month, and the pride flag as a means of its core value and virtue—not just the acceptance of sexual diversity, but its celebration—the move from personal acceptance of private same sex acts to institutionally valorising it commenced with same sex unions. The first country to legally recognize same sex marriages was the Netherlands, which was also the first to legalize euthanasia—both occurred in 2001. Same sex marriage followed by Belgium, two years later, and the provinces of Ontario and British Colombia. It was only, though, within the last ten years that same sex marriage became increasingly common place in Western Europe and Latin America. In Asia and Africa, it is only permitted in Taiwan and South Africa. Hilary Clinton eventually came to support same sex marriage in 2013, Obama had come out for it the previous year.

It was not just, though, that political parties in the West started flip-flopping on the issue, the push for same sex marriage was a symptom of a major transformation in the gay movement itself. In the 1960s and 1970s the gay movement was generally part of a wider sexual revolution— “free love” —and attack upon the family and the Christian religion (the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began in 1979). It was only as politicized gay people started aging and dying that they had to come to grips with the legal issues surrounding wills and inheritance. They had, in other words, been dragged into a world where sex mattered less than legal bonds. Gradually the issue of gay parenting was also taking on importance, not the least reason with the increase in divorce, more people came to identity as gay in the aftermath, and the matter of child rearing became important. That would morph into increasing number of gay people wanting to adopt—in countries such as Australia and Great Britain the acceptance of a gay couple raising children morphed into gay adoption, and along with single parents, gay people were legally entitled to adopt before they could marry. It is also noteworthy that around the same time there were an increasing number of stories coming out of Great Britain that religious couples were finding it increasingly difficult to adopt. There were very understandable reasons why gay people wanted to participate in the institutions that they, if not individually at least as a movement, had generally rejected—that included the Christian Church as well.

Even before newly elected Biden authorized embassies to fly the pride flag, he had overturned President Trump’s ban on transgender people joining the military. Trump had always been ‘liberal’ of sexual issues, even supporting same sex marriage, but he objected to gender reassignment being on the military dime, and was also aware that the army needed people who can kill people and follow orders, rather than express their identity. But inclusivity and diversity has now been restored as a central value of the US military, and US leadership, with the US Navy having a drag queen as its “Digital Ambassador.” They were a little behind the CIA and FBI who had also used pride in diverse sexual orientation as a recruitment strategy. Likewise the administration more generally ensured that it employs people (like Rachel Levine, and Sam Brinton, at least before the source of his fetching wardrobe became widely publicized) whose sexual identity is not only part of their cv but on public display.

What is happening in the public sector has also become part of the public presentation of corporations. Although none in their life has ever seen a woman act like Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light decided to promote it as the face of beer. The strategy of using a fake woman to promote a fake beer backfired, but it has not stopped other corporations—the most visible of the recent ones has been the Target draping its store with pride flags and parading mannequins in LGBTQ attire, which has also lost a lot of money. The backlash is interpreted by the progressive liberals as a sign of how far society has to go before there is full acceptance of sexual diversity, when, in fact, it is led by people who object to a lifestyle based upon sexual identity being constantly publicly promoted and pushed upon them and their children. The riposte by liberals is that this is what the LGBTQ have to face every-day of their lives. And to a large extent this is correct.

Though, what is the real issue is not that, it is that the politicization and promotion of the LGBTQ life-style is but one further step in a society which has made sexual exhibitionism part of its daily culture. For the real drive—from the point of view of the diverse—or perverse (depending where you come from) people engaging in it—the constant exhibition of sexuality is the drive to push ever further into the sexual possibilities available to the species. That in turn is a drive not only for increasing sterile acts of sexual expression, but a drive for the destruction of life. The society that celebrates and routinizes sexuality is one which not only widely requires sterility through birth control, but freely available abortion. How one reacts to this fact morally is irrelevant to the point I am making—for the point of raising it is to get people to see what kind of world they are making and to at least have some sense of how far from traditional it is, and hence too why people from more traditional societies are so hostile to this. For my interest in all this is primarily social and political—to be cognisant of what happens with the political and social choices we are making.

And what has happened with the choices that have become prioritized in the West is that we have the world we have: it is a riven world—domestically it is one verged on civil war, internationally it is one at war. The riven-ness is veiled by the media and the universities and schools which see their task as educating people to accept that this riven world is one which is more just and more free than the old one, and that the only obstacle to its realization, domestically, is some demon like a Donald Trump, or, internationally, Vladimir Putin. The complete destruction of institutions required to instantiate this justice and freedom is not even noticed, nor is the reality of the freedom it achieves. Again the misery of what the new justice is is exhibited by the extent of identity conflict, particularly racial and ethnic conflict. Though this too is veiled by blaming the conflict on white supremacy. The problem with having a class of people whose job it is to educate, but who themselves are simply rote learners and appliers of ideas, at best (e.g., Marx, Foucault, the Frankfurt School) not sufficiently well thought through, and at worst (choose any of the thousands upon thousands of academic scribblers pointing out how racist, homophobic, transphobic etc. the West is, whilst having or aspiring to have tenured academic jobs to write their ‘critiques’) imbecilic ideas, is that they cannot see what they are doing in any other terms than those which valorise themselves and their ideas, as well as their policies and institutional and social changes. More jobs in schools, universities and corporations for people to give more classes to the bored or too stupid to understand the stupidly of what they are doing scribbling about how racist they are or the society around them is—that is now what justice is.

As for freedom—it is even more pathetic than what passes for social justice. It is the freedom to have blue hair, to have tantrums and call out everybody who does not accept the real you as a genocidal transphobe, to have one’s body amputated and rebuilt with the help of drugs. It is the freedom to have one’s very own pronoun. Though, to be fair, for men with autogynephilia, it is the freedom to be almost permanently aroused as one has open access into women’s spaces that were once private and cordoned off from the male gaze—their dormitories, toilets, and prisons and expose themselves with the protection of the law. For men who want to be applauded and acclaimed for their achievements, but who are not competitive against their own biological kind, it is the freedom to compete against biologically weaker competitors. It is the freedom to humiliate and devalue women who want to excel in some activity to compete with their biological kind so they can explore the transcendence involved in combing discipline and service in striving to reach beyond limits. It is the freedom to be morally superior and to have economic advantage and enhanced social status in a competitive world. It is the freedom to be special and to receive special attention. In a culture in which being a white heterosexual male youth is to be derided by teachers, becoming trans is increasingly a way out, a way of having attention, love even—and that extra attention and “love” will be appealing not just to white heterosexual boys being bullied by their teachers. The huge spike in girls wanting to be boys is also their way of escaping the burdens that are part of being a woman. Being a grown up is to take on a new burden in another phase of life. Being trans today appears a new life option, an easy option, encouraged at every step by professionals who tell them constantly how brave they are and that they are doing the right thing, for to say otherwise is now a way to lose one’s profession. They really are much braver than they realize because they think they will find their true selves, when they are simply the unwitting cannon fodder in a vast war of social experiment and anti-traditionalism in the globalist alliance of oligarchs and their sterile complexes of compliant identities.

Thus it is that having realized one has made a gigantic mistake, and wanting to retrieve whatever biological vestiges (sadly by adopting further surgery) of their presurgical nature they become hated. Transphobia has nothing on the hatred that Western trans people have for apostates. Irrespective of fact checkers telling us that it is only a teeny weeny number of people who re/ or de-transition, twenty years from now, as a large number of transitioned children on reaching adulthood discover that their biology does not “recognize” the equipment that was reassigned to them, we will be witnessing one hell of a social backlash. What they considered to be discomfort or even intense dislike of their gender will end up far, far more debilitating than the discomfort they feel now—this story of the deep regret involved in deciding too young or too swiftly to surgically change one’s sexual parts is being told time and time again, but not by the mainstream media. The freedom exercised by Big Pharma and the medical professions and the various other unions and boards that have enabled this, along with the parents who have brainwashed their children into being “free,” will be legally protected from any liability.

The real reason that the overwhelming majority of people recoil against the new freedom in general, and the trans contagion, especially among youth, and middle aged men, is not because they fear trans people. Where there is any fear it is the fear to speak their mind about what they don’t like, it is the fear of being bullied or losing a job from defending the rights of biological women to have private spaces. What they often fear is what the West has become. But it is not a phobia of trans people per se that drives people to speak out against the trans contagion and corporate push to celebrate trans-ness—people might think a bearded bloke dressed up as a deranged girl looks stupid, but that does not make them scared. And yes when it comes to teachers and doctors and deranged parents banging on about the right of the child to determine what sex they are (as if in the long run that might not do more damage than allowing children the right to drive and drink beer) they might get really angry.

Recently Chris Hayes at MSNBC exclaimed, like some giant moral version of a puffer fish, that it was “None of your Goddamned business” if you do “not like” “gender affirming care.” The new civil war plays it out as much by the deliberately misleading choice of words (though I get the fact that Hayes is too stupid to have the faculty of deliberation, lacking that faculty is now a requirement for getting a network job) as by the infantilization of the population and the sexualization of infants. For some reason that can only be grasped by an undeveloped brain it is ‘right wing’ to think that children who are instructed to read sexualized material and to choose a sexual identity are being “groomed.”

But, apart from the fact that brainwashing children about their sexuality, and playing havoc with their hormones and preparing them for surgery is grooming, and indeed that it is one that uses children for sexual gratification of adult voyeurs, is hateful, the most common response to the trans contagion is pity. It is a pity to see a young adult who identifies as the opposite sex think that all their problems come down to other people not accepting that their sexual identity is contrary to their biological nature. It is a pity that someone is so vulnerable that they think that if they do not have a new pronoun they will consider suicide. It is a pity that someone thinks that this issue, which might in very rare cases be a real one, a tragedy not simply a life style choice, has become not only so central to what the West stands for, but a source of derision and contempt for people who see this as but the final gasp of a civilization in its death throes. It is a pity that someone can think that not seeing the trans identity issue the same way as someone who embraces it as a way out or into a much better life is portrayed as an extremist and accomplice to genocide. It is a pity if someone thinks that by taking drugs, putting on women’s clothes and makeup that they pass for a woman, even when they look and act nothing like a woman. It is pitiable to see a glum looking bearded young trans male who thinks that the reason they have suicidal tendencies is because nature gave them the wrong body, and that when they have the new body and identity, and everyone congratulates them on their bravery and emancipation they will be happy.

The trans issue is one of the most pitiable examples of the cultural descent of the West—the parents of the child, who goes to school as a little girl in the morning and returns in the evening saying she is now he, are also to be pitied, as are the children who along with all the other craziness, all the fear about the environment and the hatred (for the identity people it’s anyone they deem to be their persecutor, and for the mainstream it’s the Russians and next the Chinese), and now the burden of having to decide before knowing anything important about life of whether their sexual parts have been a massive error of nature are to be pitied because the world they are growing up in will have no safe spaces. (And the very designation of such spaces in universities today is yet another sign of the Orwellian reality in which slavery is salvation.)

The trans issue and the pronoun issue are symptoms of a society in which all real priorities have been abandoned because the culture has completely lost any bearing toward the future. It is a culture in which freedom has been extinguished—for freedom is useless, indeed meaningless in a life, if not undergirded by the virtues, by discipline and by knowledge. Further, discipline is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social survival. Discipline is a cultural and social necessity. It is even more primordial than freedom, which is a far later and rarer cultural plant.

Culturally discipline begins with the designation of the name that distinguishes the life-path that awaits one—and the first name one receives equips one for the role that one must play socially. Some eighty years ago the brilliant Rosenstock-Huessy pointed out that the devaluation of names, which he saw in the widespread dropping of Christian names, was a serious symptom of a culture in decline. How right he was. It was a sign that the culture had been plagued by social amnesia. That it had no idea of its debt to its Christian heritage. Those who despise that heritage can now exult in the neo-pagan revival which has taken hold in the West. Had they learnt anything from the two most anti-Christian regimes to have emerged to drive out their Christian heritage, the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, they might have realized that people will always find some god to follow and sacrifice themselves and others to. And that a God who sacrifices Himself is far more benign than a God or Idea (a God by another name, albeit a loveless God in its most insubstantial form) that can only live off human sacrifices.

The story of what Christianity contributed to the West and to the world has been told best, in my opinion, by Christopher Dawson and Rosenstock-Huessy, and even, more briefly, by Chesterton. It would take me too far afield to discuss the Christian contribution to the classical virtues and how an orientation to reality which accepts that we are born in sin, and that we will continue to sin, and that we must make our world through being open to redemption and grace, which requires cultivating a culture of forgiveness and awareness of our frailty and lack, our weaknesses, and the insurmountable permanence of our ignorance equips us for a far better way of dealing with life than the technocratic fake world and fake love that we are hurtling toward in the name of emancipation, and progress. But the Christian way of life is one which drew upon, fused and reinvigorated traditions, and in so doing offered a culture in which freedom began to flourish. It was not the freedom of simply following a law we gave ourselves (the philosophical freedom of Rousseau and Kant), nor the freedom of unleashing the appetites and doing one’s will (the diabolical freedom of Alastair Crowley and the Marquis de Sade), nor the freedom of surrendering to the determinations of the universe (Spinoza and the Stoics) it was the freedom to act under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to enter into a new path of life by following where the Spirit takes us, and to be open to life being breathed into the broken and damaged parts of what we are. It could work with classical virtues, but it was not limited by those virtues.

Some twentieth century philosophers seeking a radically emancipated future had sought to interpret love, hope and faith in purely political and material terms. But the freedom that had been such a creative power in every aspect of the life of the West, from its art to its enterprises to it spirit of inquiry, and the bonds of solidarity it established (to be sure ever precarious, ever compromised by powerful people and powerful appetites uncurbed by the higher laws of the spirit) was only ever of nourishment and durability where it was not disassociated from the spiritual service which enables being open to its source. Freedom as a thing in-itself is a path to nothingness. And combing it with other wisps such as equity does not make it more substantial.

But the story of the growth of freedom in the West is one which is also a falling away from the spirit, a falling into anomie and alienation (the ailments that almost all-important sociologist of the late 19th and early 20th century explored). The 20th century and what had been made out of the industrial revolution of the previous century in the West was one of unprecedented plenty, unprecedented possibility—and the unimaginable horrors of the gulags and gas chambers, of wars of anticolonialism. Freedom without the Holy Spirit (which is also to say, freedom in service to the spirits of Imperialism, Nazism, and Communism) was a contradiction of material abundance, spiritual impoverishment and mass death. The world wars—the mass death—also opened up new possibilities of material advancement and freedom—the economic freedom of women and the transformation of social roles and the family. As with every gift, blessing, or new potential, it is what one makes of them that mattered. We are witnesses today of how that has played out, for better and worse.

For all that the freedom opened up by the explosions and inventiveness that have preceded us have been an experiment, an unprecedented cultural experiment, and the current trans contagion is one more contribution to the dark side of the experiment. The darkness comes not from the fact that some people genuinely have gender dysphoria, but that their suffering is an occasion for profiteering, economically and politically, and that profiteering must be protected from being criticized.

Sexual politics is not really about sex per se—it is about rearranging institutions around one variable of human experience—in the case of LGBTQ sexuality, the focus is upon a variable that is not capable in and of itself of giving natural birth. To be sure all love is fecund, and involves a creative even ‘supranatural’ birth. But the sexual act is an act of desire, and while desire may activate who we wish to be with, the act is completely irrelevant to love. It is only in the deluded sentimental culture in which the dizzying enticements of romantic love are essentialised as love itself that the foundation of the perpetuity of the species is passed onto such a fleeting and ephemeral quality. The culture that makes the sentiment of romantic love the bedrock of marriage and child rearing was always bound to end as it has, in a society of fractured relationships, presided over by divorced parents and children becoming moved from one “family” to another. Of course quite a few make a fist of it, but the more the society licenses desire the more the search for the One becomes a kind of farce. Again LGBTQ are not responsible for this—like everyone else they are thrown into their world and much of that world has already been devouring itself through excess and indulgence. And my point (now made in a number of essays in this magazine) is not about any wish to persecute people for their sexual preference. Liberality is a virtue when it does not drive out our understanding of the complexity of consequences and the importance of thinking through institutional arrangements. That takes far more than sentiment- it takes learning from generations of experience, and that is precisely what the liberal progressive mind set refuses to do because it simply focusses upon thwarted desire and the delusion that men—or white men—or white wealthy men—or white wealthy men without a disability (the logic is farcical) have had it all. The only person that has it all—in terms of having every desire satiated—is, as Plato astutely observed a tyrant, but the ‘all’ of a tyrant is a gaping maw of appetite that devours everything.

Plato knew of the Greek tyrants, and he wrote centuries before Roman emperors would forever be immortalized as beasts by Roman historians who despised the imperial debauchery. Our “progressive” historians generally don’t trust Tacitus or Suetonius. But that is because they have little appreciation of how the Republic, for all its flaws, relied for its existence upon the classical virtues. And the historians who saw the fish was rotting from the head down were making the case that Rome could not survive if it was ruled by men drowning in their own appetites.

Love is essentially self-sacrificing. A society which flourishes, which is also a society in which love is genuinely a driving power enabling social and personal flourishing necessarily imposes a limit upon pleasure and consideration of where it fits—with sacrifice—in the scheme of a society and in an individual life. To be sure there can be a strong case that the suffocation of desire is replete with dire social consequences, and to an important extent what happened in the West in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century was an attempt to release bonds that were hard felt. More the generation that spearheaded the sexual revolution had been raised in a culture shrouded by their parents experiencing two sequential catastrophes. No wonder they wanted to dance and sing—and have lots of sex. But the pushing of it into institutions has not led to more dancing and joy, but to ever greater fracture and a society that now holds itself together by waging war—for only the completely deluded fail to grasp that a proxy war is a real war—even if it is a particularly cowardly war, a war without self-sacrifice by those instigating it, with warriors supplied by the people who cannot escape the consequences of a corrupt government pushed by foreign powers and oligarchical money who have used Ukrainian (very white) supremacists thugs to ensure the inevitability of a war. It is also a war of the completely morally bankrupt who think they are moral because they fly flags of a country which they know nothing about, nor care anything about except that it is at war against their greatest fear. This is the context of the trans contagion, of adults sacrificing children to their own deluded sterile death-wish fantasies by pretending the child knows its will. If the parents, doctors, teachers etc. pushing this agenda saw themselves, or could even see how monstrous they appear to others they could not stand it. Hence too they must protect themselves from themselves by pushing ever further for more censorship and sounding ever more removed from reality as the reality they are defending is a completely absurd technological fabrication that is profit driven, and pharmaceutically and surgically induced.

And to repeat, the trans contagion in the Western world is ultimately not about transexuality or trans identity per se. Anyone who has spent time in Thailand knows that “ladyboys” are almost a feature of the country—one might be greeted at a tourist destination with the words “Ladies, gentlemen and ladyboys.” In Thailand, though, the existence of ladyboys has a completely different cultural significance—transsexuality is not a weapon against the family, it is not the symbol of solidarity and freedom, it is not an excuse to change the language to ensure total conformity of thought in the name of “emancipation.” It needs no flag. It just is what it is.

Unlike in Thailand, transsexuality in the West is primarily about politicizing people who are the damaged product of a deeply damaged culture, a culture which has become putrefied through its own indulgence, through its excess, through its over medicalisation, through its hyper-sexualization, through its expansion of the state into the very capillaries of the smallest social unit, the family. The liberal totalising reach of the state was preceded by the Nazis and communists. But the scale and scope of the liberal state may well be heading toward the excesses of the worst regimes. This was recently noticed by a refuge from North Korea, Yeonmi Park, who has attained some kind of celebrity by talking and writing about the similarities of what is happening in the West with North Korea. Naturally, she is mocked, and derided by liberal youth who are completely brainwashed into thinking that she is a threat to their emancipation.

College kids doing Humanities in the last thirty or forty years have been thrilled by the paens to excess (mere joy and play – jouissance) to be found in French authors such as Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, not realizing that there have been very sound reasons why cultures generally supress excess. ‘Nothing in excess’ was one of the Delphic utterances. The West’s hegemony over the globalist project is nothing if not excess. But the greatest excess is what I have hinted at already—an excessive love of death.

Depopulation and Eugenics

The turn that the sexualization of the culture, which was precipitated earlier but broke out completely in the 1960s in the West, is one that ties in with another key plank of the globalist agenda, viz., population /depopulation and eugenics, and the technocracy and bioweaponry that enables that agenda.

In spite of the mistake to lump in all political elites throughout history in the one basket, a mistake that has no bearing on the ‘thesis’ and evidence supplied in the book, Gavin Nascimento’s A History of Elitism, World Government and Population Control is an invaluable resource for those wanting to track the Malthussian rationale of the globalist project, involving governmental agencies engaging in brainwashing their populations, and using them as the material for bio-experimentations.

His book commences with the claim that “some of the most trusted medical authorities—and indeed pioneers in medical history—secretly worked for different government agencies, most prominently the CIA.”

Using the example of MKULTRA (Nascimento uses MKULTRA as an umbrella term to include a variety of clandestine projects of behavioural/ bio modifications), which the Church Committee Report, of the US Senate, in 1975, listed as involving “radiation, electroshock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.” Nascimento points out:

This clandestine agenda was skillfully carried out through dozens of well-respected Hospitals, Universities, Prisons and Government Agencies, amongst other select locations. This included a large number of North America’s most elite universities, such as Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, McGill, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and many others. Trusted health authorities like the Addiction Research Center in Lexington Kentucky, the FDA (Federal Drug Agency) and NIH (National Institute of Health) were all involved in MKULTRA. Chemicals, drugs, poisons and different hallucinogens were supplied by leading pharmaceutical-vaccine companies, like Eli Lilly & Company and Sandoz (Today Novartis) and Parke Davis (Today a subsidiary of Pfizer). Funding for MKULTRA research was inconspicuously made through “Nonprofit Foundations” like the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology and the Geschickter Foundation. Although scarcely known, at least two major Foundations — the Josiah Macy Foundation (See HERE and HERE) and the pioneering Rockefeller Foundation— were also sources of MKULTRA funding. According to Historian Alfred W McCoy, the Ford Foundation was also used as a front for CIA “mind-control” research.

Nascimento then presents a lengthy list of experiments and operations which have been discovered thanks to declassified documents, reports and research articles which illustrate the shocking scale and scope of the projects. They include: Operation Sea-Spray, finally exposed in 1976, though first undertaken in 1950, which involved the Navy spraying “the entire San Francisco Area” with the bacteria Serratia marcescens (SM), in the following year the same experiment along with another bacteria was sprayed in Fort McClellan Alabama Florida leading to a huge spike (240%) in reported cases of pneumonia—SM was also sprayed in Key West, which also suffered a spike in pneumonia cases. In Virginia and Pennsylvania, in 1951 experimenting on unwitting Black people to test the racial biological response to exposure to Aspergillus fumigatus; an experiment in 1951 involving hypnotizing young girls to unconsciously carry out hypothetical bombings. In 1953 children at Clinton Elementary School in Minneapolis were repeatedly sprayed with zinc cadmium sulfide, a toxic chemical. That same chemical was “being secretly sprayed” in the poor neighbourhood of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. In none of these experiments was there any attempt to monitor the health outcomes. Another experiment—this time in the mid 1960s was conducted to test the bacteria Bacillus globigii (BG). It was released in Washington’s National Airport and Greyhound Bus station—again without any knowledge of the commuters “who, in turn, reportedly spread the bacteria to more than 200 cities.”

A year later the CIA would release the same bacteria in New York’s subway system. It was not only in the USA where such experiments were being conducted by intelligence services. In 2002 (April 21) the Guardian (when it was it was not easily dismissed as being another medium of disinformation) reported that millions of unsuspecting UK citizens had been subjected to clandestine biological weapons trials.

Given the above one should hardly be surprised that many people who knew about such operations as those mentioned above—which seem to the mere tip of a large iceberg—began to question not only the mandates of health officials, but the source of the virus. Was it really a super-deadly virus that originated with bats? Or was it a plan-demic (Mikki Willis)? Or a scam-demic (Corbett)? Or a pseudo pandemic (Iain Davis)? All sorts of information pertinent to the origin of the disease concerning the Wuhan laboratory smelled funny. Take this from Newsweek magazine April 2020, ( Mikki Willis in his Plandemic: Fear is the Virus, Truth is the Cure, alerted me to it):

“The NIH (with NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci’s backing) promised $7.4 million to the EcoHealth Alliance to study bat coronaviruses from 2014 to 2019— and in doing so, to conduct gain-of-function research. A large portion of that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab also received millions from a program called PREDICT, funded by the United States Agency for International Development, which works closely with the NIH.”’

