“I Wanted More”: A Selection from An Excess Of Love

The following selection comes from my recently released memoir, An Excess Of Love. The book concerns my 12 years teaching at a traditional Catholic school in Connecticut, the long scandalization and strangulation that sect worked on my affection, and why, if one must be idealistic, they must never waste their energies on middle class people. In my own bibulous and pissy way, the story is in fact optimistic; for, when one sloughs off half lovers and hobbyists, one finds out what the Holy Spirit can do with one’s vocation. You may purchase the book HERE.

What I saw in traditional Catholicism, and what I would see with my coming work at St. Esau’s school, was a system which could give secular modernity a run for its money. That is still my conclusion. Nothing in my beliefs changed with the failure of St. Esau’s high school. What drove me from traditional Catholicism, what I am trying to convey in this paper, is how I came to the realization that religious conservatives are too puny to establish their principles in society.

Always have I seen one enemy and one alone, secularism. I still believe the only system which is brawny enough to scotch secularism, at least in the West, is Catholicism. Unfortunately, it is the work of this essay to show how the mighty system of Catholicism is lodged in socio-economic strata which will never be able to establish it as a social reality. This is to say as long as Catholicism is strongest among the middle class there will be no Christendom.

Mission & Sacrifice

We will not dawdle on the history or legal irregularities of the Society Of St. Pius 501(c)3. Others have done this better than I can. It is not our focus here anyway. To grasp the doggedness of the St. Esau’s Project we must look at something more important. We must look at the SSPD’s sense of mission.

The founder of the Society was Archbishop Marcel Proust. He was a missionary in Africa for most of his career. This missionary spirit infused all of the clerics I came across in the SSPD. If one only understands the group from Internet apologetics and the sometimes lame and erratic laymen who frequent their chapels and glory in their pretended affiliation with the Society – for the Society are only the vowed religious and their hirelings – one will miss the fuel which fires the actual SSPD. That fuel is the missionary spirit.

There was additionally a spirit of sacrifice which greatly appealed to me. Everything could be united and supercharged by uniting it with Christ on the cross. No privation was too small to go unnoticed by heaven; no work too obscure but that it could contribute to the salvation of the world. This deeply jived with my total war mentality. Everything for the cause, and the cause was the salvation of everything.

Here were people – I thought – who were bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. They were more pacific than I, I suppose. What I called total war they termed the Little Way. Tomayto-tomahto. Adduced to witness this idea in history were the thousands of martyrs they read out each morning at Prime. And sure, wasn’t auld Jesus the only god worth a sin and a prayer and a beheading.

Diamonds for Souls

Because of my experiences at ‘Round Abouts Danbury, and their coreligionists farther afield, I do not believe traditional Catholics take themselves seriously. No matter how much my creed and praxis matched theirs, I eventually could no longer tarry with them when my final patience was exhausted. When those people take themselves seriously others will take them seriously. It is the work of this essay to explain how I arrived at this conclusion.

Still and all, I do not hesitate to mention that I met a handful of extraordinary people over my 12 years in Tradville, at the school, on pilgrimages, at camps. Wallahi, had I not seen these people I would not believe such men could exist! They were like people out of the books. For a rare few of them Christianity, too, was like a physical thing.

How taken aback I was my first Good Friday to see people emotionally overcome with the theme of the day. I remember one woman composed but forlorn enough to excuse herself from the ceremony. There was one cleric who walked the Camino so intently his toenails fell off afterwards. I saw people turned out by their families for their religious principles. I saw people turn out great addictions with the power of faith. I bloody the noses of not a few broads in this book; by God, though, didn’t I see some of them hold their family together with a will. When all of warm and massaging Postmodernity nibbled on their ears and said, “Divorce, divorce,” they roared back with Cathal Brugha, “I shall not!”

And for those divorced, as the Freemason attorneys reckon such things, I saw traditional Catholics take up their station with lonely Cato in Carthage; I saw these walking wounded from The World embrace singularity and continence in loyalty to their vows when their own married partners went the way of all flesh. The world stares in awe at these last ones. For while their matrimonial loyalty was strange to the world, these everlasting Penelopes were also written off as damaged goods by their haughty coreligionists.

Circumstances provided the pressure, Allahu alam, doctrine and narrative gave the matter, to forge diamonds of their souls. For all the overweening mediocrity I would discover, there were a few good skins at ‘Round Abouts Danbury.

First Contact

When I was young and I was in my day, I first found myself on St. Ignatius’ feast 2005 at the complex which would consume the next 12 years of my energy. I’d have been in the guts of my seventeenth year then. I was greeted by one of their priests, Fr. Habakkuk. He was a rotund man both holy and jolly. Often the genuine version of the former will naturally produce the latter characteristic. As I would find out with nearly every traditional cleric and religious I would come across, he was a man very much a credit to his vocation.

When I rolled in he and an old timer were putting an air conditioner into a window frame. He had the old guy, The Bull McCabe, guide me about the property. Bull McCabe was finishing up a years’ long project of soldering the stained glass windows. They were salvaged from a closed church, which could care less for them, and placed into this new temple. In a nutshell this was traditionalism: salvaging the patrimony of the past for the grateful. The Bull is long dead now but his window panes are as snug as ever. I was eventually taken by him to the office where I was given pamphlets concerning the SSPD by the kindly blue haired secretary.

On my way home I stopped at the Danbury Mall food court. Eating what I still remember was an excellent turkey grinder, I read through the packets and savored the memory of their hospitality.

In Retrospect

It must be understood that the SSPD(c)3 in 2005 was a different creature than it is today. This fundamentally had to do with the second generation of priests – those men ordained by Marcel Proust following their 1988 schism – being in their prime. As with all such ideological groups, this second generation had much of the fire in the belly which motivated their parents to embark on the protestant path before them.

What happened during my temporal footprint is that this second generation would be replaced by younger clerics who had no interaction with the actual Catholic Church nor the spirit that fired their traditional grandsirs. They and their parents were brought up in a traditional Catholicism which was already up and running.

Likewise with the laity. When I was involved with traditionalism we were seeing the third generation of people come up. These were the grandchildren of people who had seceded from Catholicism – or kept the faith when everyone apostatized, as you like. In any case, these ones were the generation I was to teach. I can tell you this rising cohort did not have anything like the grasp of Vatican II-related topics I understood, I who had read myself into the movement at 15. As they say, the first generation builds, the second coasts, the third wrecks the work. This is all of history, sacred and profane. Rinse and repeat.

In line with this, as the years wore on the SSPD would embark on a program of professionalization which would ensconce these dynamics. Pagan, Christian, or Jew, religious or secular, every group that has ever been must inevitably confront a scenario in their growth where they must soften their edges – or water things down, as you like – if they are to grow. Come to think of it, this is something all major languages have done as well. Religion is a group’s soul language, so perhaps we have stumbled on a big principle here. Anyway, during my footprint at ‘Round Abouts Danbury this necessary softening was happening.

All that was a ways off. That summer of 2005 I threw my energy into traditional Catholicism. In short order I began attending their liturgies, going on retreats, and entering into the rhythm of their parish life. A pivotal point would come the following summer of 2006. At that time I attended a pilgrimage which my new church organized. About a year later I was invited to teach at their school.

When the Saints Go Marching In

Before I explain the circumstances which hailed me into the school of St. Corporate Whore Church for the next decade, a word on that summer pilgrimage. This was the incarnation of everything I had hoped for, and more than I had hoped for, about traditionalism. The event went like this.

I worked in those days at a notable fast food chain specializing in roast beef sandwiches. In the best capitalist fashion of doing the most with the least, the night before my holy journey I was up late closing the store. We were understaffed. Circumstances at that time required me to walk some miles home afterwards at midnight. I did not have a car. Indeed I needed to bum a ride to the pilgrimage the next day. I had arranged a lift sight unseen with a man and his wife who would be important in my entry into St. Esau’s a year later. The man’s name was Van Dyke, the wife’s name was Mrs. Van Dyke.

Anyhow, about my fatigue. I worked late into the night the evening before the pilgrimage and walked home afterwards. I awoke early to meet Van Dyke and his wife for the three hour journey from Danbury to the shrine in Upstate New York, the pilgrimage start point. I began the subsequent 10-mile trek under moderate sleep deprivation and fatigue. I only ground down from there. There is something to be said for sleep deprivation. I suppose that’s why religions often use it. It puts one into a different state of mind.

In this triptych – the penny pinching, the fatigue, the determination to press on nevertheless – was the next decade of my life. Here too was the thing which explained the day and the decade: the beauty of that journey.

Labbaik Allahumma Labbaik

At that time the Auriesville Pilgrimage was held around Midsummer. School was just out, the baby priests were making their rounds of first blessings, and the liturgical fireworks finale of Pentecost-Trinity-Corpus Christi-Sacred Heart was fast approaching.

If memory serves, in fact, the Saturday of this pilgrimage was the Vigil Of Pentecost that year. Following the pilgrimage things got to be very quiet on the grounds of St. Corporate Whore’s, and at all Society chapels; so on top of everything there was the consciousness that people would only see each other sporadically over the next few months.

Thus for Northeast trads, regardless of age, the Auriesville pilgrimage was like both the first day of school and the last day of school at once, and the gate of heaven besides. They wanted to make the most of their time together. All of this combined with the natural exuberance of early summer to imbue the day with a fine energy for one so new “to tradition,” as the parlance was.

When we arrived it was the pissing down of rain. Van Dyke left me to my own devices, so I began wandering around. I haven’t the slightest recollection of how this came about, but I ended up in the back of a U-Hall van assisting some young men move equipment around. That year the head of the SSPD, Bishop Bernard Mallard was at Auriesville. This meant that attendance was much bigger than it normally would have been. He was going to preach from the back of the van this rainy morning, and we were getting that set up.

I spent the first half of the pilgrimage with the work crew. The foreman that day was a man who lived in the Retreat House, The Gaffer. I got to know him some in the years ahead and we’d come to get on like a house on fire. On our way to the lunch site, leap-frogging ahead of the pilgrimage, the lunch crew stopped at a gas station for some snacks on The Gaffer. I would find out in after years that this was a yearly ritual, his buying goodies for the lads. I’ve never forgotten this paltry kindness of his, and I don’t think all the guys who cycled through the U-Hall truck over the years ever have either.

Well, after the opening sermon, the step off, and the lunch set up, I walked the second stretch of the pilgrimage.

The weather had broken and a beautiful afternoon presented itself. The rail trail we were using was steaming. The procession went on for several miles. At the front of it teenage boys traded with their fathers in carrying a life-sized cross. Though hollow, that bastard weighed a lot. In time I came to find that traditionalist women loved denim skirts and sneakers for casual wear. As the lot of us were doffing our slickers, or our trash bags if we didn’t have proper coats, the beors took off their shoes. In women of a certain age the braids and bare feet and scapulars is a fetching look.

Yes, it was a pretty sight altogether: the steam and asphalt and the kids, and everyone jabbering out the Rosary and holy songs. A great quote of Brendan Behan’s comes to mind apropos to the mood that afternoon. He says, “I always get grateful and pious in good weather and this was the kind of day you’d know that Christ died for you. A bloody good job that I wasn’t born in the South of France or Miami Beach, or I’d be so grateful and holy for the sunshine that St. Paul of the Cross would be only trotting after me, skull, crossbones and all.”

I remember the sun and humidity and mosquitoes as big as a brick that afternoon. What I remember most is one young mother that day. She was with child. Herself was easy on the eyes which is how I suppose she got to be a mother in the first place. Now there were provisions made for the elderly and the knackered by way of a fleet of golf carts which patrolled the length of the march. She hailed one cart from behind me. As the trolly came trundling by I thought she looked as beautiful and delicate as a butterfly.

I briefly met that couple years later in Syracuse. The Butterfly was with child once again. Our plans that morning were scuppered by her having morning sickness. Her husband, slightly embarrassed by her digestive faux pas, was most generous in joining me for breakfast sandwiches and coffee after holy Mass. I learned after that a job offer eventually sucked the family into the wiles of Ohio and forever out of the East Coast orbit. It’s funny how people come in and out of your life. So it goes.

The last stretch of the hike was up a hill which people dubbed Purgatory Mountain, a la Dante. Some of the religious and the high schoolers from somewhere or other formed ranks on either side. As the balance of the procession hauled its way up the hillock they sang the Litany Of The Saints. It sure felt like Purgatory after 10 miles, or five in my case. At the High Mass which concluded the pilgrimage I nearly fell asleep – standing – during the Creed. I was terribly tired. The sense of completing the pilgrimage was a fine sensation, as the maid said to the soldier.

The Parting Glass

I should never forget that final scene as I prepared to return with my ride to Connecticut. The Shrine was on top of a hill whose head was flat. I’ve never had a problem reconciling the gospel accounts of the Sermon On The Mount vs. the Sermon On The Plain, because this Shrine was located on a plain which sat atop a mount. Because of the tension between the SSPD and the actual Catholic Church, the shrine authorities in fact limited our encampment to a neighboring field and parking lot. It was on the gift store side of the property, and, whatever the canonical status of the trads, their money was good in the store. In God we trust; all others pay cash.