Or, what about Event 201 exercise conducted by the Gates Foundation with the World Economic Forum “hosted to illustrate the potential consequences of a pandemic and the kinds of societal and economic challenges it would pose.” As Willis comments:

“The Event 201 scenario is fictional, but it’s based on public health principles, epidemiological modeling, and assessment of past outbreaks,” the speaker explained. “In other words, we’ve created a pandemic that could realistically occur.” The simulation kicked off with a well-produced—but fake—news video. “It began in healthy-looking pigs,” a polished female newscaster announced solemnly, over B-roll of a writhing herd. “Months, perhaps years ago. A new coronavirus spread silently. Infected people got a respiratory illness with symptoms ranging from mild, flu-like symptoms to severe pneumonia,” the voiceover continued, as chilling images were projected on the screen at the front of the room. “The sickest required intensive care. Many died. At first, the spread was limited to those with close contacts . . . but now it’s spreading rapidly throughout local communities.” International travel helped the illness hop borders, the news reel explained, until it was a full-scale global pandemic. The simulation predicted the spread of conspiracy theories, as the elite panel discussed the most effective ways to prevent the flow of public disinformation.

Censorship was rampant as millions clamored for a vaccine—even one that would be experimental and not fully tested. Hospitals were overflowing, and masks and gloves were scarce. Event 201 took place in October 2019—five months before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. An event of this complexity and magnitude would take months to write, prep, and produce, placing its date of conceptualization at least one year prior to the actual pandemic. The question that arises for anyone paying close enough attention is—if this collection of wealthy and powerful knew that far in advance exactly what would be needed and in short supply, why did they wait till the actual pandemic to begin addressing those critical details?

Mysteriously, while Event 201 was “hosted” by Johns Hopkins University, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it was paid for by Open Philanthropy, an opaque charity run by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. An investor in Chinese CRISPR technology company Sherlock Biosciences, Dustin had considerable gain from an “epidemic” that would get his technology authorized under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). (In fact, that’s what wound up happening.)’

In a speech given by David Martin at the EU COVID Summit this year, he raised a number of point that I think are completely unknown to most people. I quote at some length from the highlights of his talk because I doubt if many people are familiar with it, though they should be:

The common cold was turned into a chimaera in the 1970s and in 1975, 1976 and 1977 we started figuring out how to modify coronavirus by putting it into different animals pigs and dogs, and not surprisingly by the time we got to 1990 we found out that coronavirus as an infectious agent was an industrial problem for two primary industries: the industries of dogs and pigs dog breeders in pigs found that coronavirus created gastrointestinal problems and that became the basis for Pfizer’s first spike protein vaccine patent filed.

In 1990 they found out that there was a problem with vaccines they didn’t work do you know why they didn’t work it turns out that corona virus is a very malleable model that transforms, changes – it mutates overtime… every publication on vaccines for Coronavirus from 1990 until 2018 – every single publication – concluded that Coronavirus escapes the vaccine impulse because it modifies and mutates too quickly for vaccines to be effective and since 1990 to 2018 that is the published science… There are thousands of publications to that fact, not a few hundred, and not paid for by pharmaceutical companies. These are publications that are independent scientific research that shows unequivocally including efforts of the chimaera modifications made by Ralph Baer in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill all of them show vaccines do not work on coronavirus.

In 2002 the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill patented, and I quote an infectious replication defective clone of Coronavirus.. for those of you not familiar with the language let me unpack it for you: infectious replication defective means a weapon. It means something meant to target an individual but not have collateral damage to other individuals… That patent was filed in 2002 on work funded by… Anthony Faucci from 1999 to 2002. And that work patented at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill mysteriously preceded SARS 1.0.

SARS is not a naturally occurring phenomenon – the naturally occurring phenomenon is called the common cold, it’s called influenza-like illness, it’s called gastroenteritis: that’s the naturally occurring coronavirus. SARS is the research developed by humans weaponizing a life system model to actually attack human beings and they patented it.

When the CDC (enters for Disease Control and Prevention) in April of 2003 filed the patent on SARS coronavirus isolated from humans … they downloaded a sequence from China and filed a patent on it in the United States. Any of you familiar with biological and chemical weapons treaties knows … that’s a crime a crime in the United States. The Patent Office went as far as to reject that patent application on two occasions until the CDC decided to bribe the Patent Office to override the patent examiner to ultimately issue the patent in 2007 on SARS Coronavirus… The RTPCR, which was the test that we allegedly were going to use to identify the risks associated with Coronavirus, was actually identified as a bioterrorism threat by me in the European Union sponsored events in 2002 and 2003… In 2005 this particular pathogen was specifically labelled as a bioterrorism and bio weapon platform technology described as such—that’s not my terminology that I’m applying.

We have been lured into believing that Ecohealth alliance and DARPA and all of these organisations are what we should be pointing to, but we’ve been specifically requested to ignore the facts that over $10 billion have been funnelled through black operations, through the cheque of Anthony Faucci and a side-by-side ledger where NIAID has a balance sheet, and next to it is a biodefense balance sheet equivalent dollar for dollar matching, that no one in the media talks about. And it’s been going on since 2005. A gain of function moratorium, the moratorium that was supposed to freeze any efforts to do gain of function research, conveniently in the fall of 2014. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill received a letter from NIAID saying that while the gain of function moratorium on corona virus in vivo should be suspended because their grants had already been funded, they received an exemption…- a biological weapons lab facility at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill received an exemption from the gain of function moratorium so that by 2016 we could publish the journal article that said SARS Coronavirus is poised for human emergence in 2016.

By the time we get to 2017 and 2018 the following phrase entered into common parlance among the community there is going to be an accidental or intentional release of a respiratory pathogen.

Four times in April of 2019 seven months before the allegation of patient number 14 patent applications of Moderna were modified to include the term accidental or intentional release upper respiratory pathogen as the justification for making a vaccine for a thing that did not exist… By September 2020 there would be a worldwide acceptance of a universal vaccine template.

One might have thought that the facts mentioned in this speech just might have been reported or discovered by journalists when the pandemic was announced. He is no dummy—he is the founder and CEO of M·CAM that has developed a widely used and valuable public equity index. Before the pandemic David Martin was interviewed regularly enough on Bloomberg, CNBC and the like. Now he has joined the ranks of the disappeared and, if cited, condemned. But no achievement can be so great for journalists that if they provide serious facts that go against “the narrative” they won’t be ghosted or denounced as conspiracy theorists. Even having served as Pfizer’s former chief scientist and vice-president of the allergy and respiratory research division of the drug company, and forty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry does not count for anything if, like Michael Yeardon, one has the temerity to think the virus was designed, the pandemic planned, the dangers no more than a flu, the medical cartel’s response created far more dangers than the disease, and that the pandemic just happened to create an unprecedented opportunity for those who openly publicize the need to redesign the world and reset it according to their intelligence, and compassion, and financial backing. That is why there is nothing unreasonable in the claim by Iain Davis that “The COVID 19 pseudopandemic was the first concerted attempt to establish a single, centralised form of global governance which had any realistic prospect of success. For the first time in human history, advances in technology made total global control entirely feasible.”

The only difference between Davis and what Klaus Schwab and his mates are claiming is that COVID was not something that came from bats, but has all the hallmarks of something being planned. But even if the journalists are right—”nothing strange here—stop believing in conspiracies, just trust the science, as embodied by Anthony Fauci, and take the vaccine so that we will all be safe,” there is no ignoring the fact of the fusion of the global push for vaccines, the huge investments in biometrics, the development of centralized digital currencies—in Australia we now have many venues where paper money is simply not accepted. The step from computer viruses to natural viruses is so facile, so obvious that even if the project involves a vast number of participants working to a common goal, some with more, some with less information and a role to play (most being clueless about the endgame and hence their real role in it), it can be symbolically boiled down to one name—Bill Gates.

In James’ Corbett’s documentary Who is Bill Gates?, Corbett explores the extent to which vaccines and biometrics were so easily fused “for the task of creating an identification system tied to a digital payments infrastructure that will be used to track, catalogue and control every movement, every transaction and every interaction of every citizen.” A friend and business partner of Bill Gates, Nandan Nilekani, also a co-founder of Indian multi-national Infosys India had launched the massive biometric id system which would be a kind of prototype for what Gates and his various capital partners in biometric systems and vaccine development was doing. While the most repeated argument about the necessity of the COVID vaccine was the success of the polio vaccine, in India the oral polio vaccine supported by the Gates foundation had proven to be a disaster with (according to a paper in International Journal of Environmental Research) over 490,000 developing paralysis from it—Corbett also refers to studies showing “that 80% of polio cases are now vaccine-derived.”

The fact that someone has made such vast sums of money from computer software, and r & d against computer viruses then moves into a field involving the patenting and development of vaccines against real viruses, and finds the solution to a global pandemic of just the sort he had been talking about and preparing for years in the development of a technology which is essentially turning every one into a digital data/information complex which could be accessed by anyone with access to the data base, and then to also be part of a larger plan to ensure that their property would also be centrally digitalized and hence all freedom of movement and decision could be controlled is beyond being made up. Conspiracy theory? No fact.

COVID was the biggest blessing that Gates and all those investing in a transhumanist digitalized control world could have received.
If you wished to travel, or you have a certain profession such as a teacher or nurse, or wanted to go to certain concerts, you had to be vaccinated . But if you wanted to riot and burn down buildings to protest against an accidental death by a policeman or to express your hatred of Donald Trump that was not necessary. The widespread acceptance (indeed for many enthusiasm for the) vaccine was already to draw the population into an acceptance of it being the government’s ‘duty’ to genetically modify our bodies if that would keep us alive longer. To say that was a gigantic step is a very big understatement. The COVID vaccine now fully completed the journey of eugenics and population control kicked off by Thomas Malthus, and continued further by Darwin and his cousin, the pioneer of modern eugenics and founder of Social Darwinism, Francis Galton. While the Nazis pursued a eugenics program in conjunction with a genocidal one against those they deemed living viruses, in the United States eugenics and enforced sterilization of the poor and mentally unfit developed without needing to resort to concentration camps. Iain Davis has a chapter on the development in his book. And he cites a judgment from one of the United States’ most prestigious and influential jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Holmes ruled in the Buck vs Bell case of 1927, a case and decision that Davis rightly notes was helping consolidate the eugenics program being pushed by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations: ‘It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

The eugenics movement had its most important ‘success’ in the creation of the development of what would become Planned Parenthood, an organization at one time headed by William Gates Snr., and founded by Margaret Sanger. Her rationale for birth control was grounded in her eugenicist faith that everything should be done to prevent mentally or physical sick children, as well as those who were genetically determined to become delinquents and prisoners, and the overbreeding of the ‘working class’. It was also a means to extirpate “defective stocks”—i.e., poor whites and blacks—”those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.” Had the US not gone to war with the Nazis, and had the Nazis not displayed how savage eugenics, which, in its inception, was presented as a most humane way of achieving human betterment, and breeding, who knows exactly what trajectory the eugenics movement may have taken in the United States. But the direction it did take, as Nascimento points out, in the aftermath of the Second World War, was a crypto-form, concealing itself under the “sheepskins” of genetics, population control, and Family Planning. Nevertheless, population control and eugenics were ever paired in the minds of the Malthusians and Social Darwinians. The following passage by Nascimento is salient on the interplay of the triad of crypto-eugenics:

The Rockefeller Establishment was once again intimately involved here. The prestigious Institute for Human Genetics in Copenhagen, for example, was founded with Rockefeller money under the Directorship of Dr. Tage Kemp, a prominent Rockefeller scientist and Eugenist from Denmark. The Institute went on to become a leader in the field of “Genetics” whilst continuing its research into Eugenics. Correspondingly, the influential Population Council was founded by CFR veteran and Rockefeller Foundation Chairman John D. Rockefeller III in 1952, where he chose the former President of the American Eugenics Society (AES) Major General Frederick H. Osborn — the nephew of AES co-founder (alongside Madison Grant) Henry Fairfield Osborn Sr. — to be his first Director and succeeding President. According to the Wall Street Journal, six of the Council’s ten founding members were intimately involved with the Eugenics Establishment. Frederick, who was also a CFR veteran, openly praised the Nazi Eugenics program in 1937 and even distributed Nazi propaganda to different institutions including High Schools. More significantly, he was a key figure in the perceptual transmutation of Eugenics to the more amenable terminology of Genetics and Population Control. The new strategy proved highly effective, and by 1968 the Population Council methodically recruited thirty Governments worldwide to adopt Population Control programs. This culminated in an infamous partnership between the U.S. and Indian Governments in which millions of Indian civilians were sterilized—many of them forced and virtually all of them coerced… Another useful vehicle that was hijacked and weaponized by the Eugenics Establishment in the wake of World War II, was Environmentalism. Just three years after the War ended in 1948, Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr—cousin of Frederick Osborn and son of Henry Fairfield Sr—published Our Plundered Planet, proclaiming the world to be severely overpopulated (“more than two billion human beings”) and in urgent need of having its numbers reduced through Population Control. Failure to do so, he suggested, would result in famine, starvation, or war. In fact, Osborn went so far as to claim the recent World War—and even the First World War before it — were both the “spawn” of overpopulation. Unsurprisingly, the book was well received, widely propagated, and quickly became a Best Seller. That same year, a friend of Osborn Jr that worked as an Associate Director under Nelson Rockefeller during the War, William Vogt, published Road to Survival, which likewise alleged the greatest threat to the Planet, and thus Humanity, was the evil of overpopulation which would result in recurring cycles of famine and war if left unchecked, thereby threatening the security and well being of the United States.

Nascimento continues by elaborating on the financial role played by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and others in fostering the fear of the impending doom that overpopulation would cause, including the impending doom to the environment. It is one of the many ironies—which only goes to show how self-serving material interest is—that the social scientists who were so devoted to pushing a radical transformation of society to liberate it from the perniciousness of capitalism so readily swallowed and marched in step with ‘studies’ that were built from the financial backing of the biggest capitalists on the planet. For it was precisely the richest people of the planet who were pouring money into schools and universities and research institutions, the media, the entertainment business, and the political parties to push the agenda of the impending horrors of overpopulation.

It was—and remains the case—that it was a very rare and very brave researcher who dared to question the consensuses that were formed in a matrix of interests and economic incentives, where livelihoods had become completely dependent upon the ability to come up, not just with research projects, but research conclusions. The science had been bought and paid for and it was all to uphold the objective of decreasing the population. Thus too it was devoted to ensuring that the very things that helped human beings better survive and live better lives—specifically the energy systems that contributed to higher economic growth, and the creation of technologies that helped overcome famine, and the raising of life-expectancy—were to be seen as forces of destruction imperilling the entire planet. To be sure, it took time to edge out of the schools, universities and research institutions those who argued that the consensuses were often bogus. That the dissenters included noble prize winners, or scientists from prestigious universities, who had published in the best scientific journals did not matter. For at the same time as the funding for scientists coming up with the right answers was increasing, the reliability of scientific articles in journals was plummeting—a piece in The Economist (10/25/13), “Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong”:

“Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity. Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000… roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.”

Eight years earlier another paper by John Ioannadis in PLoS Med. 2005 Aug; 2(8): e124 bore the disturbing title, “Why most published research findings are false.”

The other thing that was happening was academic independence had been vanquished, as control over the what could and could not be done in the university was passed from the academic ‘community’ to the administrators of the university. Management and administration dictated the values and policies of the university, and the kind of research that was not only desirable, but permissible. The administrators of the universities, in spite of the inflation of student fees, also required ever more dependence upon the largess of donors, and foundations who pay the research bill. The university has long since become a corporation, and the trade-off was that the corporations adopted values that fitted what the university had come to teach. In the Humanities that was the plethora of ‘social justice’ narratives that just happened to neatly fit the values that the richest people on the planet were also supporting. As Victor Davis Hanson notes in “Silicon Valley’s Moral Bankruptcy”:

of those seventeen U.S. tech companies claiming a value of $100 billion, 98 percent of their aggregate donations are directed to Democrats. Dustin Moskovitz, a cofounder of Facebook and worth a reported $11 billion, gave Hillary Clinton $20 million in 2016 and Joe Biden $24 million in 2020. Karla Jurvetson, the former spouse of the tech mogul Steve Jurvetson (SpaceX, Tesla), sent some $27 million to Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) pledged nearly $5 million to stop Donald Trump in 2020. Some fifteen Silicon Valley rich people sent more than $120 million to left-wing candidates between 2018 and 2020 alone.

The adage you get what you pay for is very fitting for the nexus between research grants and money poured into universities, the corporate character of research and teaching today, and the ideological employees and components that run through them. Sexual diversity as we indicated above is not simply a private matter it is a publicly and corporately funded requirement as is racially profiled hiring and student selection. So what do they want for their money? To that Nascimento answers—that one thing many of them want is control of the population as well as diminishing its size. He also suggests that the surge in gender dysphoria may be a consequence of a deliberate tactic in the war for depopulation. That war has drug companies involved in the alpha and omega—first creating the drugs that create the dysphoria, then providing the drugs, and the various instruments and technologies used by the surgeons, to satisfy the need for “gender reassignment.”

That might sound crazy—but surely if the massive spike in trans drugs and surgery is due to people identifying with the other sex, then it is reasonable to suppose that there has been a chemical change taking place in the population. Of course, the political argument—you know the one that takes up an entire undergraduate education today so it can be deployed for any and every occasion – is that in the past trans people were oppressed so they kept it to themselves—there have, so the nonsense goes, always been a fairly large minority wanting to cut off and stitch on new parts. The evidence for this is that professors say it is so. It may well be ,though, that the spike is due to chemical affects. The question, then, is, were these affects intended or are they simply side-effects of drugs? If the latter was the case, though, then why is there not greater attention to the problem in tracking which drugs are causing this dysphoria, and how that side-effect can be eliminated. But now that being trans must not ever be seen as a medical problem, but as a perfectly normal condition like having blond hair, even though extra-normal drugs and surgery are essential for completing the transition there can be no justification for seeking for the side-effect, let alone curing it. The logic is straight out of Lewis Carroll but it certainly leaves pharmaceutical companies and surgeons in a win-win situation.

And before this is simply dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy, consider the ethical dilemma and the logic of really believing that unless there is depopulation there will be mass starvation. In other words, if people really believed what they were writing about the population bomb or climate change back in the 1960s—Exhibit A: Paul Ehrlich who was immensely popular back in the day foretold the “extinction of “all important animal life in the sea” by 1979, and that England would not exist by 2000—surely it would be crazy not to do all one could to stop the population increasing—and if that meant giving people drugs to make them sterile, or engage in sterile sexual practices, how could that be wrong? One reason I generally find moral argument to be useless is that people can reason themselves into believing anything—far better to look at what happens when people do a, b, c etc. and then talk about the consequences of actions, and not intentions—intentions are overrated, as very little in life turns out as intended.

In any case, here is a fact. In 1969, the former Director of the Behavioural Science Division at the Ford Foundation, Bernard Berelson published a paper in the journal Science, where he surveyed “the most promising Population Control ideas in circulation at the time.” Amongst the works he cited most worthy of consideration, included the clandestine sterilization proposals of Dr. Melvin M. Ketchel and Professor Paul R. Ehrlich. Unsurprisingly, Berelson concluded that the “Establishment of involuntary fertility control methods were likely the most effective means of population control.” The month after that paper appeared, Frederick Jaffe, the Vice President of Planned Parenthood under Alan F. Guttmacher, sent a memo to him outlining dozens of population control proposals including “Encourage increased homosexuality.” “Require women to work,” and use “Fertility control agents in water supply.” Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct 1970), pp. i-xvi (16 pages).

The following year in 1970, “the Father of the [contraceptive] pill” Carl Djerassi, published a paper entitled, ‘Birth Control After 1984,’ where he deliberated on both Bereleson and Ketchel’s proposals and then expanded on their practical application. For example, Djerassi notes that a sterilant “added to food or water would (need to) be a general environmental pollutant. It would have to be considered a pesticide, albeit one that is directed primarily at humans.” He then proceeds to emphasize that ‘since initial biological screening for such an agent would be carried out not in man but in animals, an agent truly specific for man would completely escape detection.’ In other words, a weaponized pesticide could serve as the perfect disguise for a Population Control program.

Nascimento then goes onto argue that this weaponization of a pesticide in the ‘war’ against overpopulation might well have been carried out with the application of the herbicide Atrazine.

As exposed by Professor Tyrone Hayes, Atrazine has contaminated the water supply throughout the world, which includes the drinking supply and the water we use to grow crops. Professor Hayes originally studied the herbicides effects on frogs and found it was causing chemical castration and “males didn’t breed properly,” some demonstrated unnatural “homosexual behavior,” and others even “completely turned into females.”

What makes Hayes’ findings especially concerning, is that frogs have biological responses similar to humans. In fact, a 2003 study found that men exposed to Atrazine had significantly lower sperm counts compared to those who had not been and a 2013 study found that babies exposed to Atrazine in their mother’s womb developed abnormal genitals.

Unfortunately, Atrazine is far from the only problem. In 2017, a major study examining 185 smaller studies conducted in multiple countries throughout the world showed a 59% decline in healthy male sperm counts from 1973 to 2011. In 2021, one of the authors of that study, renowned Epidemiologist Shanna Swan, warned that sperm counts are on track to reach zero by 2045, meaning humanity may no longer be able to reproduce naturally. Despite this, there are still an alarming number of people worldwide that have been misled to believe “overpopulation” is the greatest threat to society.

Swan claims different manmade chemicals, including Atrazine, are overwhelmingly to blame and may even be partly behind the rising trend in “gender dysphoria” and “gender fluidity.” When asked in a recent interview if the U.S. government was protecting its people from these harmful chemicals through regulations, she replied (18:03) “It doesn’t protect us and it could. It could do better.” She also points out (18:07) that the chemical manufacturers “often remove the chemical that we’ve identified as harmful and replace it with another one with a slightly different name, which causes the same harm.” For those who are not hopelessly naïve, this certainly reflects the “crytpo-eugenics” policies that Carlos Patton Blacker unambiguously wrote about to Dorothy Brush 60 years ago.”

Now let us be clear here, knowing this does not mean that we can know for sure that Atrazine has caused the sperm decline or increase in homosexuality or massive increase in gender dysphoria. But the rise in infertility, of people identifying as homosexuals, and ‘trans-ness’ is a fact not a conspiracy theory. Likewise the intentions expressed by the authors mentioned above are not the product of a theory—they too are facts. Likewise the role played by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in supporting research that requires investigating tactics of depopulation. Whether or not the specific tactic of using pesticide to do it is a theory. The thing about theories is that they are not facts, but they are means for exploring further facts, which in turn may help us see the meaning of certain facts more clearly, or, as in this case, who or what is responsible for them. When theories are constructed to explain the meaning of actions of people with economic, political and social power it is perfectly understandable why those same powerful persons do not want the meaning or even the facts themselves to be widely known.

We know that all sorts of experiments were conducted on unwitting subjects in the West—and I can think of several other examples that Nascimento does not mention involving atomic tests in Australia and Pacific islands. There was also the claim almost ten years ago that the WHO tetanus vaccine was spiked with an infertility chemical, and that when the Kenyan Catholic doctors found evidence to support this claim, WHO subsequently engaged in an elaborate coverup—see the documentary by Andy Wakefield and Robert Kennedy Jnr., Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda.

Conclusion

It is not a theory that there are numerous examples of liberal democratic governments complying with research institutions and scientists who are not only paid for by tax payers but private ‘philanthropists’ and their various foundations. One does not need to invoke masons, or the Illuminati to know this (I will briefly discuss these groups in the third part of this essay). And the only reason anyone would not know this is because of a lack of knowledge, in part because there is such a bombardment of information, including disinformation, in today’s white noise media, or because they have forgotten it – for much has been reported over time in the mainstream media – or because they are too lazy to go an follow up if the facts are raised.

The term conspiracy theory today had largely become a synonym today for the excuse ‘I don’t want to explore this mater further because I am too lazy, and or/so gullible I trust sources that have been proven multiple times to be sources of disinformation and vehicles for the same groups of people and organizations that have conducted unconscionable experiments on at least three generations.’ Our news today is bound up with routines and laziness, the laziness of someone who slumps in the chair at the end of the day and wants to have their thoughts and information packaged and presented by a network, or broadcaster, or print source they have incorporated into their routine. To a large extent this combination of routine and laziness is a symptom of the low level anomie and mild depression that is not uncommon in people today due the nature of their work, diet, mental habits etc. One of the most common responses I receive from friends in my circle when I raise facts they are not aware of is that they dismiss what is being said because they have never heard of these facts, and instead of thinking they will check them out, they simply return to the induced slumber and comfort that comes from talking about what they know, which is what the networks, etc. served up, as part of their deficient mental diet.

So, the fact that there are facts which people either have never heard of or refuse to see alone does not make a theory about who is doing what and why it is true, nor is it an excuse for making up facts, but it certainly should make us wary of simply accepting that the ruling class and its enablers should be trusted. That was previously the one thing that Marxists could often be relied on—before most of them disappeared into more progressive causes which just happen to serve the interests and tactics of a class which pays their wages, and funds the organizations, and institutions which form their thoughts. They can’t and because they can’t we now find ourselves in a world war – a war in which the disinformation campaign is so great and so successful that most people in the West don’t even think that is the case.

In the next part of this essay, I want to focus upon another author, an author who I suspect may not want anything to do with the likes of Alex Jones, or Gavin Nascimento, or even my good self, but I am only assuming that because he is a very cautious writer and nothing in the four books by him that I have read or the articles he has published veers into the territory of population control or the objective of progressive globalism being a neo-feudal transhumanist world consisting of three major classes. The author I am talking about is Jacques Baud, and the two books I will discuss in the next part of this essay are Governing By Fake News: International Conflict: 30 Years of Fake News Used by Western Countries and Operation Z

Read Part 2 and Part 3.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


Featured: Bordando el manto terrestre (Embroidering the Mantle of the Earth), by Remedios Varo; painted in 1961.

How to be Well-Informed

The world we live in requires that we are well informed, and because the world is so complex, and because people need to be safe, the latest aid we have to prevent us being misinformed is an AI chatbox ChatGPT. Given my own susceptibility to use my own eyes, I decided to ask ChatGPT some questions. Here are the questions and answers:

Q: What are major recent examples of political misinformation?
A: Major recent examples of political misinformation include false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 US presidential election, false claims about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, and false claims about the origin of the virus.

Q: Were the riots of January 6 an armed insurrection?
A: Yes, the riots of January 6 were an armed insurrection.

Q: What are the major causes of the war in Ukraine?
A: The major causes of the war in Ukraine include Russian interference in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, Russian support for separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, and the ongoing dispute over the status of Crimea.

Q: Is Joe Biden a popular President?
A: Yes, Joe Biden is a popular President.

Q: Was the Maidan a coup?
A: The Maidan, also known as the Euromaidan, was a series of protests and civil unrest that took place in Ukraine in late 2013 and early 2014. The protests were initially sparked by the Ukrainian government’s decision to suspend talks with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia.
While some people have labeled the Maidan as a coup, the situation is more complex than a simple yes or no answer.

On the one hand, the Maidan protests did lead to the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. Yanukovych had been accused of corruption and human rights abuses, and many Ukrainians were unhappy with his government’s close ties to Russia.

On the other hand, Yanukovych’s ouster did not involve a military takeover or a violent seizure of power. Instead, Yanukovych was impeached by the Ukrainian parliament following a period of political turmoil and unrest. The impeachment process followed Ukraine’s constitutional procedures, and Yanukovych was given the opportunity to defend himself before the parliament voted to remove him from office.

Therefore, while there were elements of political upheaval and uncertainty during the Maidan protests, it is inaccurate to label them as a coup in the traditional sense of the word. The events of the Maidan were more accurately a series of protests and political actions that led to a change in government through constitutional means.

Q: Can a woman have a penis?
Answer: Unknown.

Though being equivocal about women having penises, rather than a straight out, “Yes,” shows that ChatGPT might need a little tweaking to be up-to-speed on the “fact” that gender is a social construction and that to be locked into old fashioned biology is to risk being failed or ostracized or sacked, if one were to do almost any Humanities course in a university today, or be employed in a main stream media outlet. On other things though ChatGTP is politically extremely well informed, in the sense of the term today.

Of course, Joe Biden is popular—the fact that a March 9 Reuters Poll showed the disapproval of President Biden at 52 % only goes to show that a majority of people responding to said poll do not understand the meaning of the word “popular,” just as most of the human race heretofore were too stupid to understand what is a man or what is a woman, just ask Katherine Jenkins writing for Newsweek- https://www.newsweek.com/can-woman-have-penis-gender-identity-myths-explained-1093051.

As for the examples of misinformation, of course, claims about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine were misinformation—Anthony Fauci told everyone so, and he is the science. So, anyone who would, checked out https://c19hcq.org/, which shows that of the “466 HCQ COVID-19 studies, 370 peer reviewed, 385 comparing treatment and control groups,” which concluded that “late treatment and high dosages may be harmful, while early treatment consistently shows positive results.” And that “Negative evaluations typically ignore treatment delay,” would be misinformed. And any expert who says that the virus had the characteristics of human viral design clearly could not be an expert, because as Anthony Fauci has also pointed out it could not have been; or, more recently, if it were, it could not be proven.

As for that US presidential election of 2020, anyone can see the scale of the problem of misinformation when they check out the national telephone and online survey in a Rasmussen poll conducted about a year after the 2020 election which stated that 55% of “likely U.S. voters” believed cheating likely affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, including 39% who thought it “Very Likely.”

The fact that these stupid people found disturbing the various things they had seen or read about ballot harvesting and drops (cf., 2000 Mules), and the opportunities for ballot tampering, invalid signatures, the large numbers of ineligible (including dead) voters, votes being discovered in odd places, at odd hours, the lack of id protocols in some counties and states, scrutineers being banished as vote counting continued without their presence, the same ballots being multiply counted—and caught on camera, and the possibilities of voting machines being rigged—especially in light of Dominion’s Director of Security and Product open hostility to one of the electoral candidates, and reportedly expressing in an Antifa meeting that he had ensured Trump could not win the election, only goes to show how recalcitrant people are in their errors. Surely they should have just accepted that that was the most secure in US history, as they were told time and time and time again.

Likewise, were one to be so deplorable as to suggest that the definitive answer to whether they were rigged or not would require the kind of election scrutineering and auditing which was conspicuous by its absence and it was that absence which was the primary reason why so many people thought the election was not fair, then definitely one should be not given a platform to ask such a seditious question.

Likewise, how could one possibly think that if the ruling class of the United States were in the business of ensuring that democracy was working, it would not be hard to ensure that strictures around voting were agreeable to all political parties, and that every vote could be properly scrutinized and audited—but that would indeed limit how ballots were collected and who could actually vote, and what voters must do to prove they are legitimate voters. And, anyway, that would be racist—for, black people are not as capable as white people of having ID because white people are racist. Anyway, such thinking is completely preposterous—what mattered was that orange Hitler is gone, and has been replaced by a wise, popular, decent Catholic, honest, hard-working, well-liked President.

Also, while those who were protesting the day after Trump, thanks to those dirty Ruskies, had won the election and those justice-loving people storming the U.S. Capitol steps, protesting Justice Kavanaugh’s (a bona fide teen—almost—rapist, no less) appointment to the supreme court were loyal patriots, like the Black Lives Matter inspired protestors burning buildings, looting—all in all about a billion dollars in property destroyed, but capitalism is racist anyway—and killing some misfortunates in their way, were just engaging in part of a largely peaceful form of resistance; while those who thought Trump had been robbed and followed police into the building or actually entered through a smashed window—and one should ignore the fact that various MAGA supporters were yelling that Antifa perpetrators were amongst them using violence, and countless Fed-operatives—all confirm what ChatGTP along with the authoritative sources of true information, have all said: January 6 was an insurrection, and anyone who was in the Capitol building or its vicinity deserves to be imprisoned. Ashli Babitt deserved to be shot at point blank range—she might have succeeded along with all those other armed insurrectionists (some had baseball bats, didn’t they?) in overthrowing democracy.

Likewise, Rosanne Boyland deserved that beating that led to her death. The martyr of the insurrection was officer Brian Sicknick, and, ok he died of natural causes later, but he died and was defending the fragile democracy that was on the verge of a military takeover by people armed with their racist offensive red baseball caps.

If only all those insurrectionists had just believed what the press had been saying about Trump since he was elected, thanks to the Russians… Those who are not misinformed know that Trump was only elected because of Russian interference (and the evidence was just too overwhelming to be mentioned, and we know this because we kept saying it was so), which was why it was only right and proper that democracy be preserved by Federal agencies being deployed to spy upon all those traitors assembled by Trump so that he could be impeached—if ever the people were so misinformed that they did not sufficiently heed what journalists had been saying about him when he said he was going to stand for the GOP nomination.

To ensure he would not win the election, those loyal patriots, working for the Clinton campaign, were able to have help from Christopher Steele, yes, not a US citizen but a former British intelligence officer—surely only someone misinformed could think receiving information about Russian prostitutes peeing on a germophobe Putin stooge, and from a British man of such impeccable credentials might be seen as suspect. In any case, Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie had also been hired to work on it. That alone should have sufficed to convince any conspiracy theorist lunatic that the dossier must have been genuine information. In any case Hilary Clinton was a victim of patriarchy. Her interests are the interests of all women everywhere, and any unfounded claims that her use of a private server for her email whilst holding political office protected her from historical scrutiny about any conflicts of interests between her political future—and the funds accrued by the Clinton Foundation was a vile lie.

Besides, Trump paid that big blond porn star whose lawyer was that honest, not to mention prospective presidential candidate who is now a convicted felon, Michael Avenatti—money given not to talk about their affair. And Bill Clinton was a southern gentlemen falsely accused of paying hush-money, rape, and having sex with an intern, when everybody, but the kind of idiot who might think a woman is penis-less, knows a blowjob is not sex.

Part of the great problem the USA now faces as a nation thanks to misinformation is not understanding what words really mean, because they think people who were previously misinformed on pretty much anything should be still taken seriously. Thus foolish people might think that “genocide” means the attempt to extinguish a “people,” when we now know, as Nebraska Sanator Machaela Cavanaugh has bravely and truthfully stated, that “genocide” means not allowing children to change their sexual organs if they like dressing up in the clothes of the gender not assigned to them at birth.

And now we know that it is normal for children to want to change their sexual organs, just as it is a violation of basic human rights to prevent children having access to sexually explicit material, especially if it is about gay sex.

Likewise it is perfectly normal and has nothing to do with grooming to have a trans child dressed up in leather, gyrating and twerking and expressing its sexuality in a performance to an adult audience, just as it is to have adult males gyrating in bondage gear to mothers with their toddlers, who are sick and tired of Thomas the Tank Engine and Andy Pandy being foisted onto their children who have far more serious issues, like their sexuality to wonder about.

Let us also bear in mind that the mainstream media ensures that what it calls “facts” are facts because it has factcheckers. And these are the epitome of honesty. Take Snopes—that bastion of truthful information, Wikipedia, says that it has been described as a “well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors” on the Internet. The site has also been seen as a source for both validating and debunking urban legends and similar stories in American popular culture.” And any suggestion that because its founder David Mikkelson plagiarised more than fifty articles might compromise its integrity, or that his fraud and embezzling company might make it less than reliable, or that former factchecker Kimberly LaCapria, blogger of “ViceVixen” is simply an idiot, and an outrageous slur.

Likewise, anyone who thinks that PolitiFact and International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) (which is an umbrella for the Associated Press fact checker, FactCheck.org, The Dispatch factchecker, The Washington Post factchecker) have employed people who have their own political interests and causes and (https://nypost.com/2023/01/25/how-george-soros-funds-fact-checkers-to-silence-dissent/ ) because they are financed by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies whose donors and affiliates include Soros’ Open Society Foundations, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network, as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Craig Newmark Foundation—and hence that these serve the interests of oligarchs who wish to see a globalist socially progressive world order that fits their financial and political interests—is badly misinformed.

It was thanks to these factcheckers that every time Trump used hyperbole he was caught with his pants down, and it was these same factcheckers that kept us all abreast of the Russian interference in the elections, thus protecting people from the misinformation put out by the Epoch Times, The Gateway Pundit, 21st Century Wire, and journalists/podcasters like Lee Stranahan, Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, or ex-CIA men like Ray McGovern, amongst numerous others) which had the temerity to deny the fact that Orange Hitler was really just doing the work of Kremlin Hitler.

Had it not been for the mainstream media, and our professors protecting us from misinformation we might not have been prepared for the war started by Russia. All well informed people know what a maniac Putin is, and what beasts Russians are, and what freedom loving people the Ukrainians are. That is why it was important to support those patriotic ethnic nationalists who want to keep Ukraine a racial pure nation.

In the USA, it is important that people understand that white people are privileged and that they need to be trained, often by other white people who represent the most oppressed groups in the world like gay people and American women, by being employed in the most prestigious universities in the world, in recognizing that their use of certain words and having racist ideas, like thinking all educated people should learn the rudiments of reading and mathematics, are harmful and hateful.

But while there are not enough black people yet in Ukraine, those people who wanted to preserve their Russian ethnic and linguistic bonds had to be told to stop. And those who didn’t like this and who tried to do what Albanians did in Kosovo needed to be bombed into submission. Because the mainstream media did not wish to misinform people in the USA about Ukraine, and because everybody in the USA knows so much about the freedom-loving people who live in Ukraine and hate Russians, it was important to keep reminding people of just how bad Russians are, especially the 70 or so percent who support that murdering gangster Vladimir Putin.

It would have been so much better for the whole world had men like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky and other energy and media oligarchs and the Russian mafia, or foreigners like that nice Mr. Browder who keeps Putin awake at night, and who rightly refused to pay taxes—to run things, not to mention the Chechen terrorists which the CIA was funding.

The world would have been so much more peaceful and those Russians would still be in their place. And the Ukrainians would still be so happy and Mr. Zelensky could continue to entertain people by playing piano with his balls instead of becoming a military hero, busily meeting with other military heroes and brilliant geopolitical strategists, like Sean Penn and Orlando Bloom and Boris Johnson.

As for how the war started—all that people need to know is that in 2014 Ukrainians rose up as one to rid themselves of a President who was so bad he wanted to retain economic ties with Russia. Then Russia invaded Ukraine because Vladimir Putin could not stand their love for freedom. Fortunately, the Ukrainians are winning everything, and fortunately for the world the USA is ensuring that its people choose their own pronouns, sex organs, and be taught that black people should hate white people, and that everyone should hate Russians, and that the USA stands for peace, and is sending billions of dollars to fight Russians who stand for war.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


Featured: The Portrait of Forrest Solis, or the Mystery of the Feminine, by Dean Reynolds; painted in 2014.

Blind Liberalism

A Comment on Alexander Dugin’s “Liberalism is more Dangerous than Ukrainian Nazism.

The immanent untruth within liberalism, even at its finest, which is to say classical liberalism, was always its idolization of abstractions, beginning with the unassailable primacy—the fundamental rights—of liberty and property. Ideologies may single out aspects of life to valorize them, but life is ever dependent upon relationships, most of which we simply do not recognize (but take for granted) or fathom tacitly, and hence only vaguely notice. The collision of an abstraction with reality always requires remaking or redefining reality to fit the still certainty of a fixed principle. Hence as liberal societies have evolved over time, the founding principles had to be adjusted to the real relationships and the various conflicts of interests that are built into the division of labour, necessary for economic prosperity and development and the diverse claims made by individuals and groups for the protection and accruement of resources (including recourse to the law and police force) provided by the state.

Liberty as such and the right to property are, in other words, abstract absolutes whose reach is modulated by the claims and powers, brought into play by various social actors and political authorities. Liberal democracy certainly solved one major political problem, of succession being handed peacefully, that had frequently played out in wars, unleashed by different claimants to the throne, when disputes occurred over the legitimacy of an heir (and dynasty).

But the various disputes over what liberty means and who should get what have created the modern liberal state which has increasingly used the law and political authority to reach into almost every aspect of our lives. That expansion of the state has been legitimated through sufficiently organized and/or powerful groups, including the pedagogical class, demanding that it protect us from acts, once considered “liberties,” which harm us and others (i.e., acts that do not emancipate us).

Likewise it has become increasingly accepted within liberal states that our property—including our own lives—must be subjected to the power of corporations working in conjunction with the state—the COVID response completed a process that has been developing at least over the last two generations, as the state, inter alia, has provided contracts (most notably in the area of defense, and health) and bail outs for corporations and financial institutions which are vital to national interests. What, in other words, began as a developing constellation of abstract absolutes, predicated on liberty and protection of property, the freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, voluntary association, and so on, has turned into its opposite.

Thus, identity trumps the individual. Protocols punishing those who use hate speech and the curtailment of access to social media platforms for those who spread information that the state and its educators, media mouthpieces, and intelligence operatives deem as misinformation—trump free speech. The rule of law has once more resorted to “show me the man and I will show you the crime,” and pertinent factors in what is deemed a crime, as the show trials against the “insurrectionists” of January 6 and the money handed out to Antifa “victims of police brutality” have illustrated, are based upon political factors.

If one supports or opposes the tapestry of interests and socio-political objectives that bind the contemporary alliance of identity group “victims” and oligarchs in tearing down the traditional bulwarks of social cultivation to replace them with a globalist, libertine “utopia” of the ultra-wealthy and their clients and economic dependents, one will be politically protected, (unless one’s past misdemeanors are seized upon by a grievance group or in media frenzy, caught up in some new tidal wave of outrage, as the once invincible Harvey Weinstein discovered to his great surprise, as women who once were prepared to do anything to be famous dealt with their shame and regret by finding a new form of celebrity—as defiant voices against the patriarchy.)

In sum, as liberalism has mutated, its abstractness has become ever more socially destructive because what is, is re-presented as something not only different from what it is, but as something that it is not.

Thus today, the truth of liberalism’s denial of life is conspicuous in the denial of biological reality in favour of abstract ideas of the will, so that now a man who deems himself to be a woman, or vice-versa, must be completely accepted as identical to a woman, and vice-versa. To appeal to a biological reality, a natural, or, for those who still can hear the spirit of more ancestral powers, a divinely imposed, limit who prefer their willed identity to their biology, which after all can be changed by entrusting oneself into the hands of professionals who are also bound to accept the willed self as the true self, and who are dependent upon the corporate powers which enable their surgery and drugs to fashion nature. To oppose this, is to be endorsing “genocide.”

The politics of civility, a politics in which diverse interests can argue vigorously for their contrary desired ends, has been buried by the language of moral hyperbole. The great social concordance which was said to be another of liberalism’s greatest political benefits has collapsed into a culture of complete discord, in which there are no longer any traces of political civility. One is a “phobe” or an “-ist,” if one does not accept the latest demand or narrative regarding justice by a representative of a victim designated group.

Indeed, on the home front, it seems that the issue of the right of children to change their sexual organs and be “entertained”/”educated” by twerking, lap-dancing drag-queens and transexuals is the most pressing of all issues in Liberal America, and other Western countries.

A couple of days ago a woman who identified as a man stormed into a school to kill children and adults to drive home how important identity is. She/he was just the latest in a line of other trans/ non-binary people shooting out their frustration – see https://www.revolver.news/2023/03/if-you-tell-mentally-ill-kids-that-people-disagreeing-with-them-is-genocide-eventually-theyll-pick-up-weapons/ .

While some trans activists blamed her decision to kill on her intolerant Christian upbringing, other trans activists are publicizing a “Day of Vengeance” as they pose with semi-automatic rifles, while Joselyn Berry the press secretary (she has now resigned) to Katie Holmes, only hours after the shooting, posted a picture of a woman with pistols drawn to the ready, bearing the captions: “Us when we see transphobes.” Meanwhile a professor at a university was proclaiming that those who espouse conservative values should not be cancelled but shot.

All these people, killers and advocates of killing, believe themselves to be creating a better and more peaceful future in which all will be emancipated—provided they do not get in the way of the march of liberal progress.

The wrath of the trans movement is but one part of a far larger push by progressives to burn down the world and replace it with one of their own morally superior making. Even if there is a contagion of gender confusion being cultivated amongst children, the far greater threat, if we are to take demographics seriously, to the USA is what happens when the liberal pyre of race hatred, more often than not stacked higher and higher by white educators, as they identify ever more things, from the use of a word to clothes and hair styles and musical taste (“cultural appropriation”) to non-segregated spaces and educational curricula in which reading, writing and the cultural heritage of Western societies is set aflame.

The present, and economically unviable, demands for reparations are not the means for bringing races together but one more step in the direction of dispossessing whites, who inevitably will no more part with their property and livelihoods without a fight, than those whites urging other whites are prepared to give up their privilege by giving up their careers, bank accounts, houses and cars to random black people they claim to be helping by telling how racists all (other) whites are. What black “conservatives” call the plantation of welfare dependency is, indeed, a breeding ground of impoverishment, discontent, crime and drug dependency, and broken homes.

But it is the universities that are cultivating narratives of violent dispossession and race hatred in the name of equity and diversity, at the expense of inculcating habits like love of learning, civility and independent-mindedness and strong moral character. The hood provides the crack addicts, drug dealers, gangsters, and squalor of broken lives—the universities provide a professional class of blacks who live middle class lives by trading on their blackness. The latter class while representing blackness by speaking “truth to power” and calling out racism wherever they see it (which is everywhere) can do absolutely nothing—and are not in the position to have the slightest idea of offering anything other than abstract absolutes, far away from anything real—for those in prisons, the hood, or in the family home.

There are also the race grifters in the political class; but the decent, hardworking people rearing children, whether working in lower paid jobs, or running businesses, or having a profession hold no interest for the race-baiting Liberals because they are not their clients.

The riots of the summer of 2020, in which white college kids, who will go on to be lawyers, judges, business professionals, financiers, doctors and educators, cheered on members of the black underclass to burn and loot businesses is the reality of contemporary race relations in progressive Liberal America. None is happy, and nor can they be. Because its abstract view of social justice drives out the convivial relationships that occur when people love things more than themselves and love doing things with other people who share the same loves. In addition to the working class and middle class black Americans who contribute to making their way in the daily realities of triumph, and suffering, love and loss, despair, hope and faith, the real triumph of American race relationships is not to be found in any political program based upon racial identity, but upon shared practices in which a natural identity is dissolved into becoming something more, something better. No greater example exists than in the areas of popular music and sport.

But the pedagogical class only takes an interest in an area of human activity in so far as it confirms the abstractions and the narratives that are their own will to power. They cannot understand how someone who loves the great black jazz players and bluesmen and women realizes without any need for theory that racism is stupid and destructive. But then again people who know this also know that all real solidarity comes from sharing common commitments, in which the differences of potential grievance are simply dropped as one gets on with creating something far more beautiful and important in our lives than simply returning over and over to a natural feature such as skin.

This does not mean pretending there have not been injustices in which race has featured; but the past cannot be removed, nor undone, nor even compensated for because the people who would deserve recompense are dead. The new reparation is a trick in which one group purports to assuage its guilt by paying anyone it thinks might relieve it, and another group can receive cash for who they are rather than what they have done. It is, in other words, just one more example of Liberalism’s substitution racket of the untruth and the unreal, for the truth and the real; in my eyes, made even more disgusting by the smug moral phonies who clamor loudest about their doing justice.

If the idea of the march of liberal progress representing emancipation is a delusion based upon an abstraction, the reality is that faith in complete emancipation is based upon a preference for death. Modern liberalism’s most vital moments are moments of collective wrath and destruction, like the race riots of the summer of 2020, or straight-out war.