What a scene we had the sultry sun-sinking evening! How the clerics rejoiced in their vocations; yes, how the packs of boys saw each priest a hero as they blessed and shrived and preached the day through; how the women rejoiced in their families; yes, how for one day in common – and women do all things in common – their arrayed minivans and strollers were trophies of defiance towards a sterile modernity which sneered at their fertility; how the children danced to folk music which had struck up from somewhere or other; how the fathers rejoiced in another year of being able to pay for those families. There is something in a pilgrimage completed, and a school year done, which briefly approximates for a man the paying off of a mortgage.

Blessing this bless’d scene were hundreds of sandwiches delivered on platters by the cutest children you ever saw, and plenty of chips and beer besides. It was all paid for by a man as kind as he was anonymous. You’ll remember that Bishop Mallard was at this thing, so all the stops were out for that big man with a big hat. The lot of us blessed the unknown mensch as we downed his drink and ate his food. That lot of us were, indeed, a lot of us, and a very hungry bunch we were after hiking ten miles in the summer sun and singing ourselves through a High Mass.

Since my fourteenth year I have said the breviary. There are many things in this book which must strike you, kind reader, as strange about me. This sentence is the only place where I join you. Yes, I have said the Office since I was 14. What a queer thing to do for one so young. Well, on that holy, hilly pilgrimage plateau I remembered that auld canticle of Jeremiah’s: “Shouting, they shall mount the heights of Zion, they shall come streaming to the Lord’s blessings; The grain, the wine, the oil, the sheep and the oxen; They themselves shall be like watered gardens, never again shall they languish. Then the virgins shall make merry and dance, and young men and old as well.”

By inches the day would come that I would snicker at those clerics as primadonnas, those children as disappointments for cluelessly joining as adults a ruling class bureaucracy fundamentally at war with their nominal Christianity, and those fathers as simps who could not control their wives any sooner than their deracinated society from which this pilgrimage was such a welcome relief.

What of those glowing mammies? Those traditional Catholic mothers, so young and holy and alive on that New York plateau in June of 2006, would in time earn my blackest and immortal opprobrium. All this was in the future, though. With the summer sun westerning as I flopped into Van Dyke’s car to go back home, surfeited on subs and very tired, I saw Catholicism lived. I wanted more.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

O, Sister! On The Nature Of Tyranny & The Resistance Of Schoolmen

Besides conveying personal sentiments to a most precious person, this letter is a pivot between my memoir, An Excess Of Love, and the finale of this triptych concerning nudism, family rearing, and education, Pearls Before Swine. It is a distillation of dynamics which attend The Problem, namely the lateness of the hour, the appropriate response of the republic to the occupation, and the sexual shift which must immediately attend the resistance if the good seeds yet sown are to bear fruit.

Introduction: Rumbles From The Goldfish

Spring ‘24

O, Sister!, Ya, Shaqiqa!,

The time of the hobbyist has passed. There is much work to do and the hour is late.

Any number of people have followed and follow the development of Apocatastasis Institute this decade of glory. I see the statistics on the school’s website and newsletters, I read the correspondence we get, I am flagged down by men about town – most of whom believe I am mad – to speak about the Institute.

The numbers of these things are healthy enough and regular enough to know that if my work is lonely, it is the loneliness of a goldfish in a bowl. But for all the eyeballs the Institute draws, I don’t know how many of the yoes I am still on speaking terms with. I did not make this cold situation, their women did, but that is besides the point.

As you know, I’ve two works out this spring; one on my time in ‘Rounds About Danbury on Holy Saturday, An Excess Of Love, and the other concerning naturism and child rearing on St. Anthony’s Day, Pearls Before Swine. Those are polemical works as soon as they are artistic; they are meant to provoke as soon as they are meant to inform. Patrick Pearse asked Thomas Clarke how to speak at Glasnevin. “Make it hot as hell,” the old jailbird said. “Throw discretion to the winds.” So have I, though even on a good day you’d never say I was the prudent sort. Before these two literary clouds burst, however, a rumble of thunder. I thought it worthwhile here to sketch in miniature the situation and principles which background both coming works; and I thought to do so to those who have been so patient to one so odd: to the Chosen Lady and to her children.

In this we walk a tightrope. Herein we must comprehend a tyranny of massive dimensions and subtle complexity, make allowances for people’s duty of state and ignorant complicity in The Problem, critique us putzers for our incompetence heretofore, and for all these handicaps we must sketch the appropriate response; and we must do all this in brief.

Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming: The Problem

The enormity of The Problem is a daunting thing. Its mass invites one to say with John The Revelator, “Who can make war on the beast?” The vanquishing of this thing has been my sole professional and personal focus for twenty years.

We might bog down in an hundred places when trying to comprehend what exactly is The Problem. It is really quite simple, though. “The Problem” is a catchall for the parasitic social combinations which have arisen in each and all areas of society (i.e., educational, economical, religious, political, telephonic, artistic, etc). These combinations prey on their hosts to the misery and impoverishment of their victims. This situation has obtained because a queer perpetual motion machine has developed. It has been made to develop by wicked men with wicked ends.

The Problem has engineered a system with two lines which meet in a node. On the one it has finessed a culture of child rearing and formal education which primes a man to be a lifelong victim – perhaps a sucker – for The Problem. On the other node, as The Problem is energetic (or “spiritual”), The Problem has equally finessed a culture where the most promising of its chattel – for we are all but livestock for this system – will be enlisted to be the arms and ears and eyes of this selfsame oppression.

The node where these things meet is the child. It is the education of the child which will largely decide if he will be a saint or a parasite in later years. The soul and heart and the mind of the child is the battlefield. The Problem knows this. Do we?

The Nature of the Occupation

Tyranny is but a spirit. If it is to hove into men it needs arms and legs. What is different with our tyranny is that it has so successfully made those it has conquered believe they are free. Nothing in my historical knowledge offers a parallel to this success, to convince a nation of shackled surfs they are the freest beings in the history of Man. We walk down the street and see a society whose each storefront, bank, and civil office sits upon the republic as a conquering army – and this isn’t polemical, their own legal system is clear on this point (you may start with the Lieber Code) – and we are bid believe these enemy combinations mean us well and are us.

The nature of the occupation is such that decade by decade it takes millions of little boys and girls and turns them into its pining servants. It is hard to believe, Ya Shaqiqa, but banks turn couples out of the home they raised their families in, the state sends CPS agents to scare young mothers to vaccinate their babbies, and police pigs pull over women and children to shake them down on the side of the road. Astaghfirullah! I cannot imagine such things, but I am told they happen very close to home.

Now it is true that all decent mankind would gladly disembowel themselves before being found in the costume of a banker, a CPS lackey, or a police pig, but we are faced with the reality that The Problem hasn’t the slightest difficulty enlisting willing accomplices into their tyranny by the millions each year. How has The Problem done this? By subtly inclining each and every aspect of pedagogy in its favor.

It is the bounden duty of parents and teachers to instill such an ethic into youth that they would never entertain going over to the enemy to staff their systems of oppression. The republic fails every time a youth grows up to become a landlord, police pig, ghost writer, attorney, AMA doctor, or CPS eunuch; every time any of the offices of oppression are staffed with those who were once little boys and girls.

Every work in the class, and every moment with the family, must build the contrary spirit; the spirit of holiness, charity, and freedom.

Iron Sobriety

The months contemporary to this letter’s composition have seen the savaging of the Palestinians in the worst fitna in eighty years of crimes done them. I saw a bombed up little girl in hospital; she only had one arm. She said her limbs had gone to heaven before her. I saw a father amputate the leg of his maiden daughter on their kitchen table. I’ve seen again and again the Yahudi telling refugees to flee to “safe zones” only for their AI targeting system – named “The Gospel” – to blow the families to smithereens. And I’ve watched this happen while American Christians have snickered, and yawned, and egged on the colonists and their rabbis.

Mark my words, this level of violence will be used on all non-hackers the world over in due course. Palestine is but one open air testing ground of the archons. This violence is the natural conclusion of The Problem if left unchecked. Always does this reality background my every word and work; and when you wonder why I do strange things and say hard words, O Sister, it is because I know the iron sobriety of what is coming.

In the face of this overwhelming tyranny we must be patient in our daily duty. Our trials are nothing compared to what the Palestinians have known, but we ought to be prepared to feel their chains in due course. Part of the tyranny is provoking the helpless. I have seen the Yahudi stealing the bicycles of children only to throw them in dumpsters, and I have seen them dacking old men in front of their grandkids. There is nothing the abused can do in their slavery but move on. We must always brace ourselves for the patience of such a situation. Sabr, sabr, sabr; patience, patience, patience.

Our sorts are not serious people. We dick around with half-baked ideas and slogans, and flake out the first time drama or fear is dangled before our nose. (B’Zeus, look at how the Connecticut munafiqun have treated me all these years, and me the best friend they ever had.) When our children are double and triple amputees, and when we haven’t eaten in five days, and when white phosphorus is sprinkling down, and burning our faces and flesh down to the bone, perhaps our sorts will stop playing games. When that day comes, Apocatastasis Institute will not seem so strange to people; on that day they will see what I was trying to head off. And should it not come, is there not wisdom in living each day as if it’s your last?

The Solution

Some years ago I wrote in The Trotsky Train, “Only when there’s stability to society, when men own their capital, when they memorize the poetry of the land, when local musical compositions and books proliferate, when the churches are packed each morning, standing room only, for Lauds, and the same twice over for Sunday Mass, then the scholar can take a cigarette break, but only for a minute before he’s back at it again. It is your work, it is my work. There is your end [telos] to education, there is your wealth, there is your success.” Strangely enough, it was rather favorable religious sentiments like this which caused the church rats of ‘Round Abouts Danbury to run me out on a rail. This has always been the program of Apocatastasis Institute.

The hope to scotch The Problem is, as it has always been, the youth. Here we do not praise them as The World does, for their vapid qualities, their vices, and the ease with which they can be separated from their money. We praise the youth for what God saw in Daniel and Apostle John, St. Lawrence and Claire Crockett; we praise them for their gaiety and idealism, their passion and their purity. God has given the talents, it merely remains for pedagoges to keep these virtues from being strangled out of them.

The Headwinds

Four gales and five roar in the face of educational and social reform. In no particular order they are the dominance of visual media over written/oral culture, the absence of living examples to model our efforts on, our double-minded mien, the nesting of present Christianity within the bourgeoisie, and the feminine spirit out of order.

The shift in the last hundred years from a text-based to a visual society has brought with it many social changes. One of these is that abstract ideas become increasingly difficult for people to comprehend. It’s tangential to this letter, but more than anything else this is why there has been such a falling away from conventional religion since World War II; people literally cannot imagine abstract ideas like grace, God, or salvation any longer. Or look at that naked lecture I gave; people were so caught up with the visual novelty they never stopped to hear what I was talking about. What was it I was talking about?

Anyway, this difficulty to grasp abstraction isn’t a matter of native intelligence but of mental muscles which have been left go to seed. All that has kept school attendance so robust these last decades was social-cum-economic pressure to do so. Now that that economic incentive has been found wanting, we see interest in formal education rapidly recede. And into this declining interest and rising suspicion of high schools and colleges comes Apocatastasis Institute. What timing! B’Moses, if it was raining soup John Coleman’d be out there with a fork.

Next we see that, having grasped The Problem, the lot of us have no living models to form our response on. We are trying to revive familial, religious, social, and economic cultures from books and blogs. This necessarily produces clunky and incomplete results.

Another headwind we breast is our double-minded mien. We both hate this system, or at least we comprehend certain failures of the present order, and we want to fit into it. Do you remember that panel you so kindly invited me to? As the event was winding down I raised the question as to what society homeschooling was forming. I’ll never forget the looks on the women’s faces; it was clear the question had never occurred to them. They had no concept of the social aspect of formal learning.

This raises the next theme which will be so prominent in my coming writings, the futility of Christianity nesting in the middle class. Here there is very much an overlap with the previous point about our being double-minded, for the principles of Christ are diametrically opposed to those of the bourgeoisie. The split of affections between those who want grace and respectability, those who want God and mammon, those who want the Beatitudes and barratry, are the reason why St. Esau’s high school failed, and the reason which has fundamentally recessed each parental tantrum I have weathered these twenty years.

We finally get to the most furious gale and the metatrend of An Excess Of Love and Pearls Before Swine, the feminine energy out of line. This is the gorilla in the room. However it is we describe our worldviews – different on a thousand particulars, O Kind One, but marvelously the same – our people are really just as afflicted by the same dominant feminine energy we associate with other sectors of society. Until this is put into line no social reform will last.

Duties Of State

Like all competent criminal and parasitic enterprises, The Problem has carefully fostered our complicity in our slavery. The vampire will have his prey invite him in; the street gang will compromise each new member in criminality; prions will hijack a host for its own ends. We have put the noose around our neck because everything from the cradle has suggested it to us.

Attending any invention of this complicity is overwhelming guilt. It is a spurious guilt for it is the “guilt” of a duped man. There is in fact no guilt, but The Problem must make their victim believe there is. There is in truth only one way a man can be guilty after learning he has been taken in by The Problem: that he continues the ways and days of Jahiliyyah after he knows the truth.