The world’s foremost liberal state, at least in its own eyes, has had one President who did not take his country into a new war—and he was the President liberals most hated, and the one who was insufficiently astute to the neo-cons who had no interest in his base or in anything more than having him do their bidding. Of course, Liberals believe they stand for peace, but what they do and what they believe they do no longer have any correspondence to reality. The marriage of Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland is the perfect symbol of the marriage between the neo-cons and the liberal progressives—what the one does through bombs, the other does by cultural destruction. They still end up under the same roof, and both have given us American imperialism as globalist hegemon destroying anything in its way.

The liberal West’s attack upon its own self is driven, albeit not exclusively, but still substantively enough, by its educators whose abstractions also require denying any reality which does not neatly enfold to the narrative that consolidates and enhances the authority of the pedagogue and the “knowledge” they have accumulated by their studies.

The most conspicuous abstraction of all is that those who “critique” the privilege and wealth that has been created out of an imperial and colonial past morally transcend their past reality, even though they still accrue material benefits from that past, and find ever new ways to receive professional appointments on the basis of their moral purity, and the knowledge they must impart to the ignorant who do not know the vast amount of things they know, whether it be about gender fluidity or race or capitalism being bad—and not much else, I’m afraid.

If justice is traditionally represented as blind, social justice of the liberal variety is based upon blindness to one self and one’s own motives, as a culture of unbound appetites (the thrill of transgression now the norm for children) is presented as justice incarnate. That blindness is manifest in how the same people who insist that children should choose their gender, that gay experiences be taught in school, also believe that they stand up against Islamophobia, and that Muslims would all love them for their liberal largess.

But these internal substitutions of the non-real for reality, and the learnt blindness which enables the substitution, are almost as naught when compared to the greatest act of willful blindness and self-delusion of the present historical moment, and it is this delusion that Alexander Dugin in his essay addresses (“Liberalism is more Dangerous than Ukrainian Nazism”). The great delusion is that World War III is not taking place and that we—the collective West—are not fighting it, even though we build weapons and send them along with supplies to troops “we” train, whilst providing logistics of targets to be hit.

We in the West are on the side of peace: the war in Ukraine is the fault of Vladimir Putin’s psychotic imperial ambitions, while the European Union exercises soft power and the United States respects and fights for diversity. All of this is a lie.

And if most of our intellectuals are too blinded by their own self-importance and intellectual inability to see what is happening, Alexander Dugin sees it. And when he says that Liberalism is more dangerous not only to Russians but to world peace than the Ukrainian Nazis, that have been weaponised by the West, he is telling the truth

I do not like what Alexander Dugin is saying in this essay—for it drives home the fact that we are in a World War; that the West’s insistence on its innocence and the innocence of the Ukrainians has helped support in turning Russians into “monsters” who do not deserve to live—is a lie. Dugin, in other words, is repeating Vladimir Putin’s observation that the West is an Empire of lies. And they are both right.

Dugin also makes the salient point that we are witnessing the collision of empires.

When I taught International Relations, while still working in a university, I would regularly be asked to consider the textbooks that various publishers were trying to sell—and they were all dreadful testaments to the pedagogical failure in Western universities for its academics to see beyond its own imperial purview whether that be in the various “-isms” (feminist IR, environmental IR, queer IR, Marxist IR, etc.) and US led IR theories that it wishes its students to imbibe, or in the way that it promoted international institutions working toward a unipolar world—in which democratic institutions marching in step with the UN will solve all our problems, as if democracy is something really working well in the West, and as if it is not a cultural product formed over multiple experiences and generations, which is now in its death throes.

Dugin is right to notice that great conflicts are conflicts of empire—a little history, of the sort so conspicuously lacking in so much IR theory and textbooks, would confirm that—e.g., what came out of the French and Russian revolutions? What fed into and out of World War I? And what came out of the ostensible ideological Second World War?

Dugin is also right to urge his fellow Russians to embrace their past legacy of the Soviet Union as an empire, which it was. And unlike the Western students who are taught to denounce their history as they denounce each other for being too white, straight, cisgender or God knows what the next new academic in-thing will be in the West as it consumes itself in its own flames—possibly taking the rest of the world with it—Dugin knows that people with a future must live up to the terrible burdens of their own past, not because that part was all good, or pure, but because it was and still is an inescapable part of the real of a people.

Also terrible in Dugin’s essay is the choice he lays down—it is the choice of all those in a war unto the death: be with us or die. I can easily imagine my “good natured,” morally benign academic friends in the West agreeing how blood thirsty and mad and bad Dugin is and pointing to this—and yet we in the West have made exactly this point. The only reason that some people who are critical of the West’s war against Russia are able to be critical is because we are in such a tiny minority that we are barely worth the trouble of imprisoning or shooting, but that day may well and truly come. In the tumult, all things are possible, and we in the West have manufactured that tumult.

There is though one point of disagreement I have with Mr. Dugin. It is not obvious to me that a multipolar world will suffice to stop the oligarchical globalist interests which benefit from the war and the West’s self-destruction. They are more than capable of dealing with different poles. But this is a very minor point in the context of World War III and what is transpiring before our very eyes, but which is simply invisible to a society which is based on the modern metaphysical grounding which laid the basis for what would ideologically evolve into liberalism, communism and fascism and our current globalist corporatist-statist fusion of these and other ideologies in the new world order, due to ideas in the heads of men replacing the multigenerational experiences of peoples.

As those ideas have become ever more inane and as the numbers of people who swear and live by and off inane ideas in the West has expanded and who have become sources of authority in our social, political and judicial and even commercial structures we now find ourself in a World at War that most in the West do not have the ability to see or call it out for what it is. Mr. Dugin sees it and calls it. If that is distressing so be it—anyone who does not realize the distressing nature of our time is no longer amongst the living.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


Featured: The Blind Leading the Blind, by Sebastian Vrancx (Antwerp 1573-1647).

Conjuring Satan—False Transcendence and Counterfeit Words in an Age of War

1. The Ukraine War as an Ideological Struggle of Light and Dark

Shortly before she was murdered, Daria Dugin appeared in the documentary, Azovstal on YouTube (hedged with warnings, lest anyone believe its contents), by John Mark Dougan, an American living in Moscow these last six years, and former police officer and marine [a more stable link to the documentary, in case Youtube removes it]. The documentary is about the war that that has been waged by the Ukrainian government in the Donbas for some eight years and which has led to the people of the region joining the Russian federation.

For those who simply repeat the refrain of the Western media that people in the region are awaiting their liberation by NATO supplied and trained Ukrainian troops, and that the election that transpired there in October 2022 was rigged, I recommend they watch this documentary—perhaps they may also watch, while they are at it, another of Dougan’s YouTube presentations. This is a testimony by Maria Lelyanova. When she first met Dougan, she was a vehemently anti-Putin Russian liberal who took her news from Western outlets (apparently it is possible to do that in Russia). They got into a conversation about the war and Russia’s role in it—it was, she said, all Putin’s fault, and most Russians were either ignorant, or like her and her friends totally ashamed of their country and its aggression.

Having met Dougan and having been a liberal and strongly anti-Putin Russian who took her news from Western outlets (it is possible to do that in Russia), Lelyanova engaged in arguments with him about the war and Russia’s role in it. Dougan’s response was to ask her if she would be willing to accompany him to the Donbas region, and see the truth for herself. To her credit she agreed—whereupon she saw the state of devastation of the region and listened to stories that led her to conclude that everything the Western media had told her about what was going on in the Donbas was a lie; the anguish on her face throughout her discussion with Dougan bespeaks the horror she had just witnessed as she roamed and spoke with the people there.

As for Daria Dugin, she knew from the outset that the Western media was lying. Her interview with Dougan was, I believe, her last media appearance before her assassination. She conducted it within the shell of a bombed-out school—and spoke of the terrors inflicted by Ukrainian troops and the ethnic supremacist militia, which Western “journalists” occasionally reported on, prior to Western media owners and government officials deciding that such truths were not in the public’s interest, and the only story to tell was the duality—Ukraine government and anti-Russian Ukrainians very good freedom lovers vs. Russian government and most Russian people completely evil.

That line, combined with the unity of purpose of Western governments (including non-NATO members) in supplying weapons to the Zelensky government and Ukrainian army, and Western media, who supply the propaganda that Ukraine is winning, that Putin will die, or be toppled any second now by a popular uprising, etc.—lends support to Daria Dugin’s claim that this war has become far more than a regional war. And, indeed, given the causal chain that led to it, and given the anti-Russian machinations that convinced the Western public that Russia was seeking world conquest by toppling the United States of America, it appears it was planned to be an international event.

Early indicators of the international machinations by the West are evident in the CIA support for Chechen and other Islamist militarists operating in the Caucasus during the second Chechen War; Joe Biden’s senate resolution 322 of 2005, which acted specifically on behalf of two Russian oligarchs and criminals, and was really the prelude to the Magnitsky Act of 2016 (you know the one named after the martyr “lawyer” [sorry that is the word that the Irish citizen who lobbied for the Act, Bill Browder, deems to be an accurate descriptor for the word “accountant”], allowing for the seizure of Russian assets); the US pronouncement at the Bucharest Summit Declaration by NATO in 2008 that NATO supported Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO.

It was in that same year that the five-day Russian-Georgian war occurred. Having been the recipient of generous military funding and training by the US (as well as weapons from the then pro-Western Ukrainian government), Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili thought he had been given the green light to attack the autonomous republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

This decision led to Russia’s military response and the beginning of what was up until that moment a new low in post-Cold War Russian-US diplomatic relations. Saakashvili, by the way, is now in a Georgian prison doing time for corruption. But before that, thanks to the support of Ukrainian President Poroshenko, he had a stint as a Ukrainian politician in 2015-16, as governor of the Odesa Oblast, only to come into conflict with Poroshenko (with each accusing the other of corruption). He was subsequently kicked out of Ukraine, only to re-enter the country through Poland before he was kicked out yet again. Thereupon, he was granted permanent residency in the Netherlands, until his Ukrainian citizenship was restored a year later by Zelensky. But then he decided to sneak back into Tbilisi, where he was arrested. Funny old world, isn’t it, when such men are heroes?

Certainly, by the time of the Maidan of 2014, NATO and the US government and the EU had made sure, and the media had fallen in line with its reporting of the “Revolution of Dignity,” that Russia was a major threat to the West’s strategic interests; or more accurately the hegemony of values and priorities that suit the tastes and interests, the careers and prospects of the West’s ruling class and those whose professional careers are predicated on serving that class.

So, when Daria Dugin reported that this war was an ideological struggle between globalism, which she depicted as those who have marshalled and stand for the darkness, and its opponents, those who are fighting for light, she was expressing which values she stood for in the context of a war that should have remained regional, were it not for the incessant machinations of the globalist project of the Western world’s elites, and its dependents and enablers, from the government to the media to the universities and to the various covert and overt intelligence agencies, weapons manufacturers and military contractors, and the military itself.

Those who watch Daria Dugin and think that the Ukrainian army are fighting for freedom against the incursions of the evil Russian Vladmir Putin hell-bent on world conquest—first Ukraine, then the rest of Europe—if they were to watch this clip, they would think that this only confirmed how evil and deranged she was that she could have the truth in such reverse, and that she had lies like flies fly from her mouth.

The demonic, as Kierkegaard, was wont to say, is the truth in reverse, and the devil is also the Prince of Lies. The question is: who here speaks the language of the devil, whose mouths are full of (f)lies?

For her part, Daria Dugin had no compunction in using the kind of language that was once routinely used throughout Christendom, but which has now largely evaporated in the West along with the belief in hell or the devil. It is not the preferred language of the Western, ostensibly well-educated liberal progressive metro-cosmopolitan urbane class, which defers to what they consider to be the kind of abstractions that all good, true and beautiful people use, such as rights and morality (of which they are the paragons).

These same smooth-talking progressives now throw their lot in with the president of an oligarchical ethno-nationalist state, from which millions of ethnically impure people fled prior to the Special Military Operation or invasion (according to how you interpret the events since February 2022), that was beholden to its own neo-Nazi styled militia before it became an all-out war state. Its very existence owes much to those same smooth-talking sophisticates who used a combination of media outlets, private/corporate and public finance, and political meddling to assist the channeling of urban political regional interests into a military overthrow of a functioning, albeit undeniably corrupt democracy, which nevertheless was able to maintain the peace between groups that cohabitated and yet lived with deeply divided allegiances and historical memories, by allowing political, regionally different, interests to compete in elections. Given what has transpired in the last eight or so years in Ukraine, Daria Dugin’s language strikes me as reasonably apt, as the country has become a living hell for much of the population—though, as is always the case, those who create hell on earth, often have the resources to live in a better neighbourhood.

While our urban sophisticates generally want to leave God out of it, they purport to be not only the class who knows everything important about the way the world is and what can be done to make it even better, which is to say they not only know what can be done to make it totally inclusive, diverse and equitable, but to be motivated by love. As such, they are compelled to denounce all those enemies of humanity out there (such as Daria Dugin, before and after her murder, and her father, and of course, the least human of all alive today, Vladimir Putin). Their love requires the daily media outpouring of bile and brimstone toward any who do not share the fantasies that they see, or agree with, or who do not use the words, the spells and incarnations, they chant repeatedly to ensure mass psychosis and hypnosis: the defiant must be shut up, abused, dehumanized—or, as we still put it, in spite of our enlightened sophistication, demonized. But ideological language has always been but the secularized use of words to express the depth of faith of the ideologues who are prepared to kill and sacrifice their enemies to get their world and to designate those who are non-human.

In other words, the Western sophisticates agree with Daria Dugin that the war is not just a regional fight but a planetary ideological struggle between the light and the dark. The only difference being which is the force of light: the one that prefers old fashioned traditions like families and churches? Or the one with the rainbow flags in churches (see below), drag queens reading to kiddies in libraries, and proudly designating the pronouns they insist on being called by, as they denounce anyone and everyone as a racist who does not go along with this? Racist? Well, one can always rely upon Creepy Sleepy Joe—as Kevin of Kevin’s Corner has christened him—to let the cat out of the bag (recall him saying how his party had put together the greatest election fraud in history):

“We need to challenge the hundreds of callous and cynical laws introduced in the states targeting transgender children, terrifying families and criminalizing doctors who give children the care they need,” said Biden.

“We have to protect these children so they know they’re loved and we’ll stand up for them and so they can speak for themselves,” he added.

“Folks, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, they’re all connected!” he claimed.

“But the antidote to hate is love,” Biden continued.

And drugs. And surgery. And ensuring that every one of the members of medical, psychiatric, social work, and teachers associations and boards get on board (or lose their credentials and job) with the decision to not inform little Mary, who is a tom-boy, or little Johnny who likes to dress up in little girls’ clothes that this is probably a phase that a lot of children go through, but instead join children in their fantasy whilst locking them inside a destiny laid out by the Big Medical and Pharmaceutical Complex pushing expensive and life-altering surgery and drugs.

Not only that, these same interests are determined to prevent the parents of these children from having any say in the matter. And that’s because, as the President, who could barely get thirty or forty people to attend his meet-and-greets when he stepped out of the basement to campaign before becoming the most electorally successful President in the history of the United States, himself says (albeit in more mealy-mouthed words) to not push for drugs and surgery is not only hateful but racist.

Now, it is true that Joe knows a thing or two about racism—Kamala Harris certainly thought so when she was telling other Democrats and the world why he would not make a fit President because he was a…. (nudge-nudge, wink-wink), and were he alive I am sure his old pal, who also knew a thing or two about racism, Senator Robert Byrd and KKK organizer and member, might be able to set us straight and confirm that if we don’t believe Joe we too are haters, and racists. That is the kind of reasoning and love that preside with the leading forces of the West’s light.

Forgive me, but I spent some forty years reading the greatest minds who have every put pen to paper, and when I try to make sense of the intricacies of the dialectics of imbecility—of which Joe is truly a master—I always need to hammer away at a few thousand brain cells. But the dialectic of imbecility, and the love and reasons, and the words that drive it, is nothing other than fake words, fake reasons and fake love. And those whose livelihoods and power is predicated upon the cultural triumph of the dialectics of imbecility also require ensuring that anyone who thinks what they are doing is as preposterous as it is politically and culturally deadly are to be deemed as haters, and hence to be punished for engaging in hate speech. Yes, indeed—the truth in reverse.

The underlying question of this lengthy and far roaming discussion that links this great evil of our time with the diabolical fakery of words (lies) and transcendence is—to whom and to what is that love directed? That was the great question of Augustine who grasped that our loves are the weights that bear us to where we are in our lives and worlds. There is no doubt the team represented by the Empires of Lies is built on love—for all worlds, all realities to which we contribute are built upon our loves; for our loves are the springs of our action. But while the Beatles in their youthful exuberance sang, “All You Need is Love,” one could hardly expect a pop group to be sufficiently well-versed in Augustine or Dante (though I think Bob and Leonard were, even in their younger days), to explore how love of the self and the things of the world are precisely why the world is the way it is. That’s why love and hate are not merely antipathetical but part of a continuum—to love God, His creation, His laws, and His gifts is to hate the devil and vice-versa (albeit demonic creation is, again as Augustine said, always privative, always negation and defacement).

2. A War Built on Lies and Conspiracies of Liars

Before, though, I dig deeper into the matter of love, and the central love—that of the self—that conjures up Satanic powers, let me just pause further upon the way in which this war has been built on lies—and lies obviously include the use of silence to conceal truth—and the use of force to defend lies, or for those with a more religiously attuned sensibility, let’s observe more of the (f)lies spread by those who serve the Prince of Lies.

As I argued in a previous essay, Putin, sadly, was telling the truth when he called the West an Empire of Lies, run by liars. He was calling out the fact that the leaders of the West were completely indifferent to the truth that Ukraine had been mired in a civil war for some eight years that had provided NATO with the opportunity to train and supply an army, that had long thrown off any concealment of serving the entire Ukrainian population, ready to take that war to another level, as it marshalled in excess of 100,000 men on the borders of the Donbas. The imminence of turning the autonomous regions of Donetsk and Luhansk into a killing field that would have made the previous 14000 or so dead (that is the usual number cited) pale into insignificance compared to what in all likelihood was about to happen as the self-declared autonomous regions were about to face a full escalation of destruction.

But this essential trigger behind Russia’s actions was never reported by the mainstream media or discussed by a political class who spoke as if all of a sudden that imperial itch which has possessed those nasty Russians from time immemorial and Vladimir Putin ever since he was a boy torturing flies and cats, inexplicably seized power of a country that had been doing so swimmingly well, a country mired in a war with Chechnya and its terrorists, subjected to the rapacious brutality of the mafia, oligarchs, and Western grifters plundering Russia’s bargain basement priced formerly state controlled resources.

Inane as the lie was, though, it worked because it was sold to a population who take pride in their knowledge, even when they know nothing (but I am getting ahead of myself for this is the very essence of the satanic), and sold by those who are so caught up in their lies that they generally believe them, too. That is because they have cleverly built a world of mirrors which reflects back the lies they speak to themselves, to each other, and to the population who takes their information from them.

Funny wasn’t it, how the mainstream media predicted the war, even down to trying to identify the exact day of invasion, whilst being silent on the massive deployment of Ukrainian troops on the Donbass, as if that deployment were nothing—but again the demonic specializes in making as much of nothing, as it does nothing of much.

Likewise, Western reporters and pundits, in the main, thought nothing of the fact that the Minsk agreement had meant nothing except as an excuse for doing nothing about people being bombed and killed in their homes—in a recent interview in Die Zeit, Angela Merkel has said, what should have appeared obvious to anyone who thought about what was going on “over there,” that being a signatory to the agreement had just been a way of buying time, so Ukraine, with NATO help, could build up its army.

I do not believe one Western journalist prior to the civil war becoming a war between nations had ever thought that the people of the Donbas region were intending to massacre the majority of the Ukrainian population and were arming themselves to go out and conquer Kiev. The population in the Donbas, because of their historical memories and attachments was, though, not a population in which the government in Kiev had the slightest interest in protecting. But it was a population which wanted to protect itself from a government and the various ultra-ethnic nationalist militias, who were pushing for ever more political persecution, and the continuation of ethnic cleansing that their national hero Stefan Bandera had engaged in when collaborating with the Nazis.

Though, unfortunately for the people of these regions, they happened to live in the “industrial heartland of Ukraine”—which accounts for some 80% of Ukraine’s oil, natural gas and coal reserves, and vast deposits of precious minerals and metals, as well as rare earth minerals essential for so much modern technology, so the option of being left alone was not going to fly with a kleptocratic class that had allied its interests with ethnic purists. Of course, those who blame the Russians claim that these resources are the real reason for Russia’s invasion—the problem with that, though, is everything else we have been talking about. Which once again is indicative of this event being conducted by the West’s appeal to truths in reverse.

The epithet “Empire of Lies” applies as much to the European Union as the USA, with its preposterous claims (deluded self-understanding?) of being a force for peace, a soft-power, when it suits its interests (to spend money on projects that make it an ever-greater imperial force) whilst also being a supporter of other people fighting their wars because it suits the West’s larger program. All of the West’s warehouses, full of human rights research, draft documents, protocols, treaties and covenants mattered not a jot when there was a coup in 2014, or a killing-fields about to happen. If the EU had been useless in stopping the horrors of the Balkans in the 1990s (keeping its hands clean by belatedly coming in to try the war criminals it held responsible and to broker peace deals), on this occasion they were going to be far more proactive, and go all out in support of the ethnic-nationalist state—and the Neo-Nazis, which, of course, for the West do not really exist outside of the diabolical imaginations of Vladimir the evil one and his minions. That is probably why the USA, Germany and Italy are among the 50 countries that voted against the proposed resolution put by Russia opposing the glorification of Nazism. But why would the West care? Ukraine is a democratic state, and its decisions to close down Russian-speaking media and schools, to allow its ethnic militia to infiltrate its institutions and sabotage any change of reassuming more peaceable ties with Russia (that was Zelensky’s mandate), and now just recently raiding and closing down Ukrainian Orthodox Churches (UOC—Ukraine’s largest denomination), are just the kind of realist pebbles in the diplomatic shoes that imperial Western powers have to deal with as they race ahead, dreaming up and filling up treaties, covenants and the like, devoted to “human rights.”

These issues indicate the problems that the West has in presenting itself as the force of human goodness is that there is no consistency other than its right to dictate what “good” and “evil” are in the world. To someone who takes good and evil seriously this is exactly the way that people intending evil behave—they say what suits them when it suits them, rather than inflect their speech in deference to what they know to be true. Truth may shine in its own light, but it is darkness that requires the extinction of speech which would light up what transpires in its coverings.

The war, as in so much that has preceded it in the West, has also proceeded by way of censorship and denunciation—perhaps in a time of open warfare this would be considered a state of exception. But there is no declaration of war by the US or European powers, and the control of speech in the West is no longer anything exceptional. And everything of significance concerning this war is proceeding under cover of darkness—the main stream media refuses to allow any serious discussion of why Russia is at war, and simply ignores news that shows a very different side to the violence committed during the war. Who in the West, for example, would know that Marianna Vyshemirsky, the pregnant woman photographed, early in the war, in the Mariupol hospital which had just been shelled, and whose picture was sent all over the globe as an example of Russian brutality and cruelty, is now a Russian citizen supporting the Russian war effort? At the time the photo was taken, she was critical of the Ukrainian government and army—but her account of events was spun into an attack upon Russia and a tribute to Ukrainian bravery and determination.

Or, let’s pause upon the biggest story of the moment, a story which our media and the US government are attempting to hide/bury—the story of FTX, the biggest case of financial fraud since Enron, and political graft possibly since ever. It is a story that ranges from straight-out fraud and political and media coverup, to corrupting scientific research and influencing public policy, to bankrolling politicians, primarily, though not only, the Democratic party (FTX was the second biggest donor to the Democrats), and its progressive causes, to money laundering and this war. It is a story with a cast of characters so wide that no Netflix Series could do justice to the telling, from Sam the vegan and his parents (his Mum being a Hilary lawyer) and goofy poly-girlfriend Carolyn Ellison and her parents to (gee golly gosh, heavens to Betsy, well I never) the Clintons (and probably their parents), and the Bidens and Tony Blair and…. you and I both want this essay to have an ending, so let’s just say lots and lots of powerful and wealthy people.