Emotional intelligence is sorely neglected in family rearing, formal education, and the workaday world, and the neglect of so vital an aspect of life has consequences. One of the consequences of this pseudo-guilt is that people lock up in defense.

Told that they damaged their child in one bogus John Rockerfeller medical procedure or another, they continue passing down trauma rather than admit the error theretofore; told they enslaved their child in a LEGAL NAME which will rob and reeve his every piece of property, which will put him under the galling yoke of the Bar Association, for the remainder of his days, they continue with birth certs; told they wasted the childhood of their offspring in an educational system designed to form workers hungry for strangers’ smiles and frowns, they continue. Only here is culpability, only here is guilt. As Oscar says, “He who sins a second time wakes a dead soul to pain/ And makes it stain it spotty shroud, and makes it bleed again.”

Still and all, every allowance must be made not only to salve the conscience of the abused but to make allowance for various compromises too. Not all men have the same duty of state, and we must never forget we are under an occupation. The resistance of a single man to The Problem is different from the resistance of a mother; the resistance of the able-bodied is different from the resistance of the so-called disabled; the resistance of a child is different from the resistance of an old couple. The nature of opposition is different based on circumstance, the spirit is the same. Only a broad, catholic (sic), and masculine spirit will be able to instill and marshall this sentiment properly for the liberation of the people.

This too is a fine line. Men no longer read for regular lengthy periods, so men do not have the mental muscles to grasp nuance. People cannot grasp our situation, a crisis which speaks gently to those used, abused, and complicit with The Problem; roughly to the active partisans of The Problem; and impatiently with pretended foes of this abuse whose incompetence has stalled out proper resistance. There is no nuance, and so people fall into us vs. them, black and white, thinking. One of the first casualties in such an environment is humor, at least the good sort. Our masters think in grays, in complexity, and that is why we are in slavery and they are not.

Sabr: The Generational Nature Of The Resistance

O Sister, the Solution is simple: preserve the natural virtues of youth – gaiety, idealism, passion, and purity – in the student until death; titanic is the vision and patience to effect this. The Problem has aligned the entirety of its social institutions to killing or co-opting these very things, all the soon to make an adulted slave. To nurture the above virtues into later life we need to scotch trauma, cultivate the four wealths, and be a fulcrum of unity.

Everything in this order is designed to traumatize men. From conception to burial the life of man on this plantation is one compounded hurt after another. I do not speak of the natural slings and arrows of this valley of tears but the carefully fostered hurts designed into our child rearing behaviors, and those of afteryears.

It was as clear as clear can be that the response of families last June and October vis-a-vis the nudist aspect of Apocatastasis’ work was triggering a great deal of trauma in those individuals which had nothing to do with me or the school. I mean in Pearls Before Swine to advocate for naturism in the classroom, family sleeping and bathing, and related health approaches which will diffuse or altogether do an end-run around designed hurts. How the devils of evil suspicion roared – or rather, texted – their filthy insinuations at – or rather, about – me. Apocatastasis Institute will exercise and heal those possessed harpies yet.

And what was the subject of that nude talk I gave in Manhattan, the one all the dusty Karens were clucking about with their innuendo? Vulnerability and mortality. It is really only in vulnerability that an high trust society can develop; it is only in consciousness of our mortality that we can be grateful. Let the classroom be such a wholesome training ground.

O Kind One, to end trauma only brings one to the mark; it only brings one to the starting gate of life; it only brings one from the red, as the capitalists say, to $0. An healthy society needs to be rich in four things if they are to be sane. They must be rich in spiritual, cultural, social, and economic capital, and they must be ranked in this order, if they are to be lasting. The religious bounty of the community must be great; each man’s cultural knowledge, contribution, and engagement ought to be robust; our interpersonal comportment must always be in honor, and our social trust must be of a high level; and if a man must waste his time in commerce, at least let each and all own the means of his livelihood. How will we do this? By instilling these sentiments and training in his schooldays.

Finally, it falls to pedagogues and schools to form the fulcrum of unity in society. Stimulated by telephonic media, our society is fragmenting into a thousand pissy bubbles. Whilst stroking the egos of the partisans this only serves The Problem, for a people must be divided if they are to be conquered. After the church, the school is the place where a common ground may be cultivated free of factionalism and denominalization. Alas, I’m afraid the Church is no longer interested in any social role beyond pocketing checks from the DNC, so it falls to schoolmen alone to serve this social end.

Barefoot & Happy

Many moons ago, long before Apocatastasis, and long before even Nancy, before the saints ran my patient hide off from St. Esau’s, I saw a vision of what education could be. I saw a sight of barefoot teachers and learners allowed to live their vocations sans meddlers. O Good Sister, I cannot say our educational interaction has been perfect, muscha, but it has been as perfect as this vale of tears will allow. You and your dear husband come as close as I can hope to that oldsome vision: vulnerable lot we, we’re trying to make sense of this crazy life, and to milk the classroom for this end. Thank you.

Hark! A Voice like Thunder Spake

The men must rise at this hour. I do not say they must rise in physical force, for – should The Problem persist – that is a duty which obliges a future generation. (Arrah, it falls to us to rear this generation.) No, ours is not the generation capable of the gun. I say all healthy men and communities are those who can handle the gun; it is an altogether different matter whether they ought to do this.

Save for the shining example of the Islamic Emirate Of Afghanistan, if the Muslims – a spiritually, familiarly, physically, and culturally healthier bunch than we – were unable to physically check The Problem in two decades of immortal and heroic struggle, there is no way the men of America will. Unlike the robust Musslemen, we North Americans are intoxicated, fat, estrogenated, sexually dissipated, and fragmented into an hundred political and a thousand religious parties.

So how must men rise? They must rise in leadership. The most pressing area where they are to do this is in religion, for The Problem is really a spiritual sickness; where grace, sacraments, and charity recede, like a tired, sugared, stressed body, The Problem comes in like a cold.

On the heels of a masculine religious revival, men are to rise intellectually; the working man as soon as the bourgeois, the Hottentot as soon as the stockjobber. The most immediate area where intellectual leadership bids us to labor is in formal education.

Querelle des Dames

You said I burned bridges. That is a dangerous metaphor to one so vain as I, for it is too tempting to make a comparison with Horatius! (It is Lent and I must resist temptation.) But let us stick with that analogy nonetheless, I burn bridges. So I speak bluntly if I speak at all: women ought now cede instructional roles in all educational modalities towards students aged at- or after puberty. Let us honor what good they have done, particularly in homeschooling, and show them the door. They have done some good yes; now let us magnify their labors, and to do this there must be a sexual changing of the guard.

The reality is that alternative education has stalled out for fifty years because it is almost completely a feminine enterprise, and it is not given to women to see beyond their family concerns. At this point men must lead in alternative education or the whole enterprise should stop wasting everyone’s time and fold up. As it stands, The Problem which alt ed-ers apprehend, and the educational Solution which will dismantle The Problem, cannot be shouldered by women. They have had half a century to prove themselves and they have stalled out at a kitchen table.

How loath I am to say this. In their diapers and in their heels, I have loved the daughters of the republic as they are, something like a sister or a daughter. Surely every little girl was once a snowflake in heaven. From their sundressed car seats to their seven year old sandaled feet, from their chokered necks and sixth grade scuffed knees to their prom rigouts and blushing smiles, I have gone out of my way to not so much as shake their hands. More times than not I cannot bring myself to look into their eyes, so fair are they. And horndog I, don’t I put the souls and virtues of Rachel Corrie and Israa Jaabis and Donna Mcguire on blast like none other, and don’t I hope my daughters will be strong as they were strong?

Yet for two decades I have watched formal education strangled by the feminine spirit. I saw St. Esau’s high school destroyed by menstrual rags (see, An Excess Of Love), and I have seen Apocatastasis Institute hampered again and again by the same (see, Pearls Before Swine). I was content for many years to cover their nakedness, to excuse the shortcomings which always attend women in the classroom. I said The Problem was big and that we needed each and all hands on deck were we to instantiate The Solution. I do not say that now, for I’ve seen again and again the unmoored feminine energy degrade our time in the class, waste our resources, and stall out in a stunted grasp of The Problem and The Solution.

In the essays to come I did not want to shove against the feminine energy as forcefully as I did, but the behavior of those Connecticut broads last year forced my hand. I have seen white trash behavior from that bunch, but last year was beyond the bounds. It is clear that sort is a liability to everything they profess. I love what they profess, and so I have shoved back against those liabilities. They were drunk, but not with wine; they staggered, but not with strong drink. Perhaps my writings will cause them to sober up.

The End Of The Matter

I thought it worthwhile to condense for you those major principles which background my coming works, An Excess Of Love and Pearls Before Swine. Besides, these are the assumptions I take into those dinnerly conversations which are such a welcome break from the administrative duties which so obsess my days of late. I imagine that I should become persona non grata when my projects are published, but we must grasp the sobriety of the moment and the weight of The Problem. If there must be a Cato in Carthage let it be me; let me sit in the ashes and rubble to make my point to the world. And if men will say I am mad after those essays drop, they at least won’t say that I lied as their teachers lied, that I was frivolous as their parents were frivolous, or that I sat around when there was work to be done.

You in your way, Shaqiqa, and I in mine, must keep our heads about us as we reestablish formal education on a free, holy, and agentic footing; and whilst instilling the durability of youthful virtues in afteryears, let us both continue being gay, idealistic, passionate, and pure.

Always children we, Sister,

I kiss your head, and your feet, and your hands,

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

Featured: Gust of Wind, by Jean-François Millet; painted ca. 1872.

The French Légionnaire Who Taught Philosophy

There, in front of me, sits a fat folio, made up of four large Clairefontaine notebooks, covers stapled back-to-back. The title, typed on the homemade red plastic binding, evoked the beginnings of an apprentice philosopher discovering the nervous power of words: “Phénomènes des cours de philosophie de Charles Cambe—Année 1971-1972” (“Notes from Charles Cambe’s Philosophy Course—Year 1971-1972). Charles Cambe was my philosophy teacher at Lycée Théophile-Gautier in Tarbes, France. He was a colonel in the Foreign Legion.

Philosophy notes, 1971-1972.

Shaven-headed, calm and sharp-tongued, he had a way with the dunces (I was no longer one of them) who frequented the bars in this garrison town, still home to the first and oldest Hussars regiment in Europe: Tarbes is the birthplace of Marshal Foch, Generalissimo of the Great War, and romantic writer Théophile Gautier; poets Comte de Lautréamont and Jules Laforgue sat on the same benches as I did listening to the Colonel. Lourdes is nearby .

The Colonel was sarcastic with the good students in Terminale A1, “la philo 1,” (I was not one of them), whom he knew would stop pretending to think, once they had passed the baccalaureate. He arrived in class, on the day of military ceremonies in front of the 1939-1945 war memorial, engraved with lapidary eloquence—NI HAINE NI OUBLI (Neither Hatred nor Forgetfulness)—wearing his unique and prestigious sand-colored uniform; he placed his glorious white kepi on the desk itself slightly raised on a platform. He looked at us, all boys, called the roll and began in a steady, poised voice, without a trace of picturesque accent, as befits a monk of the one and indivisible Republic, a voice full and frank—”dynamic” would be the right word.

In Terminale A2, the class of the lesser students, the teacher was a late graduate of May 1968, who puffed on his fag, sometimes taught on the paving stones of the school yard, was on first-name terms with his pupils and, if he had had the courage of his “make love not war” convictions, would have made hootchie-kootchie-koo with them and their girlfriends. But it was all a game of appearances, because on the one occasion when our Colonel had to leave to pay tribute to one of his men and raise a glass with the toast, “for the dust,” the A2 hippy took over the legionnaire’s course exactly at the point where the Colonel had dropped his voice to go and deliver his eulogy, and this resumption was seamless. They had divided up the roles. They rode in pairs, like Templars. Never trust appearances or clothing, be it sand or hippy, which does not a philosopher make.

I opened the first notebook and began reading Chapter I (my homemade folio contains 41 chapters), dated September 16, 1971. I had understood immediately that I owed it to philosophy to transcribe the viva voce: “stupid” said the good people in class, but amazed in the divine sense of the word stupor, that impression which strikes the mind in the face of an unheard-of event. I got into the habit of taking notes verbatim and in extenso, a profoundly rhetorical memory technique, I would later learn. It is a habit I have kept, and one that still brings back to me Barthes’s enveloping words, or Levinas’s desultory remarks.

My large folio repeated, without my having guessed it because I was ignorant, the ancient technique of phrase books and books of quotations, sources of invention among the great rhetors, from Antiquity to the Counter-Reformation, and of the transmission of knowledge by word of mouth, since the first mythical act when Apollo, god of speech, spat into the mouth of his first soothsayer.

Here is how my first philosophy class began, when I was sixteen: “Sensitivity. Sensible knowledge is knowledge acquired through the senses. The philosophical attitude consists in stopping in front of facts that are apparently self-evident— to the common man. Sense and organ should not be confused: a sense is the power to experience a certain category of sensations; an organ is a set of ‘terminal’ nerve cells (and here I remember a brief glint from behind his thin gold-rimmed glasses: the colonel loved irony), sensitive to certain phenomena.” That is how, at sixteen, long-haired and a virgin, I entered philosophy. I never left (philosophy, that is). It was love at first sight for the philosophical word, the eloquence of the mind: For a year, Colonel Charles Cambe led me, in 41 stages, along a path of initiation whose great models are, in Antiquity, the Tablet of Cebes and, in the French Classical Age, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s Délices de l’Esprit (Delights of the Spirit), when a master philosophizes and leads a young man from place of intelligence to place of meditation, stimulating the desire to know more by the spur of his words alone, and makes him discover a new wonder of the intellect at every door he passes through, so that when he leaves the halls of knowledge and self-discovery, the young man knows “how to lead his life well.” His eloquence thus led me to perceive what I was destined to become.

It is hard to imagine, now that everything is conspiring to destroy the critical spirit of high school students, now that the cult of the keyword reigns among adults, it is hard to imagine the life lessons those philosophy classes were, those of the Colonel, like those of the hippie of Terminale A2: we were taught to ride restive steeds and wild stallions. Outside, as I write these lines, I hear the sound of their hooves, a horde of horses being brought to the stables of the Imperial Stud, not far from the same high school. Under the influence of this philosophical word, every day, for several hours, at the most exact timing of the morning, when we were awake in the most virginal and seminal state of our sixteen years, the Colonel wanted to turn us into horsemen and stallions.

The course itself was a lesson in the formative power of philosophy, placed at the pinnacle of our education at the very moment when, as the State separated from the Church, ten years before the Great War, the Republic abolished rhetoric and replaced it with philosophy. Simply put, a higher form of eloquence replaced one that had become too literary. How eloquent and handsome our philosophy teachers were! They had donned the mantle of the great preachers, to educate, truly educate, the apprentices of citizenship, and manhood.

I will give you the outline of Colonel Cambe’s course: majestically, making our way to the top of the mountain, as in the Tablet of Cebes, we passed from sensible knowledge to the unconscious, then to memory (ah! the passage on “acted recognition, emotional recognition and thought recognition;” if only one weighed these simple definitions in politics), and to imagination, then to language and signs. Two months passed. Autumn and Advent. Another notebook. In November, as the Pyrenees turned gray and rainy, a notch, a step, a progress to break the melancholy: here, blow by blow, were concept, judgment, reasoning, scientific knowledge, mathematics, experimental sciences, applied mathematics, biological sciences, history and historical becoming (I noted: “a document is either a vestige or a testimony”… yes, as simple as that, but it took him many pages of notes, the Colonel, his kepi on his desk, to make us perceive the value of this distinction), sociological fact and, almost at the top of the mountain, the shining door, the one of pearl and ivory as I think Homer used to say: Truth. I had gone so far as to capitalize it, as we were due to resume classes at Epiphany time.

Until Easter, he spoke to us of habit, will, pleasure and pain, emotion, passion (I read: a passion is either “dominant, or dominating or exclusive”: quite a program!), followed by an almost Barthesian slide, unexpected from a legionnaire, on “the life of a passion.” The Terminale A1, when the chestnut trees were greening up, listened to Colonel Cambe discuss morality, duty, responsibility and sanctions, followed by the ancient schools of morality, Kant, utilitarianism and “the philosophers of life,” followed by Nietzsche: ” You shall not beget!” “What is great about a man is that he is a bridge and not an arrival point.” “To be a man is to overcome.” Finally, Bergson, Sartre and Marx: “To re-establish the DIGNITY of man is to destroy the alienation of labor”—here, I dared to capitalize a whole word, because the Colonel had to take off his gold-rimmed glasses, put them on the table, and accentuated the term.

Then, as the end of classes approached, and Pentecost too, came three surprises, for after a year of daily attendance, we had all formed an idea of who was the Colonel-Philosopher. False ideas: the dunces assured us they had seen him at the brothel. The good ones said he never smoked (astonishing in those days). Others spoke in hushed tones about his wife (one of those Dominique Sanda-like beauties from the colonies, whom I only met once). He threw three quick, luminous lessons in our faces, like the gauntlet of an old-fashioned challenge, because by then we were seasoned and he thought we were ready to go at full throttle.

First, two lessons on beauty and God. Him—talking to us about beauty and God? We had to be thrown off our guard. On beauty, I noted: “Beautiful comes from bellus, diminutive of bonus. Bellus is a colloquial term and was used to refer to women and children, while “lovely,” addressed to a man, was very, very pejorative, if you know what I mean; for a man, the word was pulcher.” The Colonel, having brightened us up, then moved on to serious matters, point by point, and having lifted our souls to the aesthetic, he would, systematically, as if maneuvering—we were at Pentecost after all—put before our minds’ eyes all the proofs of God’s existence, deployed a priori and a posteriori.

Face to face, on the chessboard of life that opened up before us, here was the strongest dilemma facing a man who had to “overcome” himself, and achieve true pulchritude: by the senses, or by transcendence? As if to say: everything I have taught you is now to be tested against this double possibility. Weigh it up! Think! Because to “overcome” is to be free. And guess what his farewell lesson to arms was, the last surprise of the legionnaire-philosopher, finger on the seam of his pants? Freedom. “You are free to judge.” A fine piece of work!

I remember visiting him at home twice. The first was before the baccalaureate exams. I asked him to sign my big handmade tome. He signed it, on June 8, 1972, without saying a word. He only asked me how my father was. I saw him a second time, when I entered the rue d’Ulm (the École normale supérieure), in July 1975. I went to thank him for having taught me, confessing to him that, often, at Louis-le-Grand, I would reopen my big notebook to find the right path, rectitude, even the joy of thinking. He said to me: “Salazar, you should have gone to Saint-Cyr” (the foremost military academy of France).

Colonel Cambe’s signature.

Charles Cambe, colonel, legionnaire, philosopher, died in July 2005. The 2006 class of the Special Reserve General Staff School (ESORSEM), at the French War College, bears his name. As long as the Republic (not this republic, a mere ghost) keeps up with these teachers, even the hippy of Terminale A2, and keeps up with this teaching, this eloquence, the Republic will have “values.” Where is the source of the Republic’s crisis and decline? As we have seen, the republican school calendar silently follows the liturgical calendar. Old habits die hard. The Republic is sometimes capable of overcoming herself, and now and, then, even reach pulchritude.

The last word, I hand over to the colonel, and this is the last sentence in my big notebook: “This notion of fundamental freedom that is the freedom to will is most often just a word. Generally speaking, for the non-philosophers, their idea of ‘real’ freedom, the freedom that makes sense to them, is just their freedom to act as they please.” Has the Republic become just that: a sum of freedoms to act, with its strident claim to be the only valid “ethics,” from head of state down to ordinary citizen? When shall we finally “overcome” ourselves?

Colonel Cambe in operation.

French philosopher and essayist Philippe-Joseph Salazar writes on rhetoric as philosophy of power. Laureate of the Prix Bristol des Lumières in 2015 for his book on jihad (translated as, Words are Weapons. Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror, Yale UP). In 2022, the international community of rhetoricians honoured him with a Festschrift, The Incomprehensible: The Critical Rhetoric of Philippe-Joseph Salazar. He holds a Distinguished Professorship in Rhetoric and Humane Letters in the Law Faculty of the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

School of Prayer, Medicine of Life: The Divine Office as Social Salve

Setting Out

One of the features which has accented Apocatastasis Institute from the word go has been the inclusion of the Divine Office in our daily schedule. I mean in this essay to explain why this is. Other and better men have done other and better jobs at explaining what the Office is, its mechanics, history, and spirituality. We are not rehashing that necessary material here. If you are deficient in those sciences, dear reader, put aside this paper and digest those topics before returning. By way of house rules, I will be using the terms Divine Office, the Office, the Discipline, the Liturgy Of The Hours, the Prayer (with a capital p), and the Liturgy (with a capital L) interchangeably.

In this exploration we will look at the Divine Office as a medicine for social wounds, one that is rightly administered in a school setting as schools ought to be directed toward this same end. It is a salve for the wounds of secularism, abstracted pedagogy, personal foibles, and historical accidents. Like any treatment it does not contain the totality of the solution. It nudges, it points, it guides towards the correction.

The Sickness

We are unrooted. Just as one’s posture can be thrown off by flat feet or a bum knee, from unrootedness come a flurry of other ills such as a low trust society, lack of agency, and discouragement. Exploiting these social and personal failures are unscrupulous men operating in unscrupulous combinations. Foundations once destroyed, what can the just do (cf. Ps.10/11)?

Part of our unrootedness stems from economic developments at first affecting Western man, and after the Second World War, all mankind. Part of this condition stems from deliberate schemes to make unrooted men. Modern education, marital laws, and telephonic communication, for example, appear deliberately to trip up natural personal, familial, and social harmony. Part of our unrooted condition is our own concupiscence, particularly our going with the flow of deracinating and deracinated culture. We may blame social institutions all we like, but at a certain point we must hold ourselves responsible for our cooperation with McWorld. The Office is a skeleton upon which to hang real life once more, and a school setting is an opportune place to do this. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and McWorld wasn’t either. If we are to build Christendom, we will need discipline. Hour by hour, brick by brick, the Divine Office is an handy trowel for this erection.

The Myopia of Alt Ed

When I was a little bit younger, I was quite enamored with the educational critique of homeschoolers and unschoolers. To a certain
extent my subsequent exasperation with those communities is that they have not developed their insights into anything more significant than personal necessity. Singular interest is the mark of an immature mind. It is the manful intellect which grasps that the individual is a cell of a larger society; it is the manful body which labors to bring this about.

Howsomeever, I remember at one conference a mot just out of high school—or at least she was of that age, as unschoolers of course don’t go to high school—was asked how to make unschooling more popular. I’ll never forget what she said; it was wisdom in a nutshell, for all true wisdom is pithy. The girl said she didn’t want unschooling to become popular because more people would necessarily mean a watering down of that modality.

Well, she was right. For those of us who have dedicated our energies towards alternative education, we ought to have been careful what we wished for. Our educational critique has become popularized, and much of that critique has become sloganized. As so often happens in history, the subtleties of maxims which slogans assume are lost over time and after a while only the naked maxims are known without the scaffolding of assumptions the sayings originally assumed.

Thus, in Rabbinic Judaism their concept of “the Torah” migrated from the Pentateuch to first include, then prefer, the Talmud. This enlarged “Torah” became unwieldy and was condensed into a third collection, the Gamara, before the rebbes ignited a “back to sources” reaction which began the same cycle of condensation-cum-back to basics cycle again.

In the same way the Christian Fathers were summarized in the Summa and Sentences of Scholasticism which were further condensed into catechisms before triggering a “back to sources” Reformation which shortly found—to the horror of its instigators—that the meaty “Sola Scriptura” rule of thumb was being taken literally. Likewise, the educational critique has fallen fast and far in the last fifty years.

All of this is a long way of saying that men do not think twice in saying, and they’ve all started podcasts to say, that “Public schools should be ended,” “We don’t need schools,” or, my favorite, “Schools are brainwashing camps.” Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone! How men of mature years say such things without reddening at the stupidity of such statements is a testimony to what the media, even—perhaps especially—the conservative media, does to one’s thinking process. Fifty years ago, the likes of John Holt, Raymond Moore, Ivan Illich, and other early pedagogical pioneers made like statements, but they did so from a place of erudition and nuance. It is we, their unlettered grandchildren, who rehash their ideas sans the mountain of meaning they assumed.

As I have often written, the problem with the rainbow of religious and secular conservativisms is that they have no grasp of solving their problems. They spend so much time talking about how they want things to be that their comprehension of things as they are is retarded. Thus the conserved have a fair knowledge of what’s amiss with industrial learning but they have no ability of how to solve these problems, problems which they assert do great harm to souls. Perplexed, they self-contentedly stall out at, “I only have to worry about my family.” What traitors. To conservatism? No, to mankind. To see an evil and not move might and main to right it is cowardice. If one sees a social problem, and they merely respond to it personally, this is effeminate. Prophet Ezekiel said to these epigones of Burke, “When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand” (Ez. 3:18).

So Here We Are

Into this cooling of public sentiment towards formal education came the COVID shutdowns and what is called Artificial Intelligence. As in many areas of life, these developments sped up processes already in motion. Casualizing trends of life were furthered. If education is simply the individual accrual of data, why not watch an appointed number of pre-recorded classes until the sufficient number of boxes are checked? Added to this is the demographic reality. Babies were not born 12 years ago during the Bush-Obama depression, what the Madison Avenue boys still spin as the “Great Recession,” babies who would just now be entering college. This has caused despair for private schools, who must shift for themselves, and glee for municipalities ever eager to trim the budget.
So here we are. Schools are challenged to explain why they exist. We ought to embrace this challenge.

Whatever the level schools ought to begin at the beginning, we ought to encourage rootedness. Only from this stability can we as educationalists and as citizens address those above-mentioned foul fruits of unrootedness, and only from this can we strike a blow against predatory political, economic, and social combinations.

For twenty years I have seen men appraise what we broadly call the New World Order only to stall out in their attempt to push back. We must start with rootedness in our lives, in our children’s lives, and in those communities which ripple out from that. The environment of formal education is the ideal place to do this, and the Divine Office is the ideal framing of a school day.