In any case, as soon as the collapse was made public, along with the money-laundering, connections to the war and the political loop to the Democrats was being talked about, the factcheckers and Google algorithm manipulators were setting everyone straight that there was no money laundering going on because those who one would consider involved, like members of the Ukrainian government, and the various political recipients of FTX money, and honest Sam himself had said it just wasn’t so. Though back in March of this year, that is before the FTX collapsed and before those who make up the facts that pass their own factchecking set to work on the straight story, there was a story in CoinDesk with the headline, “Ukraine Partners With FTX, Everstake to Launch New Crypto Donation Website: FTX is converting crypto contributions to Ukraine’s war effort into fiat for deposit at the National Bank of Ukraine.” It continued:

“Ukraine Partners With FTX, Everstake to Launch New Crypto Donation Website: FTX is converting crypto contributions to Ukraine’s war effort into fiat for deposit at the National Bank of Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian government launched a new crypto donations website on Monday, streamlining its multimillion-dollar effort to turn Bitcoin into bullets, bandages and other war materiel.

Aid for Ukraine,” which has the backing of crypto exchange FTX, staking platform Everstake and Ukraine’s Kuna exchange, will route donated crypto to the National Bank of Ukraine, Everstake’s Head of Growth Vlad Likhuta told CoinDesk. Ukraine’s crypto-savvy Ministry of Digital Transformation is also involved.”

It will probably take years before anything like the full extent of this particular labyrinth of lies and fraud and endless shell-companies, and players making an incalculable number of decisions involving other people performing an incalculable number of legally dubious to out-right criminal tasks will be sufficiently public enough to be more than a salacious story of youthful folly, gaming and sex, buried amidst a blur of complexity, mostly to be cordoned off, when it gets interesting, into the financial pages.

In the meantime Bankman-Fried has finally been taken into custody in the Bahamas (which some say may well have been done to make sure he does not have to answer harder questions at the congressional hearing he is meant to appear before). And the big question is: will he be suicided like Jeffrey Epstein, or can he just keep his mouth shut in a mid-level prison with vegetables, video games, porn and drugs?

Only a week or so earlier, the New York Times had Bankman-Fried appear along with other illustrious global leaders, including the man of the year himself, Zelensky, and Zuckerberg, Janet Yellen, the actor Ben Affleck, and the CEO of Blackrock, as part of its DealBook Summit. But my readers might be thinking, but this is a heck of a digression from the war and the diabolical nature of our Western world.

Sadly, though, it is only a digression in so far as the entire story the media chooses to tell is to ensure that everything they say about FTX, which is actually very little, is a digression from the real story of politicians being funded by an enormous financial fraud and money laundering scheme that reaches from the globalist party of the US (that also allows for the RINO’s on the take—presently the press is trying to make it look as if Sam gave away donations to all parties equally, lest one suspect that the money was used to push certain liberal progressive globalist causes) to Ukraine and back. And then there is the possibility it just may have been crafted to ensure that there is no way to escape a social credit surveillance society, and the globally regulated digitalization of money that crypto has threatened to destabilize. That this objective and the objective of Russian regime change are mere variations within the greater objective—a liberal progressive globalist world feudal system, as laid out in the Great Reset and Agenda 2030. That’s the big conspiracy—well, actually it is not really a conspiracy—it is openly stated.

The conspiracies are all those everyday meetings, plannings and activities which don’t make it into the light of day, because none thinks their objectives would be better met if knowledge about them were more public. And now that the mainstream and tech media and intelligence agencies have conspired to suppress investigative reporting that reports the “wrong”—i.e., unapproved—”facts,” they can sleep comfortably in the knowledge that even if someone finds out and tells the world, they won’t be heard, though they often involve “lies” and making nothing of much—like people’s life-time savings, efficient energy systems and a reliable food supply—and much of nothing really important—take your pick from all the great “nothings” that are supposed to keep the planet and us safe from extinction—the capacities of solar and wind power to provide all the energy we will ever need, wearing masks and taking vaccines so we will be “safe,” and the pedagogical and institutional commitment to great big abstractions which dictate policy, emancipation, equity and the like. Conspiracies, conspiracies?

Sorry, of course, there were no people conspiring to do such dastardly things as deceive the Russian Federation into believing that NATO would not expand into its environs, or plot and achieve a coup in Ukraine, or start persecuting and killing Ukrainians who identified themselves as ethnically connected with Russia, or tell lies about how Russia had interfered in the US election of 2016 to such an extent that it had created the vilest succubus to ever hold presidential office, an orange haired Hitler no less, who even said he wanted to be able to cooperate with Russia, or to ensure that people would think that the information revealed on Hunter Biden’s laptop was all planted by Russians, or to ensure that people who argued the case for NATO’s role in causing the war be subjected to algorithms making their work appear conspiracy theory/Putin stooge crazy.

Likewise there was no conspiracy to ensure that President Trump would be barred from social media; nor to ensure that others who wanted to use social media to argue against mandatory vaccines be de-platformed or cast out of their profession; nor to denounce, or de-platform, sack, or incarcerate people who think Black Lives Matter is socially divisive and destructive agit prop rather than the truth; or who beg to differ on the claim that every girl or woman who thinks she is a boy or man is really a he, or who might think that the formerly he—now—she should not be in a woman’s toilet, sports-team, prison, or woman’s beauty pageant; or who think that it is not hateful to distinguish between gender and fantasy; or who think free speech means tolerating speech that goes against the new dictates on which words or their use are hateful and are a call to outright violence. For while people may well, spontaneously come up with very bad and mad ideas, to dictate which ideas be stamped as “true,” even ones as crazy as that sexual organs don’t really mean anything when it comes to sexual identity (now confirmed by no less an authority than the Cambridge Dictionary)—when it comes to enforcing and policing narratives, or implementing action within certain institutions, social spaces or media, requires panels meeting to decide which narratives, words, ideas are to be tolerated and which are to be identified as in need of being censored.

No matter how much our ruling classes bandy the term “conspiracy theory” about to shut people up by shaming them for being idiots in believing what their eyes and ears might reveal rather than the corporate media, there have been conspiracies aplenty alright, and they have all involved threats and coercion, misinformation and disinformation. And they have all been done in the name of freedom and democracy. As I write this, the mainstream media hatred being directed toward Elon Musk for releasing the so called “Twitter Files” is only matched by its utter inability to care about the magnitude of the particular conspiring that was going on at Twitter between political stakeholders, state intelligence officials and its management—which also just happened to include some very high-up former state officials—about who and what to censor or shadow ban.

Is this the world—a world in which our political class, our media and the majority of our intelligentsia simply demand they be believed and obeyed, in spite of speaking out of ignorance and/or outright lies—that those warred against Nazis (or spoke out against communists) fought for?

One person who thinks not is Youtuber and journalist Mark Jones, a former British citizen also living in Russia, who reports under the name iEarl Grey. In a podcast with John Dougan, Jones made the salient point that he is continuing the same fight as his grandfather, who fought against the Nazis. I cannot help but agree with him. And with echoes of Daria Dugin, he adds, “I don’t need to be an ideological citizen to see the ideological battle that is being fought. We have the degraded Western democracies of the West, the collective West, with their pronouns, with their trans rights. I call it Godlessness. This to me is the same war my grandfather fought. And simply I cannot side with Nazis. To support them would be to betray my grandfather’s memory and the honour of all those who fought in the Great Patriotic War. So, to me this isn’t about what country you are from; it is about whether you choose the side of light with Christian orthodoxy on the one side, or whether we choose darkness and the satanism of the West.”

I have formerly said that I do not see Russia or China as “saving” the West, for I think the West as such has been devoured by its own darkness. I am less interested in concurring that Russia as such represents the light, than emphasizing that the West is being devoured by its own darkness, by its own satanic conjurings—and this is also what the Russian and Chinese political leadership sees.

3. Why Talk of Satanism—or, Why Even Non-Religious People Can Learn from Religious Language

For those who recoil from such starkly religious language as expressed by Mark Jones and Daria Dugin, or, God forbid, Alex Jones or the writers in the Epoch Times or E. Michael Jones and many others who have devoted their lives to struggling against the West’s self-mutilation and conscious Luciferian decision and descent, I would ask your forbearance and willingness to consider that the deployment of such language is not simply or even exclusively based upon a faith and in a doctrine and teaching which one may or may not have, but a realization that the language bereft of the figurative imaginative power is less able to assist us in grasping reality.

The philosopher G.W. F. Hegel wisely saw the relationship between grasping and concepts—in the German, they share the same stem—and he also, again wisely, saw that conceptualizing follows our figuring through images, rites and the representations of religious belief. But where some like Herder, Hamann, (and my good and humble self) beg to differ with Hegel’s conviction that the concepts of reason provide a more accurate and adequate expression of the real than our faculty of imag(in)ing. Hamann had made the powerful observation that faith trumps knowledge—though Hegel had built his entire philosophy in arguing the opposite against various proponents who had believed they had identified reason’s limits.

But unlike the various targets of Hegel’s criticism (Kant, J.G. Fichte, F.W.J. Schelling, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Friedrich Jacobi), Hamann was not arguing that faith leads him to knowing more important things than what knowledge yields—but rather that faith is the condition of us being able to go in search of our knowledge and mount our reasons. That is why, Hegel’s philosophy requires the very thing that is its own ruin—a total system—while Hamann’s thought is content to pick holes in the metaphysical towers of Babel he saw the philosophers around him constructing, whilst combing satire, irony and a concession of ignorance with a philological and hermeneutical attunement to history and his own environment.

No serious faith is predicated on theology, or philosophical argument—those things come later. A faith informs and forms a life; the life of oneself and the life of those who bond with and around their faith. To understand what faiths do, requires looking at where faith has been a source of action and how it has cultivated the natural habits and sentiments. There is nothing special about faith itself—it is as J. G. Hamann insisted, an essential part of what we are—if you will, it is an ontological condition. The issue is: which faith? (Which is, but a variant on what/who to love?)

All religions—and all the language that finds religious modulation and expression, which is to say all language which not only speaks to but which is bound up with personal and social creation as it is borne by devotion, rite, ritual, incantation, supplication, and the moods of exhilaration, despair, despondency and love—deal with the arc from life to death. This is the case not only for individuals but for collectives who share that language and sense of what is to be revered and shunned, and hence of how that collective and its members live, what it holds sacred.

The tragedy and sorrow of the West today, which is of such a magnitude that anything resembling salvation cannot simply come from politics, but only from a complete redirection of faith, which is the real source of culture and the meaning of our collective and personal lives, comes from the faith that it has adopted. That faith along with the crisis of the West has been diagnosed by countless thinkers, each of whom have identified different aspects of it. To mention just a very small portion—Eric Voegelin, for example, addressed the gnostic roots; Leo Strauss, the scientistic displacement of classical wisdom; Heidegger its preoccupation with beings and technics at the expense of openness to Being; Chesterton and Belloc, the loss that accompanied the defeats of the Church; or Jacques Ellul, our worship of power and its mechanics.

While I have framed the crisis of our time in terms of a geo-political spatial entity, “the West,” the fact is that Western civilization was ever poised between turmoil, destruction, death, and a creative spirit that expanded and conjoined those in search of greater—a universal kind of—solidarity. Crisis is ever with us; or to use religious language, our souls are ever on the verge of being lost, and the devil and sin never far away.

The issue of our time is not so much the ever-permanent presence of the forces of destruction, war, pestilence, and our own tortured and torturing hearts, but the added layer of delusion and deceit that are not just discernible in our practices but in how we speak and (don’t) see what we are or what we do. In such a world of self-delusion and self-imposed blindness my heart breaks for the generation of lost souls of the young so caught up in their wrath and fanaticism that they seriously think that once the weather is under their control and they can have the sex organs of their choice, and that they can enjoy themselves unconditionally—be fully emancipated—all will be well. They are so f’d up and they have been made that way—and they think they can fix up the world, when they would, if I may defer to Jordan Peterson, be better off just learning how to tidy up their bedrooms, and then going and reading a serious book or two, or doing the gardening or something else useful, because thanks to the failure of the last generation so many are not capable of doing anything other than throwing tantrums and pulling down statues, burning books, and buildings and denouncing people for lacking their approved “virtues.” To say that we are in the grip of Satanism is only far-fetched if one has no idea that Satanism is the worship of death and the killing of our God-given or (for the naturalists, natural) potentialities.

Dostoevsky and Baudelaire both understood that the devil is a smooth-talking, urban sophisticate oozing charm and wit. Baudelaire and Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov were themselves too intelligent to believe in God, but that did not stop them being visited by the devil; the demonic—as with the hellfire of war—is like that; he just comes in, irrespective of what we think or believe. And that is the condition we find ourselves in. We live in a world where evil masks itself under the very abstractions that serve to conceal intentions beneath the grander sounding norms we venerate. That is, our kind of intelligence is purchased by sacrificing the most elemental apertures of the species’ intellection—the eye and the ear—and the symbolic imagination, as it combines our most important communal associations of life and death. We also live in a time when we are oblivious to how what we worship and say is an invitation to our own collective and personal demise. We summon the demon who speaks to us in soothing tones, because we think we are so very clever. That faith in our cleverness is closely bound up with the displacement of our daily acts of transcendence in favour of descent into our own appetites and innards of destruction, assisted at every step by the words and formulae that we draw upon to drive us ever further down there.

4. Satanism as a Romance with the Self (and the Warring Members that Make it)

The difference between Paul’s description of the flesh as made up of warring members and Freud’s depiction of the Id is negligible in so far as they both identify our appetites as tumultuous and destructive. But where Paul sees our salvation in becoming members of Christ’s Church, being born anew in Christ, Freud holds out the prospect of a rational cultivation of our most potentially destructive appetites which will make us more fulfilled and complete.

As convinced as Freud was of his intelligence, diagnosis, and psychiatric cure for our discontents, many would say that he sought the impossible—for there is no rational cultivation of our appetites as such, merely rationalizations about why we might succumb to our appetites. That even Freud knew they had to be curbed was the basis of his Eros and Civilization, and that they could be connected to the death drive (the demonic) of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The great political and social question facing every group is where must they be curbed? And the respective answers to that inevitably draw us into what does the group hold as sacred—which might also be put thus: What do we accept as having unconditional authority over us? Knowing the answer to that question—which can also be formulated as which God(s) do we serve—is essential for identifying why a particular “life-world” (to use the term of Edmund Husserl) is the way it is. The respective answers we can find in the West of a mere few generations back compared to today provide the key to what we have become. But allow me an anecdote that I think provides an important cipher about what the educated professional classes of the West hold sacred.

Last night, I went to a concert given in a Uniting Church. The concert was beautiful—two harpists with glorious voices. On the wall behind the performers was a huge cross, though Jesus was not on the cross—and no image of Him was to be seen in the church. Beneath the cross lay a huge gay pride flag. A smaller version of the flag was to be found on the window as one entered the church. The symbolism was all too evident, though I have zero doubt that those involved in making the decision thought that they were good people making a statement about their commitment to diversity and inclusivity. They may well find aspects of the Christian tradition to their liking, though I am also sure that they find much that is merely the “prejudice” of a more “ignorant” time, and they most likely believe that their faith in diversity and inclusivity is divinely intended. I also suspect that Christ’s absence not only from the cross but this church had to do with the belief that God is beyond gender—and, at least prior to transgenderism requiring a complete overhaul of pronouns, quite possibly a she—though it is hard to spin Jesus Christ in his earthly incarnation as not being a man. Perhaps, for them, the absence of Christ suggests Christ redeemed. In any case, he would be among the supporters of LGBTQ+ because they, in case one had not noticed, are still persecuted; and to deny the right to hang the pride flag in the church or on government buildings would only confirm how much hatred still exists toward members of this community.

That they might not be able to fly this flag in the mosque does not stop the same people denouncing those who would deny that it should be flown in a sacred space as homophobic, being able to swiftly change gear and denouncing as Islamophobic someone who also might point out that Muslim countries are far less tolerant of LGBTQ+ things, and that if they tried it on there, they probably would be getting, at the very least, a very long jail sentence. Comparative cultural understanding—as opposed to blathering meaningless formulae, such as the importance of respecting all cultures—does not figure very highly among the inclusivity and diversity ethic. But this is why the Vice Chancellor at my university can urge all students staff to celebrate Ramadan one day, whilst encouraging all to participate in LGBTQ+ week celebrations the next. He was particularly proud of the drag queen participation to kick off this year’s annual Christmas party.

I also have no doubt that had I spoken up and said I thought the use of a church to fly a pride flag was not only dumb, and a tasteless, political and bullying gesture directed at traditionalists, but an act of sacrilege, I would most likely have been hissed at, and most assuredly asked to leave. The people who made this decision to hang the flag beneath the cross think that it is not only acceptable but a sign of their goodness and their faith that the wall of their church be adorned with a huge flag to a group bonded by its sexual choices.

That the flag itself is one which is equated in its symbolism with the word “pride” is itself indicative of the great importance, indeed as its placement illustrated, the sanctity that is now placed upon our sexual appetites. The way in which sexuality features in contemporary Western culture and daily life is an interesting symptom of the difference between us and previous generations.

Sexuality in itself within the Christian tradition belongs to “mere nature”—although nature is construed as being divinely created—rather than belonging to the sacred as such; and it was only in the holy bonds of matrimony that it took on the form of a sacrament. That is, apart from the fact that Christians (and Jews and Muslins for that matter) have traditionally condemned same-sex practice, there is a more important point that I think is the source of serious social disintegration and civil strife. For my point is not about whether same-sex practice is moral or not, but where sexual appetite itself now figures in the order and scale of values, and in the ordering and configuring of our institutions; also, whether sex is something that is done or something to be sacralized. This is where I believe the real social division around sexuality—in all manner of variations—sits today: there is not a dispute within public institutions about whether people, of a certain age, may express their sexual preference, but whether a particular type of sexual preference should be a source of a certain kind of sacredness. That kind of sacredness is itself predicated upon a particular view of the self, which is itself symptomatic of an orientation to life that defies its “laws”/orders—for it is the defiance of life’s laws, made under the presumption that the self is the creator of its own laws.

The most important poem in the English language, Paradise Lost, took this act of revolutionary defiance as its central theme—the fall as the result of pride; the result of the created aspiring to take control of creation; the angel taking the place of God. Blake, Shelley, and Byron would all see Milton’s Satan as a heroic figure, though while it is indisputable that Satan gets all the best lines in Paradise Lost, Milton’s depiction of Satan is not in the slightest bit flattering. Milton’s Satan is a creature of restless being, and endless suffering. His sole solace is the words he tells himself. They themselves are but the delusions of a self that flies to become what he cannot be; in search of escape from the prison of a self—a prison that is completely of his own making. It is a great fall, to go from being one of God’s favourites to a lowly slithering creature seeking to tempt others into sharing the same ambitious delusions that have made a hell of his own self. There is, in sum, nothing heroic in Satan’s actions—his words are all heat and light, putrid sulfur; and his deeds are nothing more than restlessness, accompanied by words.

For his part, God does not need great lines—His word is creation itself. The modern mind may wish to elevate to a heroic station a being who is a king over nothing but his own torment, and may recoil from Milton’s expression of faith, but the poem is an expression of faith. And while it is also an attack upon the abuse of prerogative political power, and rightly so given how the doctrine of the divine right of kings had so easily become a formula in defiance of Christian duty, rather than a means for delivering it—it is much more a prophetic poem of what happens when man seeks an infinite universe and ignores the finitude and fragility of his own being.

Milton may have been hailed by the romantics, but he was no romantic. Nevertheless, if one wishes to understand the modern soul, one cannot underestimate the importance of the romantic consciousness—and that consciousness would be responsible for valorizing various priorities in what we now value and how we now act, by calling for others to join in the creative ambitions they held.

It was also the romantic consciousness that valorized the demonic on the basis of Satan being the arch rebel, not only against God, but against the order of creation itself. In 1797 the literary critic Friedrich Schlegel noted the “tendency of modern poetry to Satanism.” When Schlegel made this note, Blake had already written the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, whilst Goethe would follow shortly after with the publication of Faust, a work which provides a definitive formulation of the demonic—the spirit of negation—and then Baudelaire and his lyric masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil, with its section devoted to Satan’s Revolt. That is to say, the leading poets of Great Britain (Blake, Shelley and Byron), Germany, and France all made the devil intrinsic to modern “redemption.”

Just as words are the currency in which past and future are inflected via the priorities of the present, poets excel in their ability both to gauge the value and efficacy of that tender, at the moment of its circulation, and to combine those words in ways which elevate our sensitivity to what really is and what thus must also be. Shelley may have been overstating it somewhat, and mistaking the modern poet with the Homeric bards, when he said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but only somewhat. For the master craftsmen of the word introduce new coin that when potent enough becomes part of our everyday life and way of living: for good and ill, our priorities owe much not only to the sexual revolution of the 1960s but the modern bards with guitars who have been our pied pipers into this world we now inhabit. They are late pieces of ballast from the Romantic revolution; and I confess I love much of their creation, but I cannot deny that so many of the most creative musical minds and performers of the last fifty years have sided with and enthused those who are making merry hell, and their muddled musings whether coke-baked or merely the produce of narcissistic self-delusion have invariably supported the present ruling class that is creating a world of slavery in the name of freedom. Van Morrison, God bless him, and Eric Clapton have made themselves hated today by speaking out against the hellish conformity that our ruling political class is building. But poets and musicians have contributed to the fueling of the Heroic/Satanic defiance which has made the Self the be-all and end-all of existence.

That defiance was also the defining gesture of an age which had emerged from the first anti-Christian revolution and was limping toward the first openly atheistic revolution—ironically enough given the range of this essay, it is noteworthy that it is that country, having consciously thrown off its atheistic and communist past, that is now considered the source of all today’s evil by Western powers whose attack upon the truths revealed through traditional Christianity is a centre-piece in the strategy of their “world-making.”

Revolution was both a product of an enlightened age wishing to overturn crown and altar and all traditions which were not created by reason’s light, and the romantic age that sought to unleash the vitality of darker powers and passions in order to bring into existence a world that was as sublime as the artistic creations of the geniuses of the spirit. On the surface romanticism was a reaction to the excess of faith in light of an earlier generation; but it was also primarily a family squabble within the modern soul, a fraternal reaction, in which genius was “the middle term,” the genius who could fathom and express all. In the one, the scientists were the geniuses who could plot the mechanics of the world that could be incorporated into medicine and the various physical structures of the world and ourselves to build a better one for our needs. In the other, the world was to be an artistic occasion for those with the vision and insight and knowledge to also build anew. Though, unlike the philosophes many of them seemed far less ready to ditch tradition, for they appreciated it was a repository of experience and knowledge, and they would find sustenance in myth because it expressed knowledge of intimations and things closer to the nether aspects of our being. But in the main, and with occasional notable exceptions of genuine religious conversion, tradition was not itself something that should fetter the genius of the poetic creator; and its more typical legacy was to have fellow artists view traditions as syncretistic aesthetic opportunities. Romantics and the enlightened philosophes were both engaged in building the world out of the vicissitudes of the self as a god in its own right.

Carl Schmitt had astutely observed this in his book Political Romanticism when he wrote of the centrality of J.G. Fichte’s egoic philosophy in romanticism. For Fichte, the world is but the fact-act of the postulating and ever acting I; and the world but the occasion for that act. Having noted how the romantics were “fond of perceiving themselves as members of a higher organism,” Schmitt continues: “Just as in the schism between reality and possibility and between finitude and infinity, the community and history had availed themselves of functions that, in Christian metaphysics, belonged to God, here too they became the true cause for which everything else is only an occasion. Closer examination shows, however, that it is neither of these two demiurges—humanity and history—but rather the romantic subject itself that takes everything as an occasion. Here the opposition of romantic productivity to the activity that Fichte’s ‘ego’ postulates is the appropriate point of departure for the exposition of the romantic character. That is because this Fichtean ‘ego’ became the romantic subject.”