Filling The Void

The godlessness of a child’s day is the greatest strike against modern education. Note that I did not say “god-againsted-ness,” but god-less-ness. It is worse to be blasé of the divine than to be hostile. The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference. Before the carousel of errors which attend modern education, the absence of God is the greatest strike. It is the void of what should be there, like a missing limb or an empty seat so lately occupied by a departed. It is a crime that a young one not be told who made them and why they are on this earth. It is this void of meaning which chiefly explains the ever-rising percentage of teens who go mad.

You see, though, it is not enough to establish the fact of a student’s Creator, this must be often and commonly acknowledged. The school day is a liturgy of a sort, it certainly is ritualistic. The warm presence of God ought to assert itself in the educational rhythm just as formally and regularly as the schedule of instruction. Ergo, the Office.
Rhythm

The holy Office grounds us in time as the holy Mass does in space. This is to say, the Divine Liturgy accents the physicality of Christianity while the Office highlights our temporal rootedness. In both instances the holy Liturgy insists that religion is not an amalgam of beliefs one ascribes to. This error of definition is the result of the one-two punch of the Reformation and Enlightenment. By assembling for the Prayer in groups at the regular times we are reminded that the Kingdom Of God is already on this earth, that Christian life is a social reality not a me-and-Jesus duo, and that a soul wherein God dwells is in heaven now.

An Inconvenient Truth

Religion ought to have a certain inconvenience to it; its very imposition asserts its importance. You may remember that nugget the next time a Day of Devotion—what is now flatly named an Holy Day of Obligation—rolls around. Yes, the point of religion is to be inconvenient, to impose itself upon the mundane.

Let us recall the old apologetic for Abraham’s sacrifice of Issac: What one will not sacrifice automatically becomes one’s god. If something, someone, or some habit stands in the way of God, that thing in se is one’s deity. Congratulations Liquor, Anger, and Sloth, you’ve been promoted! But once God busts those fellas down to size one gets God back and not some idol. The clock can be an idol as soon as anything else. Musha, in a school the clock is more liable to be an idol than anywhere outside of a stock exchange, a racetrack, or a prison. That the Prayer interrupts a school day reminds both pedagogues and learners that there is a divine order greater than our daily concerns.

While this dynamic is true for genuinely sinful things it also holds that legitimate pleasures, persons, and habits may be sacrificed to stay in good form. The sacrifice of time, of my precious personal schedule, is just as fitting a way for the inconvenience of God to assert himself as in my diet (fasting) and sleep (vigils). St. Paul gave up his persecution (Acts 9), but he also gave up his hair in a vow (Acts 18), one was a sacrifice of his sin, the other was part of an optional vow, both moved him closer to God.
It is the genius of Catholicism to knead into daily life many opportunities to, “offer it up.”

The Office is a medicine to anomie by relentlessly and repeatedly squishing us together time and time again. It is a medicine to meaninglessness by taking our class time and sacrificing some of it to God.

Sacrifice is not a destruction, as Pope Benedict reminds us, “What then does sacrifice consist of? Not in destruction, not in this or that thing, but in the transformation of man. In the fact that he becomes himself conformed to God. He becomes conformed to God when he becomes love. ‘That is why true sacrifice is every work which allows us to unite ourselves to God in a holy fellowship,’ as Augustine puts it.” The Office provides the individual and social groups the opportunity to remember the imposition of the divine so often as he takes the Church up on the Discipline. The Prayer is work, and the manful soul does not shirk from the same. Whether I feel like praying or not, the Discipline reminds me that faith is not a feeling. In fact, the more disinclined I am to pray canonically the more I may learn this lesson.

Generosity

Manys the father has warily contemplated how the generosity of manys his daughter may find itself in the arms of some roguish and unworthy Chad. Yet behind this so middle class of anxieties is a calm and beautiful observation. Young people are in fact generous by nature. Youth may benefit from the mature mien of the Divine Office precisely in proportion to the delightful excess of sentiment which characterizes that chapter of life.

The other-directed focus of liturgy is a defining characteristic of this highest of prayers. When this is rightly conveyed to young ones their natural generosity of spirit will ignite great attraction towards the Liturgy. Present to students the other-centeredness of the liturgy with the same tone of voice as one speaks of the Peace Corp, Teach For America, military service, and environmental protection and you will see them rise to the occasion.

We have seen the popularization of “service hours” as part of both grade and tertiary education in these states United. On the one hand it is laudable students be led to understand education is not the isolated accumulation of knowledge and successful completion of hoops jumped; on the other this codification is a sure sign of social decomposition. The moment virtue can only be furthered by institutionalization is the moment that virtue has died in a people. Ask Augustus if his sumptuary and fertility laws revived the Arcadian manliness of the early Republic. Forsooth, if authority must impose on students artificial charity via service hours this is a greater commentary on the sour parental souls which reared such lead-eyed children. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Join students at the generous prayer for the world which is the Liturgy Of The Hours and you will prime the pump for civic generosity in later life, Chads notwithstanding.

The Office in schools is advisable because it trains the student to a regime of prayers offered chiefly for others, not himself. The Discipline breaks the consumerist attitude which does such damage at present in the religious and academic spheres. It is a sacrificial work of charity where the young pray-er learns quickly he is not the star of the show.

Community

The Discipline roots us in our neighborhood. Another poverty of Modernity which the Divine Office enriches is community. Over the last decade every Freemason town council from coast to coast has slapped “community” on their letterheads and welcome signs. Like “fresh” food and “democratic” government, it may be the use of the word expresses the desires for the thing more than the thing itself contains, but it’s a start.

The Divine Office forms community. It ought always be done in a group, and preference must be given to this aspect of the prayer over every other. Community before everything with it comes to the Office. Here we see once again how the Prayer checks our own eccentricities. It happens that when I say the Prayer myself I do tick off many liturgical boxes I do not when I go to my local parish. When I’m by myself I strike off, “Ad Orientem,” “Latin,” “posture,” and “chant.” Yes, in some ways my private performance of the ritual is in tighter conformity with the history and mind of the Church than it is at the church down the street, but those ways, alas, are Orthodox and protestant (sic) ways.

This is to say that Catholicism is the only Christian group which is realistic; Catholicism is the only group to say that the Church is a present reality, not a fetish of the First Century or the First Millenium. “Realistic” and “reality” come from the Latin word “res,” physical thing. Catholicism is the church par excellence which believes the Church is a social reality now, one may join its ceremonies now, pray with its adherents now, and phone up its ministers now. Most importantly, the Church Of Rome is the only church which at once umpires Christian heritage while adamantly refusing to become a slave of the past or of the present. It is the only church to see the Holy Spirit’s role in history in the eternal now, to see it in kairos time. It is on this point one must always prefer common celebration of the Hours over private.

At manys the church I’ve joined in at the Office there has rarely been a consciousness of orientation, sacred language, physicality, or musical quality. In fact, in the best bare bones American liturgical tradition, I am certain that the people at the local parishes I join at the Office haven’t the slightest idea that the normative setting of the Office is recto tono chant to say nothing of the other niceties. Theirs is a celebration as banal as we’ve come to expect from all suburban religion. The people there are befuddled by even minor calendric variations, even if those variations have been encountered hundreds of times before. These dear souls are like the forgetful Dory in Finding Nemo. I sometimes wonder how they operated a vehicle competently enough to get to the building. Nevertheless the communal dimension of the prayer outweighs all other considerations, and their common banality outweighs whatever traditional elements I may personally bring to the ritual.

This supremacy doubly wars against individuality, it wars against the inherent protestant tendency Americans are drawn to as a feature of our national character, and it wars against the individuality consumerism is eager to stoke in men. It’s all the easier to sells tchotchkes to isolated and lonely people than those who know they are cells in something great, be it a family, country, or church. When one is unrooted, your capitalist moneyman is the least of your problems. If one is isolated, he is prey to all sorts of personal and political tyrannies. If you think it is rough falling into the hands of the living God, you should try the embrace of a dead god. Isolate men and watch the attorney, the drug man, and the usurer come into their own… on your neck. Isolate men and you will learn what real chains are. But welcome school children into a living community in conversation with the living God, and all liturgy is conversation, and those ones will grow up and put to flight those pimps. One appreciates the common Office as one matures, and a chronic solo prayer when community participation is possible must be scorned as the fruit of a juvenile soul.

As Fr. Charles Miller writes in his handy commentary Making The Day Holy, “It is true that bishops and major religious superiors have the authority to commute the Office to some other form of prayer [for those under vows]. Such commutation may be justified in individual cases and for a period of time, but the arrangement and content of the Office allow for and even occasion a spiritual development and maturity which cannot be found elsewhere.” Vows or no’, the liturgy teaches the participant maturity.

The Office’s job is to cramp my style and yours. It’s easier to stay home and pray by myself. When online celebration of the liturgy came in vogue during the COVID days, it was easier not to boot up the computer. While the ease of saying the Office increased, I still was making excuses. What the Liturgy was inviting me to was to reach outside of myself into community.

What makes the Office especially appropriate to schools is the existing congregation of learners. In a sense the Office in schools sacramentalizes the academic community. This is nothing more than what all liturgy ought to do, take the work-a-day and point it, if only from time to time, towards God. This is true for sacramental ceremonies and the Divine Office all the way down to the objects of the Rituale, be it a blessing for a mug of beer, a motorcycle, or a puppy dog.

How often does the student ask quietly and out loud, why are we doing this? It is often an unsatisfactory or absent response from a teacher which triggers a life of intellectual apathy. If one’s teachers were not able to pitch a life of the mind, the student sensibly concludes, it probably isn’t worthwhile. The Office allows all those involved in an educational setting, instructors, students, and—my enemies until I had to become one—administrators—to take our time in school and in a concrete, ritualized fashion offer it in a meaningful way to God, the ground of meaning.

Finally, the regular celebration of the Hours breaks the isolation which the modern top-down classroom nurtures, and which the COVID days exacerbated. Surely, I cannot be the only man who has noticed the rise of people averting their gaze in daily interactions. Lowering eyes were once the province of the young child and the cutpurse. What does it say that a nation’s people comport themselves as such? Externals show internals, and you know as soon as I the feeble spirit which shifty eyes announce.

At Apocatastasis we smash shyness by lassoing all, including the reticent, into the ceremony. We do this by developing a schedule of who will be cantor and hebdomadarian from day to day; these roles throw the shy student into a role of leadership. In a low-stakes setting it breaks the shyness of our time. By inches student participation at the Divine Office builds confidence in the young learner, confidence being the necessary footing of an agentic life in years to come. Rear a generation weaned on agency and watch the tyrants run like rabbits.

A Gentle Reminder

It is the hour of the times that just as the nature of Postmodernity is making itself known, that the last fumes of Christianity are wafting off from the West. The Baby Boomers were hardly evangelized, but they had enough of the old-time religion to keep up some Christian habits. If they wouldn’t go to church each week, they’d at least go quarterly or annually; if their tongue wasn’t squeaky clean, they at least didn’t want cussing on television; if their personal creed likely had all sorts of heresies imbibed from pop culture, they at least put their child in CCD. Those Boomers have now aged out of active society. But as lukewarm as that generation was, they acted as a dam against nasty social developments. Should you wonder why one sees a quickening of unchristian social trends, know it is because that lamely Christian generation are going to their fathers. What is worse than lame faith? No faith. Lame religion at least is a start. Go ask Apollos if he had an easier time working with people who knew of the Holy Spirit or with those who didn’t (Acts 19). One has a better chance reaching people with a distant, sentimental memory of God than people who’ve no foundation a’tall.

Ecumenism

The Great Speckled Bird is looking a bit rough. If we see a paganization of society, what purports to be Christianity itself has seen better days. The mainline protestant denominations have gone the way of all flesh. The old-time protestants who have successfully maintained the “mere Christianity” of the Reformation, those who have not been swept into the Church Of What’s Happening Now, are shattering into a hundred (more) ham-fisted sects in response to the stresses of Postmodernity.

If the secular conservative who baldly asserts, “We don’t need no education,” is incapable of seizing the authority in society—the actual authority, what we might call gravitas—worse by far is Pastor Billy’s Bible Church. The protestants are good men, and they’re Christian men, and they’re holy, but the Radical Reformation protestantism which defines American religion is hopelessly shattered. Unmoored from tradition, canon law, hierarchy, and the example of the saints, American low down, hoedown Christianity is more apt to speed up secularism as anything else. Who can blame men scandalized by these sectarians when they conclude that the husks of the World are more tolerable than the fads and eccentricities of the Saved.

Protestantism can do fughall in the face of an organizationally unified New World Order and the secularism which philosophically undergirds it. In fact, I make bold to say the abysmal failure of conservatism, particularly religious conservatism, to conserve anything stems from the absence of a liturgical consciousness. Until they put on this mind they will continue riding around as so many Lone Rangers. Then again, there’s a strange thrill many of the conserved get fancying they’re the last of the Mohicans. Anyone up for an hotel room Latin Mass or Gab group?

Mind you, all is not well in Catholicville. Near as I can tell, the Roman Catholic faithful are split on the one hand between normies who have no understanding of present dechristianization, and on the other hand, nervous Savonarola types who’ve made totems of the past, and the neither of them has the slightest interest or energy for evangelization. Sure, life gets you coming and going.

The Church Reaches Out

As we labor in the classroom to form an intelligent and agentic generation we see the Divine Office extending two arms, one to the lost World and one to a shattered and anemic Church.

Towards the Postmodern world it offers beauty. Things are far too far gone to make rational appeals to men. A wallop upside the head by beauty is the surest way to attract the lost. As Dostoevsky’s Idiot says, “Beauty will save the world.” Of course, rational appeals can be beautiful, but for a society given to images it is the physical which is fetching.

It is on this account care ought to be shown towards the chant tradition and posture, even in humble, mundane, and yes—grouch as I might—in individual celebration. While clerics are too easy to dismiss liturgical complexity on pastoral grounds, perhaps those with the care of souls have their finger on a pulse which ought to be heeded. Allahu a’alam. In a school, however, greater attention ought to be given to posture and music in the beautiful drama of the Office and the liturgy in toto. As scholastics we must see ourselves as marking time until general society has the maturity and appreciation of these elements of the liturgy once more.

What people often forget when discussing the simplification of the liturgy in the Twentieth Century is that the educational soil of the masses, which once had been fairly grounded in the Classics, including not just the rudiments of Latin but a familiarity with a canvas of ancient literature and allusions, was so eroded by the 1930s and ‘40s that the ceremonial of the Church necessarily had to change to be intelligible. This was not the fault of clerics but of schoolmen. That the New American Bible, the liturgical version of the scriptures used in Yankeeland, is written for a seventh-grade reading level is proof of how far general education has gone down the tubes. The liturgical simplifications we see are a loving condescension of the Church to the aliteracy of the modern man. Perhaps if enough teachers and students take our vocations seriously, we will raise the sophistication of mankind high enough to forge a people once again capable of enjoying a fuller rituale.

You never know who is watching, nor who might be struck by your diligent performance of the Prayer. In manys the field trip and like outing of Apocatastasis’ we have had occasion to establish the Prayer in public. The students always bring beauty and poise to the workaday bustle. The celebration of the Office is neither preachy, lengthy, nor self-important; three strikes against protestantized America Christianity (and I include much of Catholicism under this umbrella). Those elements of formal faith which has so turned off the mass of our countrymen are not present in the Liturgy. It is a chaste prayer, deliberately short and to the point in the Western tradition.

Towards those souls baptized into Christ but outside Christ’s Church, the Office poses neither the sacramental nor the sacerdotal difficulties encountered when the topic of ecumenism meets that of the holy Mass. At an hour where, on the one hand, Catholic schools for financial reasons must allow students from diverse faith traditions or none a’tall (and “nones” are the fastest growing religious demographic at present), and at an hour where the general population is more and more seeking alternatives to public education, many are the ecumenical possibilities of the Divine Office. You see, ecumenical celebration of the holy Mass runs aground because the sectarian is necessarily unable to receive communion, whereas the Office allows for full participation of the Catholic, the protestant, and the Orthodox, hell, even of your Druids and your voodoo men, without the climax of the prayer leaving some excluded. The Office may be an ecumenical halfway house between private prayers and that full liturgical participation which must await reception into the Catholic Church to enjoy. The Office is a gentle introduction of liturgical prayer which may in time, please God, invite the worshiper into the fullness of the Church.

At the same time the Hours pointedly assert the grave wound ecumenism means to address and heal: authority. By participating in the liturgy one de facto acknowledges the authority of the magisterial Church. One doesn’t make a de jure submission to the Church of Christ, true, but one at least verbs submission to the hierarchy and all that means, if only in the interest of practicality and order.

It is in the Office celebrated over a lengthy period one can see the Church’s mind on topics brought into contention by sectarians such as the sacraments, the role of Mary, and even the hierarchy itself known not as a statement to be asserted intellectually but as a reality manifested in living contact with the living God. Those doctrines proper to Rome are massaged into the rhythm of prayer in a manner disarming to American protestants so used to polemical disputation.
Patience

The Office teaches patience with myself and with others. It teaches us that the perfect and be the enemy of the good. It does not take long with students new to the Prayer is realize that, “Today things won’t look like Solesmes!” This is good. The halting, the wrong pages and antiphons, the rough pronunciation, all of these are good in learning the beauty of imperfection; they check whatever of the anal retentive we may have.

The imperfection of our celebration is itself a sacramental. Various trends presently combine to make men more apt to sever ties. Regardless of one’s worldview, those others of his mind are more liable to end relationships as they purity spiral off their high horses. This is hardly a leftist or secular trait. The Office teaches us to bear with each others’ superfluities in patience.

Liberality

It also instructs us in liberality. There was a time, and more than a passing phase, when I was personally quite strict with the easterly direction of prayer, chant, posture, and the like. The high point of this energy was when I said Terce on and in a MetroNorth train bathroom.

As I’ve gotten older, I turned into a terrible liberal. While I still keep up with the whole cursus of the Liturgia Horarum, I only mind the above trappings twice a day. The other hours are apportioned between online groups and pacing recitation; I’ve even taken to combining hours, using the Angelus as a palate cleanser between one prayer and another. Ah, musha, if I keep up like this, I’ll be a grunting Hottentot in no time!

In later years I’ve worked in a balance between the present books and prior editions of the Office. In doing so I’ve come across the subtleties different rites and orders have developed in their prayer. An especially happy invention and subsequent addition to my celebration has been the reading of monastic rules as part of the morning cursus. This develops of width of vision when it comes to life which nothing else can offer. The diversity of the Divine Office undermines the “my way or the highway” mien which affects both modern religious life, and—as politics serves the role of religion for many skins—differences of worldview.

A maturity develops in all of these. As one learns of the vastness of the liturgical tradition in one’s rite and in the Church at large it becomes obvious that one cannot reasonably do each facet of the Office each day and still see to their duty of state. In fact, the tradition is so grand that a monastic could not do as much. In response to this one, learns moderation, one learns that the liturgy is an organ which pulses on beyond oneself. Rather than being a watering down, this necessary moderation teaches one they are a living cell, part of a larger whole.

Applied Education

As a teacher of the humanities, the Prayer drives home points taught in class which only repetitious ceremonies can develop over months, years, and decades. Because of the nature of industrial education, a model which has largely been adopted into homeschooling, it happens that students come to the Institute with a nigh on impossible ability to imagine different sciences connected one to another. Because of the way disciplines are broken up, the learner’s mental muscle of seeing life in a united whole is atrophied.

The Liturgy Of The Hours is a corrective to this handicap. The hymns, antiphons, Psalms, lessons, and collects were written at widely different times, yet they speak of a united reality. It is a literary museum of sorts, with the different elements a pastiche of various cultures and personalities. The Office teaches not only a liturgical tradition, but it trains the mind to grasp what academic traditions are.

Rebuilding

The Office is nothing more than the spiritual radio station of the Church. What an honor for schools to participate in educating a people fit to tune into this station. Yes, it is true that vernacular liturgy is permissible at present, and doubly yes, it is true that vernacular celebration is the expressed policy of the American episcopate. This is a sign not of liberalism or watering anything down; vernacular celebration is a pastoral allowance in the face of the population’s receding education. As hours in class increase, and more and more men sport advanced degrees, it seems the actual general education declines.

While acknowledging pastoral necessity—it may be the population is too dull to appreciate things like chant, for example—it is the charge of schoolmen to not just meet present needs but to make provision for a future society better educated. When that time comes what laurels teachers will have for having formed men capable of joining in the Church’s rich caeremoniale with all of its august trappings. Yes, it is as clear as clear can be the Church does not care about its liturgical heritage. Let us mark time until it does once more.

The Big Picture

Never have I ever blushed in saying that the fundamental telos of Apocatastasis Institute has been to form a people capable of personal, economic, political, and cultural self-defense. Indeed, the role of all right schools is to form such a people, men capable of asserting their rights against bullies and pimps. Forsooth, the Lord above only game man a body so that he may throw it against evil.

Here at home, it is certain that the tyranny which is building in one corner, and the liberty which men are nurturing in another, will meet in a fight. These two energetic lines will have it out in physical force. It is the solemn duty of all right education to form men mentally, spiritually, and socially capable for this exertion. Unlike what the goofy conservatives and truth community hold, that this row will happen when The Cathedral pushes too many people too far, this fight to the knife will not be won by free mankind for some generations out, not in this part of the world at least. Those who think they have a bead on events are bugged the hell out on The Patriot and Rambo films; the conservatives speak like little boys watching Westerns.

Hayya ‘Ala-l-falah

It is a point of record that the most muscular and competent response to the New World Order has been from the Ummah of Mohammed. If my above assertion about schools and self-defense is correct, then it behooves us to observe the role which canonical prayer played in forming a homogeneous Islamic population capable of the discipline of physical exertion. The point, and it is a point best learned early, is that spiritual liberation precedes physical efforts at the same. That is what the Muslims’ manly striving teaches us.

There will be a fight, forsooth, but it will not be in our time if it’s to be successful. It is for schoolmen to prepare a people fit for a national liberation struggle which is generations distant. Before men can responsibly assert themselves in arms, for a physical force struggle is the highest test of a community’s coherence and competence, there must be a spiritual, mental, and interpersonal revival.

I do not say it is given to us to arrange what must be, I do not say it is for us to advocate for it, I do not even say that when the time ripens to bring the tyrants to heel that it will be advisable to engage in a fight. I say that what goes for individuals goes for societies, that vigilance is the price of security, and that complete men capable of spiritual, mental, and physical self-defense can check criminals when they come looking for trouble. It is for schools to form such a pacific but prepared people.

Of all the lessons learned in school, the daily Office teaches a master class in the lessons of dedication, piety, patience, and comity, those things which prevent physical striving for liberty from becoming seven times more unjust than what preceded it. The errors of Islam notwithstanding, the discipline which their salah instilled in them was the biggest ingredient in their drubbing of the globalists’ armies.

Remember Baghuz!

Yes, the greatest opposition the confederates of the New World Order have faced in our day was from the Muslims when they trespassed on their lands. I have lost count of the number of amputees of a certain age I have come across hobbling about Connecticut as a grim testimony of this fact.

It is advisable that patriots note how the men of other lands have struggled against the New World Order. In all the times and climes, we may observe, the victory of the Taliban is the greatest triumph of self-determination in our lifetime. Close on the heels of that I adduce the insurgency of the Second Iraq War and elements of the Arab Spring. Now don’t worry, I’ll not be going in for that damn Islam anytime soon, and I am well aware of the fanaticism, insanity, criminality, and infiltration which characterized the Middle Eastern, if not the Central Asian, Islamic response to the New World Order. Still and all, the globalists were dressed down in their attempt to lasso the Dar al-Islam into their banking network. This Western banking scheme explains in a nutshell the last 20 years of the Western and Islamic tussle. Still and all, who is sitting in Kabul?

I followed the saga of the War On Terror closely, I follow it yet. How many stories are there of Muslims praying Salawat in the middle of military operations, sometimes amidst the red rush of battle itself. Who did not stare in awe to see the men of ISIS maintaining to the last their liturgical cursus even as the Kurdish communists set upon them in the football field of Baghuz Fawqani. I care not that Islam is a false religion, nor that ISIS represented the worst of the Muslim people, nor that the group was riven with supergrasses and madmen. What I hold up from that strange group at that desperate hour is the sociological value of canonical prayer as a stiffener against overwhelming odds.

Conclusion

The Divine Office is particularly fitted to a school because it grounds the student’s life and study in meaning, teaches by rote academic lessons which cannot be grasped in a lecture, refines our etiquette, and offers a calm onramp to liturgical prayer to a multiconfessional people.

Being an other-centered-prayer, the Office teaches us piety classically understood, piety as the outlay of energy and attention given for the health of the polis. The Prayer formalizes good citizenship as it calls us in the classroom and neighborhood together again and again and again and reminds us of our Creator and the symphony of salvation of which we are all a part. In so doing, the Divine Office checks the antisocial habits telephonic interaction not only tolerates but encourages. The Prayer is a gentle curative to the schisms of the last 500 years.

Finally, the discipline of the Office nurtures a cornucopia of sentiments and virtues which are prerequisites of any national liberation effort. We may say that the percentage of the community who regularly join in the Prayer will broadly be an indicator of the percentage of men capable of putting bullies in their place. All of this, bully banging as soon as anything else, are lessons best introduced during one’s formative school years. Root a child in his Creator, his community, and in meaning and watch an oak of a man grow.

Well, that’s that, as the girl said to the sailor.

John Coleman co-hosts Christian History & Ideas, and is the founder of Apocatastasis: An Institute for the Humanities, an alternative college and high school in New Milford, Connecticut. Apocatastasis is a school focused on studying the Western humanities in an integrated fashion, while at the same time adjusting to the changing educational field. Information about the college can be found at its website.

Featured: Modi orandi sancti Domini, ca. 14th-15th centuries.

Saving a Child’s Mind

Given the current attack on the life of the mind of a child by a trans activist educational system and its abettors (teachers), seeking to to destroy the innocense of children that they may readily be transformed into mutilated eunuchs—we thought it would be best to return to the ideas of Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), the man who created education for the very young, which he labeled Kindergarten (a garden for children).

What follows is in two parts: first a brief life of Froebel by Nora Archibald Smith (1859–1934), the American writer and education, and then the words of wisdom from the man himself, taken from his letters and published works.