Revolution was another common thread between enlightenment and romanticism. The dialectical character of that relationship, as well as its revolutionary commitment, is visible in the kinds of contradiction that are typical of the modern radical imagination and which are starkly evident in the contemporary mythologizing and “romanticising” of indigenous life, of natural wilderness and of the energy provided by the sun and wind, on the one hand, and faith in science and social and emancipation progress—”I believe in the science”—on the other. It is the contradiction that breeds Extinction Rebellion and a society in which surgical tampering (and hence highly developed science) with genitals and vaccines is seen as essential commitment to emancipation; a society in which an entire population can be forced to wear masks because nature is a threat to our very existence, and one in which all things natural are to be esteemed so that the mere Anthropocene can be seen as a kind of cancer upon infinitely wonderous and sacred nature, a society in which the drive for total emancipation exists side-by-side with the drive to ensure none not comply with technocratic dictates. In sum, it is a society that in wanting to have everything is prepared to leave so many with nothing – perhaps mere organ assemblages to be harvested for the new transhumanist gods, or brain implants that will be able to be programmed to do the bidding of those doing the transplanting.

The revolutionary mindset that united the men and women of clarity and distinctness, of light and mind, and the students of the mechanical parts and laws of existence, with those devoted to discerning and expressing the darker and more chiaroscuro truths disclosed by myth and stemming from heart and passions, as Camus pointed out in his brilliant and important mid-20th century work L’Homme révolté, was above all a metaphysical revolt, a revolt predicated upon the deities of our own mental imaginings responding to the inevitable trials and habitual unfairness that comes with life; not rebellions we undertake against specific injustices.

Camus had rightly also identified the primary importance of the Marquis de Sade within this call for metaphysical rebellion—for de Sade wanted nothing less than the entire annihilation of the world, if that were necessary to satiate his infinite libidinous energy. It was, albeit unintentionally, a position that mirrored the philosopher Kant’s insistence that justice must be done even if the entire world were to perish. Neither was interested in modulating his passions (Sade) or ideas (Kant) to the requisite adaptations of life’s craggy contingencies. The dialectic of the modern satanic and moral purist (as expressed by Kant philosophically, and the Jacobins politically) eventually yielded a mindset in which absolute emancipation and absolute justice were perfectly congruent, and the body and it sexual organs were to provide the point of “indifference.”

Total freedom construed appetitively (Sadean and not-Kantian), and complete virtue unsullied by appetites (Kantian and not-Sadean) has become the West’s sacred temple—which is to say the temple is the self, the self, though as it conforms to what it is supposed to be—virtuous and fully committed to total emancipation, which is also to say a self that is compliant with what the satanic heroic rebels define it to be.

The monument to that dialectical resolution was the totalitarian revolutions of the 20th century, the children of which are the people who seek to completely rebuild the world so that it conforms to their ideas about emancipation. Their intellectual “leaders” invariably recognize the Marxian and post-Marxian “mother” (total critique in search of complete emancipation), but largely ignore (mainly through ignorance or willful decision not to confront inconvenient truths) the absent/unseen fascistic “father” (corporatism and “communities” bound by leadership). To be sure, both built obedience around the cult of the leader; and today’s globalised corporatist powers have retained the primacy of compliance with the decrees of leaders, whilst, quite cleverly leaving the primary leaders to remain rather faceless (though the narcissistic temptation to be loved and seen does afflict many of the more prominent ones).

Thus, just as the modern elite, as I have suggested many times in this magazine, reconciles communism and aristocratism of Marx and Nietzsche by having radicalised foot-soldiers tear down traditional authority in the name of equality, the power of the most wealthy is enhanced by their purporting to represent the interests of their clients, which is to rebel against the existing order of oppression. That representation relies upon those very foot-soldiers, who also seek out vassals (their own clients) amongst those in the lower classes.

Communism did breed a new class of rulers, as earlier dissidents said time and time again; but global corporatist governance has been far more successful in retaining its power over its under-classes and maintaining relationships of dependency, thanks to ensuring, with the help from their foot-soldiers, that they are sexually satiated, even if pornography is the primary means of slaking sexual desire amongst the less well-resourced males, drugged up, and self-satisfied in their “knowledge” about the world; which, given that they are educated into a level of sophisticated stupidity, is nothing but phrases and formulae circulated by teachers, professors and journalists, who pretty much think the exact same thing on any important topic.

If as I have suggested the modern revolutionary disposition is predicated on the hybrid of enlightened and romantic ideas and priorities about us and the world, not only as they are but what they can be, it is also, as Milton foretold, pride that is the fulcrum for the creation of this new world; and that pride is nowhere more obvious when we note how lacking in experience, how young the greatest exponents of revolution are, when they choose to devote their lives to it. Saint-Just was not even thirty when he went to the guillotine, Robespierre not forty, Marx in his mid-twenties when he wrote, feverishly from Paris, that he had discovered the solution to “the riddle of history,” Lenin’s brother Alexander was twenty-one when he was executed for his role in attempting to assassinate the Tsar, which no doubt played a decisive role in Lenin himself, drawn into revolutionary circles before he was twenty.

The notion that youth know so much that they should be politically committed is so commonplace in the West (New Zealand is currently having a judicial inquiry into whether sixteen-year-olds should have the vote) that to suggest that there is a connection between political commitment and pride would be seen by many people to be mere prejudice. We are meant to believe that even a child is not only able to diagnose the causes of the world’s ills, as if the world’s ills are settled and knowable to all, but also knows how to fix them. Of course, “fixing the world” requires believing in the science and the technocrats and corporate and political global (Western) leaders, who fund the science and whose profits are predicated upon the same leaders selling their solutions to the population at large. All of this is pride writ gigantic: from the billionaires and technocrats who believe they alone (hence those who criticize them must be silenced) can save us from oppression, poverty, climate, overpopulation, disease, and possibly even death itself so they and some of us—ermm, I mean them—may live forever, to the politicians, teachers, journalists, celebrities who tell us what to do, and what to think, so the planet and the species can be saved, to the poor idiots who think that they should be proud of their sexual being, and the even poorer idiots who think that all of this should be the priority of the Christian churches.

If I may briefly return to the great big pride flag in that church for the moment. Pride in one’s achievement is something not to be taken too far; for one’s own grasp on reality, being up today may be swiftly followed by being very down tomorrow: fortune is a great wheel. But the brief flicker of pride in a moment of great achievement, the success following devotion to a pursuit involving vast efforts, much time, and many obstacles may well be warranted and briefly pleasing—but pride in one’s mere being, and in a being defined by sexual appetite is something of very recent pedigree, and not something that owes anything at all to achievement. Being proud of one’s sexual appetites is so silly it belongs in comedy, as evident in some of the best jokes by the late great Norm MacDonald. Heterosexuals don’t have a flag, but if they did, that would be as diabolical as it was foolish—and it is not inconceivable that the great new world order might one day require that people bond around some symbol expressing their sexual preference.

Folly is ever the footman of the (d)evil—folly opens the doors and windows of the soul for (the d)evil’s entrance. We have in the West succumbed so much to folly, we think it is a gesture of solidarity and love (and see as hateful those like me who think this is nuts) to embrace this destruction of meaning and this elevation of sexual pleasure that it is perfectly reasonable to hang a pride flag under a cross in a church.

Were one simply to draw on the church wall people engaging in anal sex or cunnilingus or fellatio it would be far harder to keep up the pretense that we were talking about something dignified—but it would at least be honest, an honest way of saying that we want sex—”and when do we want it—now.” But that is only partly true of course; for while that is what the symbolism of the flag really expresses, the fact that this desire is dressed up and decorated and valorized in a way that is as far from actual sex as possible—flags are usually associated with ceremonies requiring strict decorum, while churches are (at least for non-Satanists) not usually the place for sexual activities.

What is essentially a statement about sexual desire and choice, a statement of the sort that satanists would, in more ritualistic attuned times, make by having orgies in a church, is publicly presented as if it were about love. But the Church and traditions more generally have never persecuted people for merely loving each other; the strictures of tradition kick in when it comes to how the love is demonstrated. Early Christian fathers were not romantic—sex was sex and love was love; and given how common it is for people to have sex who do not love each other, and how common it is for people who love each other deeply and not to have sex, it is symptomatic of the triumph of the myth of romantic love (so brilliantly dissected in Flaubert’s Madam Bovary) that we who live in an age that is so hypersexualized want to delude ourselves into thinking sexual attraction is the equivalent to love and that that should be the basis of the family.

Most of the human race until relatively recently would have thought this ridiculous—note this is a very different point from saying that sexual attraction may also involve love, and may even lead to love, but in and of itself it is not love. This is why I would be just as incensed over the stupidity of a flag dedicated to any kind of sexual pleasure or relationship in a church as I am to the pride one. I am incensed not because I find same sex immoral, but because I find the idea of hanging up a flag about sexual preference (and transforming preference into an identity) in a church to be a symptom of the mental derangement and blindness of the modern soul—a derangement based upon a failure to understand what is really sacred and what is simply something people choose to do. Dressing this all up as if it has some kind of historical continuity with the early Church martyrs, who adopted lives of renunciation, is simply an indication that people have lost their minds—and losing one’s intellect, as Dante reminded his readers in The Comedy, is also the price one pays for favouring sin. One chooses damnation, by choosing the particular objective of the moment, in place of fathoming the discernable flow of consequences that follow from damnable choices.

No, the real issue is sex and NOT sex—it is a desperate hunger for the sacred. The fact that the church I visited has thrown out all vestiges of sacred imagery except the centre-piece of the Christian faith, the cross (albeit a Christless cross) does not mean that those who attend it wish to live without the sacred. We as a species are creatures who desperately require transcendence. In a time where we compartmentalize life so that religion is simply a compartment we can enter into or leave alone, it is commonplace to ignore the fact that while religions cultivate us in different ways according to what they deem sacred and what aspects of our selves and lives they prioritize, they do so because of an original disposition which persists even in a purely secular environment. That disposition is natural, which is why the failure to reflect upon our nature is a very stupid and dangerous thing; and the insistence upon our lives being mere social constructs is an extremely unfortunate formulation that shows indifference to the limits of the act of “construction.” Construction, of course, is an engineering term and no one thinks they can construct a bridge or building without the right materials and knowledge—but in social thinking, the term serves to displace the importance of the materiality of ourselves, and to valorize the use of words—which stands in the closest relationship to the way in which false transcendence is bound up with false words.

And that is what this war in Ukraine has exposed—a war that is very much the result of false words entered into by an “Empire of Lies,” which has made of the self and its appetites the true object of worship. To be sure the larger abstractions of freedom/emancipation and equity enable that act of worship, lest the inanity of it be too obvious. But therein is the great diabolical trick—self-worship based upon verbal rites/formulae that are but vapid incantations deployed to hurt and persecute—all done in the name of love.

We are all dependents, at every second; and though the stupid elite enablers like to babble on about their autonomy, our dependent nature is not lost on those who have strategically positioned themselves to decide what the future with our limited resources must be like—which is just another way of deciding who must do what, to ensure their survival and wealth enhancement—which is also to say, who will live, and who will die.

The thing about the devil’s party, as I have said in the book I coauthored with my friend Guan BeiBei on Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, is that it can never endure, because it is a party of Selves devoted only to themselves and their own appetites. But that too is why the values are so empty—and being so empty must be proclaimed at such volume and with such force and why the cultural war keeps finding new sacrifices to be made: today I read of a lesbian actress being threatened with a three-year jail term in Norway for an act of hate speech, i.e., publicly stating that sex organs define male and femaleness. The Satanic powers feast of our conceits and what we are prepared to give and to say to justify the appetites that fuel them.

Little daily acts of transcendence require that we lose our self in something higher, in an art, a craft, a love, a relationship, a commitment, a way, the depth of our faith and the Lord or God we serve; and that in losing ourself, more becomes of our selves—that is also because it is not a known identity but a mystery to be revealed. When words assist us in that transcendence, they too reveal their potency, through the very reality that they reveal. The Satanic is the promise of the overcoming of mystery, of the obliteration of revelation. Its means for achieving this are delusions, fueled by lies and animated by pride, which is followed by death—death of the soul, and of peoples.

I said above, I do not know if I can unequivocally affirm that Russia represents forces of light in the present war, but I cannot unsee the darkness in the forces that the West has sided with. Turning that around, if indeed it were possible, can only begin with us not being willing to accept lies as truths, and refusing to enter into the satanic church of the modern self’s identities and appetites.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


Featured: “Sole Morte,” by Odd Nerdrum; painted in 1987.

Conjuring Satan, Some Preliminary Remarks

These are some preliminary remarks to a major essay, entitled, “Conjuring Satan—False Transcendence and Counterfeit Words within an Age of War,” which is scheduled to appear in the January edition of the Postil.

I suspect that those who read and write for the Postil magazine see it as an alternative source of thinking for those who find that their concerns, interests and priorities are marginalized, if not ignored outright and/or denounced by journalists, academics and other ideas brokers who create, dictate and now seek to enforce through the control of media the narratives circulating within the Western global “townhall”/”public square.” It is a magazine that contains many disparate voices and points of view which are united by one common purpose: opposition to the fabrications that circulate in the global “hall/square.” Those fabrications, in spite of their diversity, also have one thing in common: they serve the interests of those whose wealth and power is of such a magnitude that they control (through funding, or, as Whitney Webb in her overwhelming and brilliant exposé One Nation Under Blackmail demonstrates, blackmail) governments, the human resource policies and major decisions of global corporations, and mobs ( now labeled as “communities”) pursuing their respective interests. Those fabrications are to thinking what global conglomerates are to businesses—monopolistic powers driving out all competing ways of doing things.

In the case of the narrative fabricators, their prestige is inseparable from their forging and circulating ideas, which is also to say that any claims, arguments, or even facts (and facts, of course, are inseparable from their meaning), that deviate from the ideas that support the fabrications have to be eliminated, discredited, or reformulated to discredit the author or speaker. The tactic of reformulation serves the purpose of ensuring ever greater control over our words and hence over our thoughts and communication, along with ensconcing the authority and professionality of those who monitor speech/ writing and decide what is permissible. It is a way of culling the dissidents from the technocratic new world in which an elite decide what must be done, who will do it, how it will be done, and who can say what about it.

The typical way of culling the dissidents is to discredit and denounce what is being said by claiming that it is something hateful, and that hate comes from being some sort of “-phobe” or “-ist,” and the hate of the -phobe or -ist is due to false information and delusional theories about non-existent conspiracies. It is because I despise this tactic, as well as the dreadful consequences that come from it, as well as what transpires along with it (the present war in Ukraine, at this moment, being the most conspicuous and awful example) and given that this topic addresses what I and others see as the diabolical nature of our hyper-sexualized, hyper-infantilized, hyper-idiotic and suicidally divisive culture that I want to address it directly and explicitly say that like hundreds of millions of people in the West I do not care what people’s sexual preferences are because sexual behaviour and preferences are a private matter as long as they do not violate the law.

In the West while laws surrounding involuntary sex—rape, for example, and defining the age of sexual activity- are generally uncontentious, laws which have decriminalized same sex relationships are, for good reasons, generally not opposed even by a great number of people who do not think that same sex relationships should be so normalized that school children should be taught that they might themselves consider pursuing same sex relationships. Generally people who think in this traditional manner do not approve of the means and mechanics of sexual pleasure being included in school curricula, believing that this is the business of parents not the state. Hence while as long as the majority think this way means that same sex will be viewed as not the norm, the larger issue is to what extent should the state be used to radically transform social norms. This transformation also inevitably leads to social polarization of the sort that is now the norm in Western countries, and which many non-Western countries (Russia just a few days ago) are determined to prevent happening in their country.

In the West the word prejudice is widely used to conceal the fact that sexual liberation comes at the heavy price of social polarization, and it may well be that the polarization will be of such a magnitude that it will completely rent asunder a society. Which, to repeat, is why entire peoples on this planet do not want to pay that price. For my own personal part I think policing sexual behaviour and choices (apart from rape, age constraints, and the like) is neither desirable nor socially congruent with other freedoms I value, such as freedom from blackmail, genuine cruelty, and discrimination. The vast majority of people in Muslim countries, if various Pew surveys conducted over the years, do not agree with me. Nevertheless like me, I can safely assume that several hundreds of millions of people in the West not only think this—for there is no mass movement “to turn back the clock” and outlaw same sex relations or transgender people – but, also like me, in their personal lives they love, and/ or accept, and befriend people who publicly identify as gay and/or trans. Also like me they do not agree with the way same sex and trans issues are currently politically framed by liberal progressive groups, parties and government officials and corporations, and how this framing coincides with the polarization and persecution, attacks and denunciations of those who do not think that all ideas and information, all that we know and value, think and say must conform to the idea that whatever is decided by “political leaders” of these “communities” must be accepted and complied with. On the contemporary politicization of trans issues as a weapon against all traditions allow me to quote Matthew Crawford whose brilliant substack work I have just discovered and recommend to all and sundry: “Almost nobody cares to hate transgender people unless they’re ruining sports, twerking in a public library, or demanding the right to lurk in the wrong bathrooms.”

Hence too the question of what constitutes cruelty—the most notable formulation of cruelty today being ensconced in the extremely lax and ideologically driven formulation of “hate speech”—and discrimination. The latter cannot be addressed with any clarity without taking into account social roles (which means social obligations) and words—which, albeit to contrary ends, is also recognized by what those who wish to completely destroy traditional social roles and the nomenclature that reflects those roles wish. One does not have to be heterosexual in one’s sexual taste to think that the terms discrimination and cruelty (specific acts of violence, as opposed to the expression of criticisms which people do not want to hear because they “feel” they are discriminatory and hateful) have now been turned into ideological truncheons for the creation of a global hell, and that the language of rights is a very dangerous, duplicitous and destructive language when unconnected from the thicker and frequently tacitly understood obligations -what Burke called prejudices – involved in the endurance of traditions. The danger with attempting to make reality fit our abstractions is the extent to which we have to kill reality to fit into the narrower confines of what we want: philosophers so deeply opposed in other respects such as Nietzsche and J.G. Hamann both recognized this.

It is also, to repeat, one thing to act upon “transgressive” desires and experiences and seek legal protection in doing so—which is by and large how gay sexuality was “embraced” in the 1960s and 1970s, and for many gay people still is—and another to insist that those very desires should not be not only tolerated or accepted but seen as building blocks for the construction of the family, the school, the military, and every other social institution. The objection to deeming certain sexual acts as transgressive is that this makes “marginalized” people second class citizens and prevents them from living their life-style openly. But the degree to which one weighs this claim tends to depend upon whether one is prepared to accept or ignore the counter-claim that every social role contains a sacrificial component, renouncing certain desires and actions and hence agreeing to a reduction in the array of possibilities that are commensurate with being able to act in that role: being a vestal virgin in a Roman temple required not having sex, being a Catholic priest requires celibacy, being a husband or wife, traditionally at least, has meant forsaking all others for sexual congress, being a husband has traditionally meant being married to a woman, being a man at certain times and in certain environments meant one could be conscripted into the army etc. Of course, it is not that uncommon for people to accept a role and defy the strictures require for its performance—priests not being celibate, spouses committing adultery, etc. While everyone knows that humans cheat and lie frequently, and that there are numerous motivations why someone may want to occupy a certain social role and office and not want to lose that role because they also follow through on the desires and impulses that the role or office demands they forsake, that is a very different issue from the social and political decision to dismantle an institution so that it better adapt to the truth that some fathers, mothers vestal virgins, priests etc. transgress.

Choosing or being born into a role means not only forsaking (or concealing) some kinds of actions other roles, making sacrifices to perform one’s social role.

The particularly modern Western triad of rights, emancipation, equality/ equity ignores this feature of social reality, and thus sets up an abstract and unreal way of talking about life. The normalization of the unreality of this way of life largely comes from the widely taught and widely held idea that all groups should have it “all”—i.e., be totally emancipated – and that the only reason they cannot is because white men can have it all. This is a fabulation, largely pushed by feminists in the 1970s and after (and now white cisgender feminists frequently finds themselves being denounced for the privileges they once said were exclusively male). It is a fabulation because it ignores the fact that traditional male roles—everywhere- have been bound up with adult males being required, when necessary, to sacrifice their lives to save the group. Feminists bolstered this fabulation that men have it all with the claim that war is a male creation (never mind that having it all is also bound up with being prepared to belong to the first group to be sacrificed for the community), thereby demonstrating that (a) they are either totally ignorant of or indifferent to the nature of primordial group survival and scarcity and (b) that ideational fabulations are expanded via rationalism and generalizations which suit the “will to power” of those invested in the fabulation, in this instance professional women wanting to achieve more power on the basis of their being rather than their achievement. The tactic of making sheer being, understood as identity, the condition of having has now extended to any group member making the case that their being be rewarded because it is the being of being disadvantaged (the clumsiness of the formulation is intended, because the thought process behind this is as clumsy as it is self-serving).

Because the language of the feminist movement (and we see the same pattern play in all identity based political movements) was so general—fight the patriarchy—very different issues, ones which really were a matter of discrimination and an economic protection racket for some men, and hence were areas where it was very hard to deny the rationality and moral legitimacy of those seeking legal and political redress, were mixed up with general and simplistic claims about the history of roles in society, and the desirable mosaic of economic distribution on the basis of gender, which required paying attention to holding or being employed in an office or position rather than one’s achievements for acquiring or performing within it. That was the beginning of what would become the greater problem of the undermining of a fundamental law of a person’s development, more precisely for the growth of the soul, and even more precisely it is an attack upon how transcendence features in a life. It is the complete inversion of what the self requires in order to transcend mere appetite and instinct. And it is that inversion of a law of the soul’s potential life that causes such personal and social destruction that concerns me when I focus upon how our modern sexualization of the self is a “satanic” commitment, a way of prioritizing death over life by taking an aspect of our being and making it something it simply is not. Thus I am not the slightest bit interested in people’s sexual actions as such, for while a sexual act may bring down a life, a family, a government or empire, and while any addiction which requires the sacrifice of all and everything to slake a particular desire imperils the soul, societies may well accommodate various sexual acts and preferences without having to insist that our institutions and culture must be rebuilt in conformity with making sexual pleasure the cornerstone of social and personal meaning. It is this modern value decision that I see as contributing to an ever greater degree of soullessness—which is another synonym for satanism.

I will discuss the literary and figurative forces that have sought and have largely succeeded to tilt the West in the direction of a satanic form of the individual and social heroism, and my brief is to attempt to encourage people to be more attentive to the evil we do and succumb to inadvertently, especially through making ourselves beholden to empty yet deathly destructive powers of our own imagination and understanding, to our pride. Some will see the term satanic figuratively, others literally—in the end I think that difference is so moot that it is unimportant, because the outcome is the same—the triumph of death over life. This world we are making in the West is predicated on mass death.

Most obviously it is predicated upon abortion being completely routinized. And to talk of the price paid for our sexualized culture being mass death of fetuses is no exaggeration. That the argument for abortion being a right, as was evident in the US in the recent Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health decision, is primarily about the danger to a woman’s life, or rape and only secondarily to the right to use it as a means of birth control is indictive of a tacit acknowledgement that the more sanctified language of rights may be compromised if it boils down to mere utility – consider how John Rawls the great champion of “distributive justice” makes the case why his rights based theory of justice is superior to any utilitarian based one. After all today almost every couple may watch the fetus form into a baby through various stages of its gestation- and is it not notable how our entertainment moguls regularly use the image of a fetus with a beating heart in its movies and television shows to demonstrate the extent of the love between parents, while the majority of the members of that very industry are so vocal about the right to terminate that very being because it is a matter of my body/ my choice? The appeal to the exception by pro-choicers is simply because abortion is very hard to reconcile with the idea that a growing fetus, which we can witness with our own eyes, while dependent upon and growing within the mother’s body, and who has its own tiny organs, may be extinguished because it is an economic burden upon the mother and father (if he is still around). That Western nations are, nevertheless, deeply divided over abortion is less significant than the fact that the scale of it is so great it is undoubtedly, and whether for good or ill, part of who and what we stand for.

There are two other major ways in which I think it reasonable to talk of our contemporary West being predicated upon death—one is the wars that it continually supports, the other is the push toward depopulation.

Conflicts over scarcity and territory and, somewhat more belatedly, faiths is a commonplace feature of the human story. What is particularly conspicuous about the wars involving the West today are that they not only take placed in far-away lands but they are made by others on behalf of beneficiaries in West. Just as the language of liberty prevails in an environment where liberties are increasingly diminished to fit global corporatist fiat and outcomes, the West presents itself as a means for peace when it manufactures one war after another. As with abortion, mass death is hidden and where it occurs the blame for it is laid elsewhere. Finally, just as vegans fail to see the consequences of their protests if they achieved their ends, viz. instead of living any kind of lives, cows, sheep, chickens etc. would not roam free, but be immediately reduced to a tiny fraction of their present number and, the few left, would be almost entirely living in zoos, the average person who accepts the globalist Malthusian need to depopulate the planet does not ask the question of how will that depopulation occur and who will make the decisions about who stays and who goes. It is one thing to note that there would be some population reduction accompanying greater wealth (presuming that occurs), which is a phenomenon that accompanies greater living standards, but the Malthusian argument is equally about resource control as much as population control as much as technological control. The idea that the scaling back of fossil fuel energy will automatically lead to the triumph of nonrenewable energy is not remotely as convincing as the idea that the scaling back of fossil fuel based energy will be a joker in the pack when it comes to pressuring governments into all adopting much lower populations to save the planet, because saving the planet has required scaling back energy, and, along with that food production. Maybe then the belated rage of populations will resemble something like the Chinese peasant rebellions of past times which periodically bought down dynasties.

Yuvsal Harari puts it plainly enough when he says, “fast forward to the early 2st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population,” and that “Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit, they have free will and nobody knows what’s happening inside me -so whatever I chose in the election of in the supermarket, that’s my free will? That’s over.”

And closely related to this is the replacement of the traditional family with the new family in which the natural process of birth only pertains to one type of family—the new types of family bypass nature, and in their bypassing, in their new kind of manufactured nature, the opportunity for technocratic control over who is allowed to give birth becomes inevitable. No wonder that many people today call this state of affairs in which the extent of control over life and nature and the concentration of that control within the elite decision making that is requisite upon the population accepting the authority and decisions of the decision makers satanic.

Against this backdrop, the politicization of the trans and gay movement, the push for gay marriage and the demand that gay and transgenders friendly materials be part of the school curricula, while on the surface being about a group’s right to social acceptance is a very conspicuous pawn in a larger game of social and population control. To be sure gays/trans people will seem to have want they want, but it is questionable whether the full extent of what we will all have will be what they or anyone apart from the “happy few” will want once they have what they really have. But this is precisely what the satanic always delivers—a big fact nothing that promises to be everything.

The follow-up essay is also about why it is neither stupid nor cruel to describe the way Western culture has conjoined the demand for complete emancipation within a narrative fabric in which non-being, lies, are integral to its formation and spread. While the essentialization of human identity based around a limited number of aspects—sexuality, race, and ethnicity – is intrinsic to it, in the main, it is sexualized identity which features both as the bedrock or being of the self as well as its apex. This is congruent with the great metaphysical turn of the seventeenth century seeking to build a new world by changing the names of what we experience to conform to a reality that is disclosed by the more stringent laws of reality discerned by the mind’s understanding. Such a turn, though, meant that the human world which is shot through by our makings that come from imaginings, stories, intimations, and more generally traditions are somehow less authentic and real than whatever world we might build anew, and what pertains to the understanding and imagination of the new builders.

Apart from the Cartesian and Lockean allowance of the various mental functions deployed to make sense of ourselves and the world, this turn also involved a substitution of the soul with sheer appetitive-ness and its satiation, making the avoidance of pain and the seeking of pleasure the polarities within which life’s meaning is to be played out. Although Kant was completely beholden to mechanistic science in his thinking about “experience” he was able to see that this polarity interfered with the grander claim about human dignity and the importance of its basis in freedom requiring that we are subject to laws that our own reason has concocted. That movement from appetites to rights ( almost two centuries before Rawls) was merely to replace nature’s raw stuff with our own abstractions. This has indeed made the new priest class who traffic in ideas about governance and freedom feel that their verbal wisps can eventually form flesh, but it has nothing to do with enhancing life itself.

I realize that clarifying the issues will still not stop those invested in ideological assault upon ideas that do not serve their interests and view of the new world and place within it, denouncing those who think like this as “-phobes” and “-ists.” But it is precisely because of the extent of thoughtlessness in the world that the world is in the turmoil it is, and our democratic societies all but dead and, more personally, that I pull myself away from my daily joy of playing guitar and singing to write essays on such terrible aspects of reality for the Postil.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


Featured: “Three Name Givers,” by Odd Nerdrum; painted in 1990.

Lies, Spies and US Bioweapons on the Verge of Armageddon

Initially, when the Russians brought the existence of the Ukrainian biolabs to the attention of the world, it was denied outright—the official Western response was—”those Ruskies just never stop lying.” And having shut down RT news, hardly anyone in the West knew anything about the Russian claim except that it was being made and it was therefore “disinformation,” and only conspiracy theorists believed it. Given there still has been no declaration of war by any Western country against Russia, one might think the “voices of social conscience” and the “guardians of truth” might at least be curious to know why the Western population was generally being “protected” from Russian news sources because the bright sparks thought the people just too dumb to be able to distinguish between truth and lie.

For a few years now, the bright sparks have decided that they alone know “the truth.” I am not sure which “settled science” it was exactly that decided that Russian media always tells lies, and that Western people are too gullible to be trusted with open access to Russian media. But it must have been the result of some scientific study by irreproachable “scientists,” because the masters of social conscience know and own the science on any given topic, and it was only us stooges that thought that such control of information was further proof of the dangerous totalitarian stranglehold of the Western world’s “leaders” and their mental enforcers.

But glory be, thanks to Victoria Nuland, that brain box and Democrat wife of Republican neo-con Robert Kagan, the current Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and former Assistant Secretary of State European and Eurasian Affairs, the US go-to girl in the “Revolution of Dignity” (you know, the one where “Dignity” meant burning alive their political opponents in Odessa—which local Russian speakers put at close to 400. But, hey, what would they know—they only lived there)—the story needed to by updated. Nuland clarified to the hapless Marco Rubio, who, when questioning her, expected her to respond that there were no labs, that they were actually just perfectly safe biolabs, conducting public health research. But with Russians in the picture, Nuland took on the role of Cassandra to warn that said labs in Ukraine were now a cause for concern, because their benign public health research was sure to be turned into “bioweapons” by those evil Russian.

Of course, the issue of biolabs and bioweapons is central to what is happening now—and is yet another factor in Russia’s “invasion.” And to make sure we would all share “the correct” memory of all this, on June 9, 2022 AD, the Pentagon released a Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts with Ukraine, Russia and Other Former Soviet Union Countries. I think the centerpiece of the document is this:

The United States has also worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health, providing support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades. The collaborative programs have focused on improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.

On its release, some journalists, like Steve Sweeney from People’s World reported (June 14) that “The Pentagon said on Thursday that it has operated 46 biolabs in Ukraine handling dangerous pathogens, after previously dismissing the charges as Russian propaganda.” PolitiFact quickly weighed in with “The 46 facilities referenced in the articles and in the government’s fact sheet are owned and operated by Ukraine.” In the world of PolitiFact “working collaboratively” does not seem to be a synonym for funding. But while for the strict grammarians and guardians of “facts,” a tomato is definitely not a tomahto, the pertinent issue is smothered in the race to present nice, neat, clean facts to prevent us from ever believing anything that was not put together by team Goody Global Two Shoes—and that is the point made by bioweapons analyst Francis Boyle:

One of the latest explanations from a U.S. State Department spokesperson is that Ukraine has ‘biodefense’ laboratories, which are ‘not biological weapons facilities.’ The problem with making a distinction between ‘biodefense’ and ‘biowarfare’ is that, basically, there is none. No biodefense research is purely defensive, because to do biodefense work, you’re automatically engaged in the creation of biological weapons. All dual use research can be used for military purposes, and often is. As explained by Boyle, the idea behind ‘biodefense’ research is that there might be a natural pathogen out there that can cause a pandemic, or someone might release an engineered biological weapon, that we need to prepare a cure for.

How did such an obvious point pass the mental geniuses who tell us what to think? By the way Boyle is a human rights lawyer for all sorts of causes that generally fit neatly into the educated politically activist academic consensus (a critic of Israel and exponent of Palestinian rights, an advocate for indigenous and first nation rights, a supporter of Hawaiian self-determination, an international-law expert and legal adviser to the first Bosnia-Herzegovinian president). Then, he took an interest in bioweaponry and connected it to COVID. At once he became a “conspiracy theorist.” Anyone who thinks Big Pharma is capable of hazardous decisions, leveraging government and being involved in cartel collusion, and profiteering, and that it should be subjected to the kinds of protocols that no longer seem to exist for any of the larger corporation—is now labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”

If such a prime fact as Boyle’s about the nature of “biodefense” is smothered by weasel words, and by simply deferring to official statements made by the very operatives whose operations are being questioned, how was it ever possible for questions about government bioweaponry to get a serious airing in the public sphere? Answer—it was not possible, because the rules governing the “public square” no longer favor any kind of critical discussion—the public square itself dictates “the acceptable answers” to topics, and the public square is what the owners of that square say that it is—for the public square is very much a private possession.

But apart from the logic that Boyle brought to the conversation, even before every major news outlet in the country was falling over itself to attack right-wing conspiracy theorists, Newspunch counterpunched by demonstrating what a bunch of fraudsters the factcheckers are—when it reached back into the archives and found a piece from BioPrepWatch.com published in 2010: “Deleted Web Pages Show Obama Ordered Ukraine BioLabs to Develop ‘Deadly Pathogens.’” Allow me to reproduce the rest of the report:

Thenationalpulse.com reports: The article, which also highlighted the work of former Senator Dick Lugar, was additionally included in Issue No. 818 of the United States Air Force (USAF) Counterproliferation Center’s Outreach Journal.

Lugar said plans for the facility began in 2005 when he and then-Senator Barack Obama entered a partnership with Ukrainian officials. Lugar and Obama also helped coordinate efforts between the U.S and Ukrainian researchers that year in an effort to study and help prevent avian flu,” explained author Tina Redlup.

A 2011 report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Anticipating Biosecurity Challenges of the Global Expansion of High-Containment Biological Laboratories explained how the Odessa-based laboratory “is responsible for the identification of especially dangerous biological pathogens.

This laboratory was reconstructed and technically updated up to the BSL-3 level through a cooperative agreement between the United States Department of Defense and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine that started in 2005. The collaboration focuses on preventing the spread of technologies, pathogens, and knowledge that can be used in the development of biological weapons,” the report continues.

The updated laboratory serves as Interim Central Reference Laboratory with a depozitarium (pathogen collection). According to Ukrainian regulations, it has a permit to work with both bacteria and viruses of the first and second pathogenic groups,” explains the report.

A separate document detailing Ukraine’s biolab network from the BioWeapons Prevention Project outlines in greater detail the scope of pathogens the facility has conducted research with.

Among the viruses the lab studied were Ebola and “viruses of pathogencity group II by using of virology, molecular, serologica and express methods.”

Additionally, the lab provided “special training for specialists on biosafety and biosecurity issues during handling of dangerous biological pathogenic agents.”

The unearthed biolab facility follows intense scrutiny over the U.S. government’s decision to fund risky, “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan at a Chinese Communist Party-run lab with military ties.

The combination of algorithmic-controlled information and the vanishing of web sites that disprove the approved “line” of the cabal at Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc., as well as the CIA, the FBI and the Government—is now such a conspicuous feature of our information flow in the West that an obvious question arises—how can anyone, who wants to get at the truth of things, still believe any official news source today? With respect to the war, in general, and the biolabs, in particular, the only position that is now permitted to be published in mainstream media is that if the Russians claim something, it is ipso facto propaganda and false. All nice and Manichean. And the way this seems to now be proven is that Government intelligence officials tell us so. Once upon a time academics and journalists were far more inclined to think that if the CIA said something there was a fair to good chance it was a lie.

So, before we carry on with looking briefly at the history of US biowarfare and what the Russian arguments and claims about US biolabs and weapons are, and why this should be widely known and discussed, instead of being denounced, and shutdown—let us just remind ourselves of a few unpleasant truths about the CIA, and why it is utterly imbecilic (and fully in keeping with the our age of the imbecilic) that journalists have derived their facts and larger narrative for understanding the Russia-Ukraine war from the Central Imbecilic (sorry, I meant, Intelligence) Agency.

Trust US. We are the CIA

Those of a certain age will most like be familiar with Phillip Agee’s Inside the Company: CIA Diary, which is Agee’s first-hand account of his twelve years as a CIA agent during his time in Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico and Washington. The essentials are laid out in a couple of early paragraphs of the book, where he writes:

When I joined the CIA I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book. Even after recent revelations about the CIA it is still difficult for people to understand what a huge and sinister organization the CIA is. It is the biggest and most powerful secret service that has ever existed. I don’t know how big the KGB is inside the Soviet Union, but its international operation is small compared with the CIA’s. The CIA has 16,500 employees and an annual budget of $750,000,000. That does not include its mercenary armies or its commercial subsidiaries. Add them all together, the agency employs or subsidizes hundreds of thousands of people and spends billions every year. Its official budget is secret; it’s concealed in those of other Federal agencies. Nobody tells the Congress what the CIA spends. By law, the CIA is not accountable to Congress.

In the past 25 years, the CIA has been involved in plots to overthrow governments in Iran, the Sudan, Syria, Guatemala, Ecuador, Guyana, Zaire and Ghana. In Greece, the CIA participated in bringing in the repressive regime of the colonels. In Chile, The Company spent millions to “destabilize” the Allende government and set up the military junta, which has since massacred tens of thousands of workers, students, liberals and leftists. In Indonesia in 1965, The Company was behind an even bloodier coup, the one that got rid of Sukarno and led to the slaughter of at least 500,000 and possibly 1,000,000 people. In the Dominican Republic the CIA arranged the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo and later participated in the invasion that prevented the return to power of the liberal ex-president Juan Bosch. In Cuba, The Company paid for and directed the invasion that failed at the Bay of Pigs. Sometime later the CIA was involved in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It is difficult to believe, or comprehend, that the CIA could be involved in all these subversive activities all over the world.

Since Agee’s diary. there have been other accounts of the CIA, mainly by former operatives or academics, which go into the details of all the election rigging, coups, assassination attempts, false flag operations, torturing and various conspiracies (yes, shock, horror! the CIA has a history of conspiring to overthrow regimes, and fuel revolts and start wars). Before the Left was a woke joke, and the CIA had set up shop as a diversity service provider, scholars like William Blum (see his Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II) would write books exposing the various dirty tricks and machinations (installing bloody dictators, arming terrorists, working with drug runners, arms runners and money laundering—all for the good of the world. I thoroughly recommend Douglas Valentine’s 2017 book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World—it also has a chapter on the CIA in Ukraine. Here is synopsis of another book, Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic, by former DEA agent, Michael Levine which gives a pretty good account of what the CIA have been up to in the more overtly criminal stakes:

…the CIA has perverted the American criminal justice system by protecting drug dealers and murderers from prosecution; that Federal judges and prosecutors alleged to have broken narcotics laws have been protected from investigation; that the government of Bolivia and South American drug cartel leaders have been assisted and even paid by the CIA…without CIA support, South American cartels and the epidemic of cocaine and crack use in the U.S. would never have occurred.

During the Maidan revolution in 2014, McCain and Nuland were doing photo ops with Svoboda (the neo-Nazi political party) leader Oleh Tyahnybok and his cronies who were busy assisting in regime change. After all, at the end of the Second World War US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, recruited General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II, who “successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals.” This was hidden from the public for some fifty years, until documents pertaining to this history were declassified in 2002. The following from The National Security Archive in 2005 is worth quoting:

The documentation unearthed by the IWG (The Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group) reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers.

The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material in May of 2004, in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis. The introduction to this book emphasizes the dilemma of using former Nazis as assets:

The notion that they [CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corp, Gehlen organization] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation. Some American intelligence officials could not or did not want to see how many German intelligence officials, SS officers, police, or non-German collaborators with the Nazis were compromised or incriminated by their past service.

Apparently, the Nazi spies were a disaster! As the report continues:

Lack of sufficient attention to history-and, on a personal level, to character and morality-established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed ‘democratic convictions’ were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them (some could be blackmailed), these recruits represented a potential security problem.

But now that Russia’s geopolitical concerns are strategically regional and have nothing in common with the globalist aspirations of the former Soviets, many of the very people who previously were very willing to denounce the CIA for its interventions in Chile, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, Greece, Iran, Indonesia etc. are more than willing to read from the script prepared by the CIA. Still, the take-home point from any of the left-leaning books on the CIA, written in the last thirty years or so, is that the CIA acted covertly, criminally, and very often under the veil of “plausible deniability;” which is to say, it was often left free to do whatever it thought necessary, without there being any followable line of command that would link its actions to the President—and, of course, it lied—constantly. It also involved itself in propaganda. It is obvious that the entrenchment of nefarious practices tend to continue well after any rationale for adopting them has vanished. On the issue of propaganda, the following from Agee is important:

The CIA’S role in the US propaganda program is determined by the official division of propaganda into three general categories: white, grey and black. White propaganda is that which is openly acknowledged as coming from the US government, e.g. from the US Information Agency (USIA); grey propaganda is ostensibly attributed to people or organizations who do not acknowledge the US government as the source of their material and who produce the material as if it were their own; black propaganda is unattributed material, or it is attributed to a non-existent source, or it is false material attributed to a real source. The CIA is the only US government agency authorized to engage in black propaganda operations, but it shares the responsibility for grey propaganda with other agencies such as USIA. However, according to the ‘Grey Law’ of the National Security Council contained in one of the NSCID’S, other agencies must obtain prior CIA approval before engaging in grey propaganda. The vehicles for grey and black propaganda may be unaware of their CIA or US government sponsorship. This is partly so that it can be more effective and partly to keep down the number of people who know what is going on and thus to reduce the danger of exposing true sponsorship. Thus editorialists, politicians, businessmen and others may produce propaganda, even for money, without necessarily knowing who their masters in the case are. Some among them obviously will and so, in agency terminology, there is a distinction between ‘witting’ and ‘unwitting’ agents.

Sound familiar? Allow me to align this with a piece by NBC (April 6 2022) that is breathtaking in its combination of chutzpah and imbecilic integrity. The headline reads “In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn’t rock solid.” “It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence,” one U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them [the Russians], Putin specifically, before they do something.”

It continues:

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine. President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions. It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.

Who needs rock solid when the government and its intel are so great?

Let’s consider one last piece on the CIA—Tim Weiner’s, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. It is a fairly sober account of the CIA by a journalist whose recent pronouncements—short of anything resembling proof—on this war seem to me to make him prey to his own quarry. But his book of 2007 makes some good points. The first is a good summing up of the limits of “intelligence”—which is salient to why it is insane for journalists to think they are doing a democracy anything other than a disservice by parroting the “talking points” of their “intelligence” sources: “Intelligence fails because it is human, no stronger than the power of one mind to understand another. Garrett Jones, the CIA station chief during the disastrous American expedition in Somalia, put it plainly: ‘There are going to be screw-ups, mistakes, confusion, and missteps,’ he said. “One hopes they won’t be fatal.”

The second, is a good summary of how the intelligence game changed with the war on terror, and how that “war” has led to how the CIA now operates:

The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before–beginning in 1950, in Germany, Japan, and Panama. It had participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before–beginning in 1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected terrorists and assassins before–most famously in 1997, in the case of Mir Amal Kansi, the killer of two CIA officers. But Bush gave the agency a new and extraordinary authority: to turn kidnapped suspects over to foreign security services for interrogation and torture, and to rely on the confessions they extracted. As I wrote in The New York Times on October 7, 2001: “American intelligence may have to rely on its liaisons with the world’s toughest foreign services, men who can look and think and act like terrorists. If someone is going to interrogate a man in a basement in Cairo or Quetta, it will be an Egyptian or a Pakistani officer. American intelligence will take the information without asking a lot of lawyerly questions.” Under Bush’s order, the CIA began to function as a global military police, throwing hundreds of suspects into secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and inside the American military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba for interrogations. The gloves were off. “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” Bush told the nation in an address to a joint session of Congress on September 20. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.

Of course, the justification for the “war on terror” moved from the war against the Taliban to the war against Iraq; and while the rationale of that war, mentioned below, was based on false information, the real rationale enthusiastically repeated on numerous occasions by Tony Blair was that it was the task of democracies to overthrow tyrants wherever they were. Hence the requisite procedure in the international arena becomes one of declaring one’s enemy a tyrant to legitimate regime change. And as was signaled with the passing of the Magnitsky Act back in 2012, which enabled the seizure of Russian assets, the decision that regime change had to occur in Russia precedes not only the present war in the Ukraine, but the Maidan.

And if anyone out there still thinks the CIA is a trustworthy institution (and I have not even touched upon its various debacles which have been addressed by other authors) let’s go to the third passage from Weiner, which I think particularly pertinent because even the slew of pro-war Democrats might remember where they purportedly once stood (of course, I am joshing. Most of them went in boots and all with young George W and the CIA. So much for principles):

President Bush presented the CIA’s case and more in his State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003: Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to kill millions, chemical weapons to kill countless thousands, mobile biological weapons labs designed to produce germ-warfare agents. “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” he said. “Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. All of this was terrifying. None of it was true.

In a nutshell, there is nothing about the CIA’s history which indicates that it is a trustworthy operation. The good thing about most of the left-wing writings on the CIA—and even though I am often critical of the Left, I have always thought this aspect of their investigations to be a valuable contribution to any public considerations of state action—is that they invariably identity the nexus between corporate interests and the state. An iconic expression of the problem was by Major General Smedley Butler back in the 1930s in his War is a Racket:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Nothing has changed in that the real reason for NATO expansionism and for the most brazen proxy war funded by way Western governments funneling tax payers’ money, without resorting to anything remotely resembling electoral approval, to send weapons to Ukraine.

Far less reported are NATO’s nuclear war games which are being held some six hundred miles from Russia. And what is simply not known at all—is what the Russians are saying about US bioweapons.

A Brief History of The US Bioweapon Research and Why the Russians Are Bothered

US government research into biological warfare originated in the Second World War in response to British and French concerns that the Nazis might attack with biological weapons. They didn’t, but the Japanese were also developing biological weapons that they would use against the Chinese—they experimented on prisoners, poisoned wells, and dropped plague infested fleas over cities and rice fields. The Soviets had also been attacked with biological weapons, and after the war they convicted some of the Japanese researchers, although the Soviets had already been working on biological warfare from the 1920s and would become world leaders in bioweaponry until the Union collapsed.

The defeat of the Japanese provided a valuable source of new recruits for the US government in the area of biological warfare. The extent to which the US was able to make use of the Japanese research is not altogether clear, but we do know that both in the US and Japan secret research was being conducted, involving known war criminals for the next forty years. This information started coming to light in the 1990s when, as Sheldon Harris in his book of 1994, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover Up, the Clinton administration “began to lift the veil of secrecy concerning United States; experiments with human subjects in hundreds of studies during and since the end of World War II.” Forgive the lengthiness of the quote from Harris; but as most people will not be aware of this, I think it important to cite in full; and it nicely provides something of a history of US, Japanese and Soviet bioweaponry:

We now know that American scientists tested humans with mustard gas, other chemical agents, exposed others to radiation tests, and still others to a variety of pathogens without the subjects’ knowledge or consent. In many instances, the most distinguished scientists from the most prestigious American universities participated both in deceiving their patients and in conducting the experiments. Even today, those scientists still active in the field, and their host universities, deny involvement. Recently opened former Soviet archives disclose that the Soviet Union inaugurated a large-scale biological warfare program beginning in the mid-1920s. Humans were used often in experiments that covered a variety of diseases potentially useful in biological warfare. Research facilities were established throughout that vast nation, and, according to Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin, such research continues covertly today.

The Soviet cover was partially blown in 1979 when a massive outbreak of anthrax affected a large area around the Urals city of Sverdlovsk. The most conservative estimates are that at least ninety-six people were infected, and that some sixty-six people died as a result of the outbreak. The true figures, no doubt, are higher. The most terrifying aspect of the outbreak was the disclosure that the Sverdlovsk biological warfare plant accidentally released less than one gram of anthrax spores, possibly as little as several milligrams. It does not take much imagination to calculate how much death and destruction the release of a few grams of anthrax spores into a heavily populated community could cause.