Part I: The Life of Friedrich Froebel

It was Froebel who said, “The clearer the thread that runs through our lives backward to our childhood, the clearer will be our onward glance to the goal;” and in the fragment of autobiography he has left us, he illustrates forcibly the truth of his own saying. The motherless baby who plays alone in the village pastor’s quiet house, the dreamy child who wanders solitary in the high-walled garden; the thoughtful lad, neglected, misunderstood, who forgets the harsh realities of life in pondering the mysteries of the flowers, the contradictions of existence, and the dogmas of orthodox theology; who decides in early boyhood that the pleasures of the senses are without enduring influence and therefore on no account to be eagerly pursued;—these presentments of himself, which he summons up for us from the past, show the vividness of his early recollections and indicate the course which the stream of his life is to run.

The coldness and injustice of the new mother who assumed control of the household when he was four years old, his isolation from other children, the merely casual notice he received from the busy father absorbed in his parish work, all tended to turn inward the tide of his mental and spiritual life. He studied himself, not only because it was the bent of his nature, but because he lacked outside objects of interest; and to this early habit of introspection we owe many of the valuable features of his educational philosophy. Whoever has learned thoroughly to understand one child, has conquered a spot of firm ground on which to rest while he studies the world of children; and because the great teacher realized this truth, because he longed to give to others the means of development denied to himself, he turns for us the heart-leaves of his boyhood.

It would appear that Froebel’s characteristics were strongly marked and unusual from the beginning. Called by every one “a moon-struck child” in Oberweissbach, the village of his birth, he was just as unanimously considered “an old fool” when, crowned with the experience of seventy years, he played with the village children on the green hills of Thuringia. The intensity of his inward life, the white heat of his convictions, his absolute blindness to any selfish idea or aim, his enthusiasm, the exaltation of his spiritual nature, all furnish so many cogent reasons why the people of any day or of any community should have failed to understand him, and scorned what they could not comprehend. It is the old story of the seers and the prophets repeated as many times as they appear; for “these colossal souls,” as Emerson said, “require a long focal distance to be seen.”

At ten years old the sensitive boy was fortunately removed from the uncongenial atmosphere of the parental household; and in his uncle’s home he spent five free and happy years, being apprenticed at the end of this time to a forester in his native Thuringian woods. Then followed a year’s course in the University of Jena, and four years spent in the study of farming, in clerical work of various kinds, and in land-surveying. All these employments, however, Froebel himself felt to be merely provisional; for like the hazel wand in the diviner’s hand, his instinct was blindly seeking through these restless years the well-spring of his life.

In Frankfort, where he had gone intending to study architecture, Destiny touched him on the shoulder, and he turned and knew her. Through a curious combination of circumstances he gained employment in Herr Gruner’s Model School, and it was found at once that he was what the Germans love to call “a teacher by the grace of God.” The first time he met his class of boys he tells us that he felt inexpressibly happy; the hazel wand had found the waters and was fixed at last. From this time on, all the events of his life were connected with his experience as a teacher. Impelled as soon as he had begun his work by a desire for more effective methods, he visited Yverdon, then the centre of educational thought, and studied with Pestalozzi. He went again in 1808, accompanied by three pupils, and spent two years there, alternately studying and teaching.

There was a year of lectures at Göttingen after this, and one at the University of Berlin, accompanied by unceasing study and research both in literary and scientific lines; but in the fateful year 1813 this quiet student life was broken in upon, for impelled by strong moral conviction, Froebel joined Baron von Lützow’s famous volunteer corps, formed to harass the French by constant skirmishes and to encourage the smaller German States to rise against Napoleon.

No thirst for glory prompted this action, but a lofty conception of the office of the educator. How could any young man capable of bearing arms, Froebel says, become a teacher of children whose Fatherland he had refused to defend? how could he in after years incite his pupils to do something noble, something calling for sacrifice and unselfishness, without exposing himself to their derision and contempt? The reasoning was perfect, and he made practice follow upon the heels of theory as closely as he had always done since he became master of his fate.

After the Peace of Paris he settled down for a time to a quiet life in the mineralogical museum at the University of Berlin, his duties being the care, arrangement, and investigation of crystals. Surrounded thus by the exquisite formations whose development according to law is so perfect, whose obedience to the promptings of an inward ideal so complete, he could not but learn from their unconscious ethics to look into the depths of his own nature, and there recognize more clearly the purpose it was intended to work out.

In 1816 he quietly gave up his position, and taking as pupils five of his nephews, three of whom were fatherless, he entered upon his life work, the first step in which was the carrying out of his plan for a “Universal German Educational Institute.” He was without money, of course, as he had always been and always would be—his hands were made for giving, not for getting; he slept in a barn on a wisp of straw while arranging for his first school at Griesheim; but outward things were so little real to him in comparison with the life of the spirit, that bodily privations seemed scarcely worth considering. The school at Keilhau, to which he soon removed, the institutions later established in Wartensee and Willisau, the orphanage in Burgdorf, all were most successful educationally, but, it is hardly necessary to say, were never a source of profit to their head and founder.

Through the twenty succeeding years, busy as he was in teaching, in lecturing, in writing, he was constantly shadowed by dissatisfaction with the foundation upon which he was building. A nebulous idea for the betterment of things was floating before him; but it was not until 1836 that it appeared to his eyes as a “definite truth.” This definite truth, the discovery of his old age, was of course the kindergarten; and from this time until the end, all other work was laid aside, and his entire strength given to the consummate flower of his educational thought.

The first kindergarten was opened in 1837 at Blankenburg (where a memorial school is now conducted), and in 1850 the institution at Marienthal for the training of kindergartners was founded, Froebel remaining at its head until his death two years after.

With the exception of that remarkable book, The Education of Man (1826), his most important literary work was done after 1836; Pedagogics of the Kindergarten, the first great European contribution to the subject of child-study, appearing from 1837 to 1840 in the form of separate essays, and the Mutter-und-Kose Lieder (Mother-Play) in 1843. Many of his educational aphorisms and occasional speeches were preserved by his great disciple the Baroness von Marenholtz-Bülow in her Reminiscences of Froebel; and though two most interesting volumes of his correspondence have been published, there remain a number of letters, as well as essays and educational sketches, not yet rendered into English.

Froebel’s literary style is often stiff and involved, its phrases somewhat labored, and its substance exceedingly difficult to translate with spirit and fidelity; yet after all, his mannerisms are of a kind to which one easily becomes accustomed, and the kernel of his thought when reached is found well worth the trouble of removing a layer of husk. He had always an infinitude of things to say, and they were all things of purpose and of meaning; but in writing, as well as in formal speaking, the language to clothe the thought came to him slowly and with difficulty. Yet it appears that in friendly private intercourse he spoke fluently, and one of his students reports that in his classes he was often “overpowering and sublime, the stream of his words pouring forth like fiery rain.”

It is probable that in daily life Froebel was not always an agreeable house-mate; for he was a genius, a reformer, and an unworldly enthusiast, believing in himself and in his mission with all the ardor of a heart centred in one fixed purpose. He was quite intolerant of those who doubted or disbelieved in his theories, as well as of those who, believing, did not carry their faith into works. The people who stood nearest him and devoted themselves to the furthering of his ideas slept on no bed of roses, certainly; but although he sometimes sacrificed their private interests to his cause, it must not be forgotten that he first laid himself and all that he had upon the same altar. His nature was one that naturally inspired reverence and loyalty, and drew from his associates the most extraordinary devotion and self-sacrifice. Then, as now, women were peculiarly attracted by his burning enthusiasm, his prophetic utterances, and his lofty views of their sex and its mission; and then, as now, the almost fanatical zeal of his followers is perhaps to be explained by the fact that he gives a new world-view to his students,—one that produces much the same effect upon the character as the spiritual exaltation called “experiencing religion.”

He was twice married, in each case to a superior woman of great gifts of mind and character, and both helpmates joyfully took up a life of privation and care that they might be associated with him and with his work. Those memorable words spoken of our Washington—”Heaven left him childless that a nation might call him father,” are even more applicable to Froebel, for his wise and tender fatherhood extends to all the children of the world. When he passed through the village streets of his own country, little ones came running from every doorstep; the babies clinging to his knees and the older ones hanging about his neck and refusing to leave the dear play-master, as they called him. So the kindergartners love to think of him to-day—the tall spare figure, the long hair, the wise, plain, strong-featured face, the shining eyes, and the little ones clustering about him as they clustered about another Teacher in Galilee, centuries ago.

Froebel’s educational creed cannot here be cited at length, but some of its fundamental articles are:

  • The education of the child should begin with its birth, and should be threefold, addressing the mental, spiritual, and physical natures.
  • It should be continued as it has begun, by appealing to the heart and the emotions as the starting-point of the human soul.
  • There should be sequence, orderly progression, and one continuous purpose throughout the entire scheme of education, from kindergarten to university.
  • Education should be conducted according to nature, and should be a free, spontaneous growth—a development from within, never a prescription from without.
  • The training of the child should be conducted by means of the activities, needs, desires, and delights, which are the common heritage of childhood.
  • The child should be led from the beginning to feel that one life thrills through every manifestation of the universe, and that he is a part of all that is.
  • The object of education is the development of the human being in the totality of his powers as a child of nature, a child of man, and a child of God.

These principles of Froebel’s, many of them the products of his own mind, others the pure gold of educational currency upon which he has but stamped his own image, are so true and so far-reaching that they have already begun to modify all education and are destined to work greater magic in the future. The great teacher’s place in history may be determined, by-and-by, more by the wonderful uplift and impetus he gave to the whole educational world, than by the particular system of child-culture in connection with which he is best known to-day.

Judged by ordinary worldly standards, his life was an unsuccessful one, full of trials and privations, and empty of reward. His death-blow was doubtless struck by the prohibition of kindergartens in Prussia in 1851, an edict which remained nine years in force. His strength had been too sorely tried to resist this final crushing misfortune, and he passed away the following year. His body was borne to the grave through a heavy storm of wind and rain that seemed to symbolize the vicissitudes of his earthly days, while as a forecast of the future the sun shone out at the last moment, and the train of mourners looked back to see the low mound irradiated with glory.

In Thuringia, where the great child-lover was born, the kindergartens, his best memorials, cluster thickly now; and on the face of the cliffs that overhang the bridle-path across the Glockner mountain may be seen in great letters the single word Froebel, hewn deep into the solid rock.

(Nora Archibald Smith)

Part II: Excerpts from Froebel’s Work

The Right of the Child

All that does not grow out of one’s inner being, all that is not one’s own original feeling and thought, or that at least does not awaken that, oppresses and defaces the individuality of man instead of calling it forth, and nature becomes thereby a caricature. Shall we never cease to stamp human nature, even in childhood, like coins? to overlay it with foreign images and foreign superscriptions, instead of letting it develop itself and grow into form according to the law of life planted in it by God the Father, so that it may be able to bear the stamp of the Divine, and become an image of God?…

This theory of love is to serve as the highest goal and polestar of human education, and must be attended to in the germ of humanity, the child, and truly in his very first impulses. The conquest of self-seeking egoism is the most important task of education; for selfishness isolates the individual from all communion, and kills the life-giving principle of love. Therefore the first object of education is to teach to love, to break up the egoism of the individual, and to lead him from the first stage of communion in the family through all the following stages of social life to the love of humanity, or to the highest self-conquest by which man rises to Divine unity….

Women are to recognize that childhood and womanliness (the care of childhood and the life of women) are inseparably connected; that they form a unit; and that God and nature have placed the protection of the human plant in their hands. Hitherto the female sex could take only a more or less passive part in human history, because great battles and the political organization of nations were not suited to their powers. But at the present stage of culture, nothing is more pressingly required than the cultivation of every human power for the arts of peace and the work of higher civilization. The culture of individuals, and therefore of the whole nation, depends in great part upon the earliest care of childhood. On that account women, as one half of mankind, have to undertake the most important part of the problems of the time, problems that men are not able to solve. If but one half of the work be accomplished, then our epoch, like all others, will fail to reach the appointed goal. As educators of mankind, the women of the present time have the highest duty to perform, while hitherto they have been scarcely more than the beloved mothers of human beings….

But I will protect childhood, that it may not as in earlier generations be pinioned, as in a strait-jacket, in garments of custom and ancient prescription that have become too narrow for the new time. I shall show the way and shape the means, that every human soul may grow of itself, out of its own individuality. But where shall I find allies and helpers if not in women, who as mothers and teachers may put my idea in execution? Only intellectually active women can and will do it. But if these are to be loaded with the ballast of dead knowledge that can take no root in the unprepared ground, if the fountains of their own original life are to be choked up with it, they will not follow my direction nor understand the call of the time for the new task of their sex, but will seek satisfaction in empty superficiality.

To learn to comprehend nature in the child—is not that to comprehend one’s own nature and the nature of mankind? And in this comprehension is there not involved a certain degree of comprehension of all things else? Women cannot learn and take into themselves anything higher and more comprehensive. It should therefore at least be the beginning, and the love of childhood should be awakened in the mind (and in a wider sense, this is the love of humanity), so that a new, free generation of men can grow up by right care.

(From Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel, by Baroness B. von Marenholtz-Bülow), (1877).