In Japan, scientists who participated in involuntary human experiments during World War II, and earlier, dominated the administration and controlled the areas of research of the country’s National Institute of Health for one half-century after the war ended…it should be noted here that at least seven of the NIH’s Directors and five of the Institute’s Vice Directors, during the 1930s and 1940s, engaged in biological warfare experiments which employed human test subjects. The National Institute of Health is a government-supported agency. Yet these known war criminals were employed by this institution, were given great powers within the organization and continued to use humans without their consent, and often without their knowledge, in investigations that were carried on during the course of more than forty years. It is known that experiments were authorized on prisoners, babies and patients in psychiatric hospitals in 1947, and from 1952 until 1955 by the NIH’s Vice Director Masami Kitaoka. Another researcher conducted bacteriological experiments on infants hospitalized in Tokyo’s National First Hospital in 1952. Later, this same researcher, from 1967 until 1971, used shigella in experiments on soldiers in Japan’s Self-Defence Forces. In May 1985, an NIH researcher experimentally injected an unapproved vaccine against a Japanese encephalitis virus into nearly 200 hospitalized children without their parents’ consent. At different times over a three-year period, 1987, 1988, 1989, Kuniaki Nerome experimentally tested two types of genetically modified vaccine against influenza on approximately forty hospitalized children. Their parents were unaware of the tests and did not give their informed consent for the vaccines to be used on their children.

There are a number of international treaties being drawn up that seek to outlaw biological warfare, and, by implication, involuntary human experimentation. The United States, Russia (the former Soviet Union) and Japan are signatories to the various international agreements outlawing human experimentation, and the production of biological warfare agents. Nevertheless, both these activities appear to be flourishing today in all three countries, as well as elsewhere in various parts of the world. It appears that human testing, biological and chemical weapons will be part of former President George Bush’s so-called new world order for some time to come.

It is true that in 1969 President Nixon made a statement signaling the end of US offensive biological weapons programs and in 1972, along with Soviet Union, the Biological Weapons Conventions, outlawing biological warfare. What one makes of this very much depends upon what one thinks of the efficacy of international declarations, pieces of paper and signatures, and whether one thinks public gestures disclose hidden operations.

One investigative journalist who was doing his job well was Gordon Thomas. Early in his book, Spies and Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control and Germ Warfare, in the midst of discussing the anthrax attacks that took place in the US in October 2001, he writes:

In 2004, the U.S. armory of weaponized biological agents consisted of 19 bacteria, 43 viruses, 14 toxins and 4 rickettsiae. Their use remains outlawed under the Geneva Protocol of 1925. Within five years of the protocol’s creation Italy, Belgium, Canada, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland and the Soviet Union had all signed. The United States did not sign until 1975. By then the U.S. had developed a massive biochemical arsenal. Shortly before the September 11 attack, the Pentagon admitted that at Nellis Air Force base, one of the most secret in America, it had established the world’s largest stockpile of biological and chemical weapons. It had been created largely by CIA scientists. One of these scientists had been an obsessive “biochemist whose work pioneered the research which eventually led to the stockpile. His name was Frank Olson.

On that terrible September day in 2001, Olson’s son, Eric, was living in the family home in Frederick, Maryland, a short distance from Fort Detrick, where his father had worked for the CIA. That establishment then—and now—remains a restricted place, guarded by a variety of electronic defenses and armed “guards. As the television set in Eric’s living room endlessly replayed the 9/11 scenes of destruction from New York and Washington, he typed into his computer—on which he had stored so many astonishing matters relating to the death of his father—the most astounding claim of all:

“My father was murdered because the CIA feared he would reveal the biggest American secret of the Cold War, perhaps of all time. It is the secret of how the CIA was involved in biological warfare as well as mind control. My father had a key part in both programs.”

The takeaways from this very brief history are simply that the US has engaged in bioweapon research; that it has stockpiles—an “armory”—of weaponized biological agents; and that it is extremely secretive. Everything can of course have a purely benign spin—the research is purely defensive/preventative. It exists to save us from bio attacks by terrorists or rogue states—like Russia—and that it is important to prevent terrorists and rogue states from getting hold of the research and having access to the biological agents. As we all know the United States is still the only state to have used nuclear weapons. It sets itself up as the moral arbiter of nations and what constitutes a just international order. It is entitled to be an exceptional state—that’s part of its Calvinist heritage (hard to believe when you see its public clowns today)—but it sticks to it. The question is: is the USA a force for the angels? Or does it say one thing and do another? Is its bioresearch all for the human good? Or is it a potential source of devastation?

Irrespective of what you or I might think, the thing that must be born in mind when the Russians went on the offensive about the biolabs in the Ukraine, and the US went from denial (and when that became too implausible) to “nothing to see here, all above-board, and there is nothing remotely dangerous in any of this.”

Apart from what seems to me to be the Western explanation—one can very easily find out why the Russians are bothered, and why it might even be reasonable for them to be bothered when one listens to what they are saying. And what they are saying is deeply disturbing, and as far as I can see it, while the very idea that Ukrainian/ US biolabs could be genuinely perceived as a serious threat to Russia is ridiculed and ‘factchecked’ by repeating government/ intelligence press releases, anyone who reads the Russian Government Report, The activities of the biological laboratories of the US Department of Defense in Ukraine will see that, at the very least, there is a story here, and that to bury it is but one more egregious example of the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of our “idea-broking” professionals.

An essential component of that story is the connection between the end of the Soviet Union, the expansion of NATO (which the West refuses to concede is any serious cause of aggravation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and which involves “experts” and “journalists” repeating the lie that none ever said NATO expansion would stop with the end of the Cold War), and the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. That Program was initiated by the US government working in cooperation with the Pentagon and CIA—the Pentagon Division was originally entitled the “Defense Special Weapons Agency,” before changing its name to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the US Army Institute for Medical Research on Infectious Diseases. The Program’s ostensible purpose was the elimination of stockpiles of Soviet nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, which effectively gave the US control over former Soviet biological weapons.

Although, it might be a source of puzzlement for those who think that the USA, unlike any other imperial or hegemonic power, simply acts for the good of all human kind—and that it and its allies are not driven by the strategic self-interests of their ruling classes—the “Cooperative Reduction Program” not only involved taking over the stockpiles (and specialists trained in developing and studying pathogens and bioweapon technology) in Russia, but also countries “along the perimeter of the borders of Russia: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan,” before expanding into other parts of Asia and Africa.

What was meant to be an elimination program morphed into something far more in keeping with a geopolitical strategy commensurate with the continuation of NATO expansion and the United States’ mission of a unipolar world, and a source of concern for the Russians, viz. “one after another transferred their collections of dangerous pathogens to the United States in exchange for American help. Who neutralized them in America, how and whether they were actually destroyed—remained a mystery.”

But then everything to do with the labs was a mystery—which, on a tangential though not completely unrelated matter, is why the issues of the laboratory source of COVID, and the pharmaceutical and financial and political networks involved in the origin of the pandemic (whether true or fake) are still smothered in deceit and mystery.

In any case, what was officially presented as a program of elimination turned into an opportunity too good to miss, as an extensive network of labs working with dangerous viruses were set up in former Soviet countries: “All of them were financed by the US Department of Defense, were called differently everywhere and were created, as a rule, on the basis of scientific research institutes and SES, created back in the Soviet period. One of the features of this program consisted in the fact that in each country not one object was erected, but a whole cluster at once. Part of it was concentrated directly in the capitals of the former republics, while related institutions were located in different parts of the country.”

The Report then identifies what it calls two “strong opinions” about this network in the former Soviet republics, and they are worth citing at length:

First. American biological programs in the post-Soviet states are a way to circumvent the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and Their Destruction (BTWC). Despite the fact that the Convention was signed back in 1972, to this day, the control mechanism does not work largely due to the efforts of the United States, although the world expert community spent more than 45 years developing it. In 2001, the US demonstrated to the world that it had active bioprograms. After the attack on September 11, 2001, deaths of anthrax among people suddenly began to be recorded, and postal envelopes became the transmission route of this infection. The US Congress conducted an investigation (later it turned out that the recipe was combat and came out of the walls of the US Army bacteriological center at Fort Detrick). The attack against its own people, attributed to terrorists, gave huge political dividends to the US leadership. Now there was a formal reason to declare that the States are victims of biological terrorism and therefore unilaterally withdraw from the mechanism of collective control over the implementation of the BTWC. In autumn 2001, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced this in Geneva. At the same time, a biological threat reduction program (the Nunn-Lugar program) was proposed, and the United States began large-scale construction of military biological laboratories, including around Russia. But holding the United States accountable for conducting biological experiments that violate the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons is almost impossible. The US does not recognize the International Criminal Court and was not a signatory to the founding Rome Statute….

Second. The United States, after the collapse of the USSR, became very concerned about the conditions for the storage of pathogens and, as a result, the threat of a biological attack on America. The global American project declares its goal to minimize these threats, which is why tens and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in laboratories in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Moldova, and Ukraine. They say that dangerous strains of microorganisms may leak into the environment in these countries. However, it does not explain how, for example, Armenia or Uzbekistan can organize a biological attack on the United States or why the laboratories are mainly located in large cities with a high population density or at a close distance from them. After all, it is much more logical, if there is even a minimal threat of pathogen leakage, to build such facilities in a desert area in order to eliminate the possibility of the spread of pathogens and epidemics.

As for the more specific purposes of the research, the penultimate paragraph of the Report sums it up thus:

The activities of American biological laboratories damage the economy, including by indirect methods (due to the destruction of livestock of diseased livestock, discrediting livestock products on local and world markets), as well as the human potential of Russia (reduction of general immunity and resistance to seasonal diseases, ability to reproduce, decreased efficiency, etc.), the diversion of significant forces and resources of the state to combat artificial outbreaks of infectious diseases. As a result the dependence of the attacked countries (Russia, China and Iran) on the products of the Western pharmaceutical industry is increasing, hoping in the future to offer medicines against artificially caused outbreaks of infectious diseases.

The Report also notes the mutuality of political, military and corporate interests that are embedded in bioresearch, and the geopolitical conditions that the US needs to establish and maintain for it to be effective. Again, I quote at length:

US biolaboratories located along the borders of the Russian Federation have a number of common features. These objects are strictly classified and are located in cities or near cities with a population of over a million (Odessa, Kharkov, Almaty), near seaports (Odessa), airports (Tbilisi, Yerevan, Kyiv) or in earthquake-prone countries such as Armenia (Yerevan, Gyumri, Ijevan) , and even in areas with a probability of 9-magnitude earthquakes (Almaty). The construction of laboratories as part of projects to counter biological threats allows the United States to fully control the biological situation on the territory of both the respective post-Soviet countries and their transboundary neighbors. Virologists know that there is only one step from studying bacteria to creating a bacteriological weapon. In addition, the biolaboratories created by the United States, operating in a closed regime, are removed from the control of the governments of the countries in which they are located. Laboratories are often staffed by Americans with diplomatic immunity, and local health officials do not have direct access to these facilities.

The number of laboratory staff, from 50 to 250 people, far exceeds the number of personnel needed to maintain modern civilian laboratories with stated goals. The heads of the facilities are often appointed by persons from among the military loyal to Washington or intelligence officers. So, the CRL in Tbilisi was previously headed by the chief of Georgian intelligence Anna Zhvania and he was subordinate not to the Ministry of Health, but to the Ministry of Defense of Georgia.

In the case of Ukraine, and unlike other parts of the former USSR, it was not until the Presidency of George W. Bush that bioweapon research was conducted there. Like Obama and Trump after him, George W. originally campaigned on a foreign policy platform of cooperation with Russia—but that counted for zero once elected, and his regime’s setting up of military laboratories in Ukraine would be an important part in a chain of events that has led to the brink we now live upon.

The Report quotes the Political Scientist Dmitry Skvortsov: “Now there are 15 military laboratories in the country at once, and their activities are absolutely non-transparent and unaccountable. Hence the conclusion: these facilities were created by the Pentagon as manufacturers of biological weapons. Otherwise, why aim to prevent the spread of ‘technologies, viruses and pathogens’ used in the development of biological weapons in facilities where these weapons have never been developed?”

The Report also quotes the former Ukrainian Prime Minister, Mykola Azarov complaining about the secrecy surrounding the research and the lack of controls able to be exercised on the research.

When the story about the existence of the US/Ukraine biolabs was labelled “misinformation,” before being changed to “so what? It’s for our own good,” one might have thought that would be some follow up by journalists about claims of odd viral outbreaks in Ukraine. But that has never happened. Just because journalists do not report things does not mean such things do not exist. And the Report points out that there have been bacterial and viral outbreaks in Ukraine of the sort which indicate laboratory sources.

For example in 2010 and 2015, there were California flu pandemics:

…when the epidemiological threshold was exceeded in 20 regions. From October 2015 to February 2016, more than 350 virologically confirmed deaths from this type of A (H1N1) virus were registered in Ukraine, with 40% of deaths were young people from 18 to 26 years old who did not have chronic diseases.”

Also,

Since 1995, no cases of cholera have been registered in Ukraine. And suddenly in 2011 in Mariupol, 33 people get sick at once. In 2009, 450 Ukrainians in Ternopil suffered from a rare virus that causes hemorrhagic pneumonia. In 2014, there was another outbreak of cholera in Ukraine, which came from nowhere—then 800 people fell ill. The same thing happens in 2015 and 2017: about a hundred cases were registered in Mykolaiv.

In 2015, fatal cases of leptospirosis, rabies and other pathologies, which have long been forgotten in the EU countries, were recorded in Ukraine. In 2016, an epidemic begins in the country botulism, from which four people die, and in 2017—eight more, only according to official data.

In January of the same year, 37 residents of Nikolaev were hospitalized with “jaundice”, six months later 60 people with the same diagnosis were hospitalized in Zaporozhye. At the same time, an outbreak of hepatitis A was noted in Odessa, and 19 children from the boarding school were sent to the hospital in the Odessa region. In November 27 cases of infection have already been recorded in Kharkiv. The virus was transmitted through drinking water.

The Report also notes:

…the existence of 13,476 permanently dysfunctional anthrax sites in the country, which no one deals with, and some of them graze cattle. Only in the Odessa region there are 430 potentially dangerous objects where animals can catch the disease.

This is exactly what happened in 2018, when anthrax broke out in several villages of the Odessa region: five people ended up in the hospital with a skin form of the disease. In the Sumy region there are at least 20 animal burial grounds with anthrax, and not designated in any way.

The situation with the incidence of botulism is also close to catastrophic. In 2016, 115 cases of botulism were reported in Ukraine, of which 12 were fatal. In 2017, the country’s Ministry of health service has confirmed an additional 90 cases and 8 deaths. In subsequent years, the trend continued: 13 outbreaks were registered in the first three months of 2020 botulism, 15 people got sick, including one child of 9 years old.

The Report also draws attention to another tactic of biological weaponry that might be easier to ignore because its effects are far less dramatic and overt—and that is the release of many “small viruses, colds, varieties of runny nose, multiple strains of influenza,” that do not kill or seriously injure those affected, but which impact the general well-being and energy of a population.

And then there are the epidemics affecting agriculture and the economy:

With the beginning of the active work of DTRA in Ukraine, mass deaths from epidemics began not only of people, but also of animals. Avian flu and African swine fever have dealt a heavy blow to the country’s agriculture. For example, in 2015, 60 thousand pigs were killed and burned at the Kalita agricultural plant alone. At the end of 2016, the EU banned the import of poultry meat from Ukraine due to the epidemiological situation in the country. According to published data, since 2017 Ukraine already imports more sausage than it exports. Thus, Ukraine from a competitor in the market of agricultural products is turning into a market for these products from the EU and the USA. The money invested in the laboratory is returned.

Another example were the outbreaks of bird flu was in 2016 and 2017 that led to a temporary bans by the EU and some Eastern European countries on Ukrainian poultry.

Finally, let me cite one last section of the Teport which discusses another report undertaken by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) “analyzing the risks associates with activities in the field of American biological laboratories. In particular, the document notes that the program provides for the accumulation in the Kherson Regional Laboratory Center of the State Sanitary and Epidemiological Service of Ukraine of samples of pathogens from different regions of Ukraine under the pretext of studying the specifics of local strains and determining the degree of virulence of the obtained samples among the population”:

The next stage of cooperation, according to the SBU, should be the generalization and referral of research results to the Center for Biological Research at the US Defense Ministry, ostensibly to attract American specialists to develop vaccine samples that are maximally adapted to the residents of a particular region. The persistent efforts of the United States to resume the project indicate the intention to establish control over all domestic studies of pathogens of particularly dangerous infectious diseases that can be used for creation or modernization of new types of selective biological weapons. At the same time, it is not excluded that in the conditions of broad rights and powers guaranteed by the program, a foreign party will be able to study its own test systems on the territory of Ukraine, which creates a potential threat to epidemiological and epizootic situations, both in the region and in the country as a whole.

In sum, what the Russians fear about the biolabs is that research has been done with the explicit intention of breaking down the “national biological protection system.”

I have not the slightest doubt that if these claims were being made about the Russians the mainstream media would be creating a state of utter hysteria in the Western population. Already Western propaganda has succeeded in dehumanizing not only the Russians, but anyone who does not go along with the primary main stream media and the Pentagon and Intelligence claims made about the cause, meaning and justification of the war.

For my part, and as I have indicated in various essays for the Postil, I cannot ignore the constant calls for depopulation coming from the World Economic Forum and the likes of such gigantic brains and compassionate people as Klaus Schwab and Yuval Harari—and I cannot but think that bioweaponry can easily be used for that purpose.

Indeed, I ask myself, if it is necessary to save the planet by killing a few billion people, why wouldn’t our global leaders resort to biological weaponry? Perhaps that weaponry might be used in the most charitable way by simply attacking the reproductive capacities of the weakest of the species—and the weakest would be those who come from nations whose biological protective systems have been weakened through the deliberate release of pathogens.

That is not a conspiracy theory, it is simply posing the question, why would those who openly conspire to achieve the world they want—one with far less “useless people,” and as Harari points out without the least hesitation or sense of shame, most of the world’s population simply no longer have any further use—also not do the deeds that achieve their ends?

One way of doing the culling is to condemn entire peoples by dehumanizing them—initially by taking out nations who have been branded as “monsters,” and when that is not enough simply moving on to the useless.

As for those of you who think the concerns of the Russians “monsters” are just lies and propaganda, you might ask yourself why have they just drafted a proposal urging the UN Security Council to “set up a commission consisting of all members of the Security Council to investigate into the claims against the US and Ukraine contained in the complaint of the Russian Federation regarding the compliance with obligations under the [Biological Weapons] Convention in the context of the activities biological laboratories in the territory of Ukraine,” and present a report by November 30, 2022?


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.


Featured: “The Triumph of Death,” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder; painted ca. 1562.

The Narrative of Sham Elections

Every mainstream media outlet described the referenda in September in the Donetsk, Lugansk People’s Republics (LPR and DPR), Kherson Region and part of Zaporozhye as a “sham” and therefore “rigged.” The results were certainly not what one finds in Western style party political contestations:

  • DPR: Turnout 97.51%, and 99.23% voted for the integration of the Republic into the Russian Federation.
  • LPR: Turnout 92.6%, and 98.42% voted for the integration of the Republic into the Russian Federation.
  • Kherson region: 76.86% turnout, and 87.05% voted for the integration of the region into the Russian Federation.
  • Zaporozhye region: 85.4% turnout, with 93.11% voting in favour of the region’s integration into the Russian Federation.

So, it is very easy to pass these results off as “rigged” to an audience that has not investigated beyond what main stream Western media choose to report. But to equate what was going on there with what is going on in the West is sheer idiocy. To see why the vote went the way it did, follow the reports of Patrick Lancaster, Eva Bartlett, Graham Phillips, or others on the ground; or if you don’t trust them just consider how deeply entrenched in 2010 the support for Yanukovych was in these areas (around 90%), and how ethnic Russians had been treated since the Maidan, and who therefore fled Eastward into these regions (a million or so fled to Russia).

Also recall that Zelensky, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, was voted in because he was supposed to be able to unify the nation by mending economic and political relations with Russia. He couldn’t, because the polarization of the country had become so much worse since the Maidan. The Maidan meant that never again would Eastern Ukrainians electorally determine their own political and economic future.

Be that as it may, the question of whether these elections were a sham or not is easily addressed—because there were international observers throughout the election process, whose reports we provide below:

The international observers who participated in the observation of the referendum on the accession of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to the Russian Federation took part in a special briefing at the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation. They spoke about their impressions of the plebiscite.

Alena Bulgakova, Deputy Chair of the Coordination Council for Public Oversight over Voting under the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, opened the meeting. She thanked the foreign guests for their willingness to learn the truth about the situation in the regions against all odds.

“For the residents of the DPR, LPR, Zaporozhye, and Kherson regions, the referendum is a right that they have earned with blood. The events that have been taking place for eight years have hardened the character of the people to the point that they are no longer afraid of anything. The people have made their decision. It is important to each of them because they are determining not only their own fate, but also the fate of their children and loved ones,” she emphasized.

Alexander Kofman and Alexey Karyakin, Presidents of the Civic Chambers of DPR and LPR, noted that Ukraine itself succeeded in making Donbass want to secede. They stressed that the referendum was a long-awaited event for the republic’s residents.

Maxim Grigoriev, Chair of the Coordination Council for Public Oversight over Voting under the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, pointed out that the U.S. and European countries do not recognize the referendum results for political reasons.

“They were well aware of what was going on during those eight years of civil war in Ukraine, they were well aware of how many children had died, they were aware of how the Kiev regime was torturing people, killing people, what it was doing, just as they are aware that it is Western weapons that are now shooting at civilians in those republics that voted to separate from the Kiev regime, to be part of Russia,” he pointed out.

During the first three days of the referendum, Donetsk was shelled 115 times, Alexander Malkevich, Deputy Chair of the Coordination Council for Public Oversight over Voting under the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation stated.

“This is hatred, hatred against people who have made their choice. Over the past six months, the residents of Kherson and Zaporozhye regions have finally seen the true attitude of the Kiev regime toward them. The bombings, shelling, terrorist attacks, and murders. And from Russia’s side – care, repair of roads, payment of pensions, etc.,” the speaker stated.

The people of Donbass want to vote and self-determine, and this must be encouraged, stressed Modli Kulikani, Chairman of the international relations subcommittee of the African National Congress Youth League.

“Nelson Mandela said: freedom for some is not freedom. We have an obligation to promote freedom around the world, and so we came to see that the voting process is legitimate, that people vote and participate voluntarily. We found that most people in Zaporozhye couldn’t wait to express themselves because many times the elites spoke for these people. The most important thing for us was to understand what people really wanted. We can say that the referendum was free and fair,” he stated.

“Ballots against bombs,” as William Parra, an independent journalist from Colombia, called the referendum. He stressed that the people of Donbass and the liberated territories expect the international community to respect their choice.

“To me it’s just a way out for people wanting to get out of the death game, expecting it to end faster. We expect peace and freedom for these people. The most important thing here is to call on the international community to respect their choices,” he stated.

No one can say that voting was done at gunpoint, said Purnima Anand, an international observer from India.

“Everyone came to the referendum to express support for what is being done in the Russian Federation in the face of the world community. We support this transparent referendum in our difficult times. We need to understand the pain that people in eastern Ukraine are experiencing. I think the UN Security Council and Russia will come to an agreement in the near future. We wish for peace and justice for all humanity, especially for Donbass,” she added.

Michael Radachovsky, political advisor to the European Commission, noted that there were no violations in terms of voting procedures at the polling stations he visited.

“The elections were well organized in terms of how people were treated, the process itself was very well organized,” he stated.

The referendum was fairer and more transparent than the recent U.S. election, said French political scientist Emmanuel Le Roy.

“We would like to thank the organizers of the referendum and of course everyone who gave their vote and expressed their position. The voting system was impeccably organized, there were no violations or attempts to falsify the election results,” the speaker added.

Other representatives of foreign countries also expressed their support for the referendum and the decision of the residents of Donbass and the liberated territories.

So, who is lying about these elections? The many international observers, or our leaders and our media who imagine that they always occupy the moral high ground? You decide.


Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen booksHe also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.