Evolution

What shall we learn from our yearning look into the heart of the flower and the eye of the child? This truth: Whatever develops, be it into flower or tree or man, is from the beginning implicitly that which it has the power to become. The possibility of perfect manhood is what you read in your child’s eye, just as the perfect flower is prophesied in the bud, or the giant oak in the tiny acorn. A presentiment that the ideal or generic human being slumbers, dreams, stirs in your unconscious infant—this it is, O mother, which transfigures you as you gaze upon him. Strive to define to yourself what is that generic ideal which is wrapped up in your child. Surely, as your child—or in other words, as child of man—he is destined to live in the past and future as well as in the present. His earthly being implies a past heaven; his birth makes a present heaven; in his soul he holds a future heaven. This threefold heaven, which you also bear within you, shines out on you through your child’s eyes.

The beast lives only in the present. Of past and future he knows naught. But to man belong not only the present, but also the future and the past. His thought pierces the heaven of the future, and hope is born. He learns that all human life is one life; that all human joys and sorrows are his joys and sorrows, and through participation enters the present heaven—the heaven of love. He turns his mind towards the past, and out of retrospection wrests a vigorous faith. What soul could fail to conquer an invincible trust in the pure, the good, the holy, the ideally human, the truly Divine, if it would look with single eye into its own past, into the past of history? Could there be a man in whose soul such a contemplation of the past would fail to blossom into devout insight, into self-conscious and self-comprehending faith? Must not such a retrospect unveil the truth? Must not the beauty of the unveiled truth allure him to Divine doing, Divine living? All that is high and holy in human life meets in that faith which is born of the unveiling of a heaven that has always been; in that hope born of a vision of the heaven that shall be; in that love which creates a heaven in the eternal Now. These three heavens shine out upon you through your child’s eye. The presentiment that he carries these three heavens within him transfigures your countenance as you gaze upon him. Cherish this premonition, for thereby you will help him to make his life a musical chord wherein are blended the three notes of faith, hope, and love. These celestial virtues will link his life with the Divine life through which all life is one—with the God who is the supernal fountain of life, light, and love….

Higher and more important than the cultivation of man’s outer ear, is the culture of that inner sense of harmony whereby the soul learns to perceive sweet accord in soundless things, and to discern within itself harmonies and discords. The importance of wakening the inner ear to this music of the soul can scarcely be exaggerated. Learning to hear it within, the child will strive to give it outer form and expression; and even if in such effort he is only partially successful, he will gain thereby the power to appreciate the more successful effort of others. Thus enriching his own life by the life of others, he solves the problem of development. How else were it possible within the quickly fleeting hours of mortal life to develop our being in all directions, to fathom its depths, scale its heights, measure its boundaries? What we are, what we would be, we must learn to recognize in the mirror of all other lives. By the effort of each, and the recognition of all, the Divine man is revealed in humanity….

Against the bright light which shines on the smooth white wall is thrust a dark object, and straightway appears the form which so delights the child. This is the outward fact; what is the truth which through this fact is dimly hinted to the prophetic mind? Is it not the creative and transforming power of light, that power which brings form and color out of chaos, and makes the beauty which gladdens our hearts? Is it not more than this—a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the spiritual fact that our darkest experiences may project themselves in forms that will delight and bless, if in our hearts shines the light of God? The sternest crags, the most forbidding chasms, are beautiful in the mellow sunshine; while the fairest landscape loses all charm, and indeed ceases to be, when the light which created it is withdrawn. Is it not thus also with our lives? Yesterday, touched by the light of enthusiastic emotion, all our relationships seemed beautiful and blessed; to-day, when the glow of enthusiasm has faded, they oppress and repulse us. Only the conviction that it is the darkness within us which makes the darkness without, can restore the lost peace of our souls. Be it therefore, O mother, your sacred duty to make your darling early feel the working both of the outer and inner light. Let him see in one the symbol of the other, and tracing light and color to their source in the sun, may he learn to trace the beauty and meaning of his life to their source in God.

(From The Mottoes and Commentaries of Mother-Play), (1895). Translation of Susan E. Blow.

Aphorisms

I see in every child the possibility of a perfect man.

The child-soul is an ever-bubbling fountain in the world of humanity.

The plays of childhood are the heart-leaves of the whole future life.

Childish unconsciousness is rest in God.

From each object of nature and of life, there goes a path toward God.

Perfect human joy is also worship, for it is ordered by God.

The first groundwork of religious life is love—love to God and man—in the bosom of the family.

Childhood is the most important stage of the total development of man and of humanity.

Women must make of their educational calling a priestly office.

Isolation and exclusion destroy life; union and participation create life.

Without religious preparation in childhood, no true religion and no union with God is possible for men.

The tree germ bears within itself the nature of the whole tree; the human being bears in himself the nature of all humanity; and is not therefore humanity born anew in each child?

In the children lies the seed-corn of the future.

The lovingly cared for, and thereby steadily and strongly developed human life, also the cloudless child life, is of itself a Christ-like one.

In all things works one creative life, because the life of all things proceeds from one God.

Let us live with our children: so shall their lives bring peace and joy to us; so shall we begin to be and to become wise.

What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to verify the thoughts of their inmost souls.

This earliest age is the most important one for education, because the beginning decides the manner of progress and the end. If national order is to be recognized in later years as a benefit, childhood must first be accustomed to law and order, and therein find the means of freedom. Lawlessness and caprice must rule in no period of life, not even in that of the nursling.

The kindergarten is the free republic of childhood.

A deep feeling of the universal brotherhood of man—what is it but a true sense of our close filial union with God?

Man must be able to fail, in order to be good and virtuous; and he must be able to become a slave in order to be truly free.

My teachers are the children themselves, with all their purity, their innocence, their unconsciousness, and their irresistible claims; and I follow them like a faithful, trustful scholar.

A story told at the right time is like a looking-glass for the mind.

I wish to cultivate men who stand rooted in nature, with their feet in God’s earth, whose heads reach toward and look into the heavens; whose hearts unite the richly formed life of earth and nature, with the purity and peace of heaven—God’s earth and God’s heaven.

Featured: Poster for the American Library Association, by Jessie Willcox Smith, 1919.

Kiel University Sacrificed Freedom of the Press

Patrik Baab has won outright. The ruling of the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court in his favor is now legally binding.

So now it’s official: Patrik Baab did nothing, with his trip to eastern Ukraine, that would justify ending his teaching position at Kiel University. The ruling of the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court of April 25 of this year is now legally binding. This is because Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU) has allowed the deadline for appealing to the Higher Administrative Court to expire.

After a lot of chest-beating, in the end, CAU did not dare come out of hiding. Its decision to kick journalist Baab out may have been a kowtow to the political situation and especially to the foreign policy course of the German government—but this decision was never legally tenable.

Freedom of the Press Before Political Pandering

The reasoning of the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court explicitly emphasized “the freedom of science according to Article 5 (3) sentence 1, GG (Grundgesetz—German Basic Law) and the freedom of the press according to Article 5 (1) sentence 2, var. 1 GG, which the plaintiff [i.e., Baab] is entitled to invoke. The scope of protection of the freedom of the press guarantees,” the court explained in detail, “in its subjective-legal dimension, the rights of freedom against the state for persons and organizations active in the field of the press; in addition, in its objective-legal meaning, it guarantees the institution of the independence of the press.”

Freedom of the press, it goes on to say, “includes, with respect to printed matter, all conduct that serves to obtain, prepare and disseminate opinions and facts for the public… Holders of freedom of the press are also entitled to a subjective right of defense against indirect infringements.” The court expressly emphasized that Baab’s trip to eastern Ukraine at the time of the referenda also falls under this protection, as he was researching for a book and acting as a journalist.

This argumentation is nothing less than a strengthening of the freedom of the press in Germany. It has an impact on other journalists and publicists in the country who see themselves exposed to the reach of politics and academia. The ruling also says that freedom of the press is more important than the anticipatory obedience of various educational institutions that think they have to throw themselves at the mercy of ideologizing politics. Therefore, we are also dealing here with a rejection of ingratiation.

Kiel University as a War Party

Patrik Baab was a journalism lecturer in Kiel. There he taught research, critical questioning—in short: He showed what freedom of the press can achieve—and this at a university that has now received more or less official confirmation that it has not only failed to appreciate that very freedom of the press, but has torpedoed it. A fatal report card for the teaching institution. Can we hope that journalists trained there will have grasped, in the course of their studies, what the qualities of freedom of the press actually mean?

The administrative file on this incident, which is now available, is peppered with one-dimensional classifications of the Baab trip. The university protagonists quoted in it made themselves a war party in the matter. In effect, there is no mention of investigative openness as a value in itself—nor is there a brief interjection that journalists (should) go where it hurts.

But that’s exactly what Baab has done. Basically, he has shown his students—in exemplary fashion—what journalistic work means: not being satisfied with what other professional colleagues have already written, remaining suspicious, displaying skepticism and getting a picture of the scene for yourself. His employers, Kiel University, however, have now emphatically demonstrated that these values are not necessarily required at all—journalists who apply them tend to appear to be a nuisance, and they’d rather be shown the door.

Now What?

The aforementioned administrative file mentions several names of professors who were in lively exchange when Baab’s trip became known via t-online—a news portal, known for its campaigns against intellectuals critical of the German government, and belonging to an advertising group that receives a large part of its orders from exactly this government. Again and again, the accusation was made that Baab had the wrong attitude—and therefore he must be unsuitable as a lecturer. The fact that he did not get on with the job, i.e., with a completely strict condemnation of Russia, thus led to the charge that he also refrained from factual analysis. This is a reproach throughout. Yet Baab has condemned the Russian invasion several times—his condemnation, however, also does not paralyze his journalistic ethos.

After the court decision, which the CAU did not even object to, apparently knowing that it had overreached considerably, the question now arises: Who will take responsibility for this democratic and constitutional failure? Who will justify the fact that funds allocated by the public were wasted for such an act of political pandering?

For example, Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at Kiel University, Christian Martin, who was heavily involved in Baab’s dismissal and who teaches comparative governance and politics? Shouldn’t one expect more sensitivity to publicity from a teacher in this subject, i.e., a sense of how journalism is done and where not to get in its way? After all, this case is no trifle; here, a university has proven that it is willing to sacrifice freedom of the press just to puff itself up as being politically correct. The danger of teaching attitude rather than expertise does not seem so small—especially when people like Baab are thrown out the door.

Roberto J. De Lapuente is a journalist who writes from Germany. He is the author of Rechts gewinnt, weil Links versagt [The Right Wins because the Left Fails]. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Overton Magazin.

Featured: The Seal of Kiel University, with the motto: “Pax optima rerum” (“Peace is the best thing”).

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 books. He 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.

Fear of the Past

This essay appeared as a chapter in What’s Wrong with the World, which was published in 1910.

The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen—which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen—.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen—.” The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.

But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of poetry and pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesitate to maintain here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even its pugnacity is fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible not because he is impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why modern armaments do not inflame the imagination like the arms and emblazonments of the Crusades is a reason quite apart from optical ugliness or beauty. Some battleships are as beautiful as the sea; and many Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric ugliness that surrounds our scientific war is an emanation from that evil panic which is at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades was a charge; it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver. The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout, a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch the hindmost. It is impossible to imagine a mediaeval knight talking of longer and longer French lances, with precisely the quivering employed about larger and larger German ships The man who called the Blue Water School the “Blue Funk School” uttered a psychological truth which that school itself would scarcely essentially deny. Even the two-power standard, if it be a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has more alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial enterprises than the fact that they are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden defenses against a world of cold rapacity and fear. The Boer War, for instance, was colored not so much by the creed that we were doing something right, as by the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing something wrong; driving us (as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was: a white feather.

Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

Now in history there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration. Among the many things that leave me doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes on the future, none is stronger than this: that all the men in history who have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed upon the past. I need not mention the Renaissance, the very word proves my case. The originality of Michael Angelo and Shakespeare began with the digging up of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness of poets absolutely arose out of the mildness of antiquaries. So the great mediaeval revival was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the Reformation looked back to the Bible and Bible times. So the modern Catholic movement has looked back to patristic times. But that modern movement which many would count the most anarchic of all is in this sense the most conservative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men than it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods. The Sans-culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return to simplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past; some might call it a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern sociological scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists somewhat amusing, statues.

But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy to a restless and rather morbid generation; and they maintain a strange silence about them—sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence. They keep them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely out of their history books. For example, they will often tell you (in their praises of the coming age) that we are moving on towards a United States of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving away from a United States of Europe, that such a thing existed literally in Roman and essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that the international hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really very recent, the mere breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they will tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great rising of the poor against the rich; but they never rub it in that France made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and that we and all the world allowed it to be trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone can test this for himself. Read any thirty or forty pages of pamphlets advocating peace in Europe and see how many of them praise the old Popes or Emperors for keeping the peace in Europe. Read any armful of essays and poems in praise of social democracy, and see how many of them praise the old Jacobins who created democracy and died for it. These colossal ruins are to the modern only enormous eyesores. He looks back along the valley of the past and sees a perspective of splendid but unfinished cities. They are unfinished, not always through enmity or accident, but often through fickleness, mental fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies. We have not only left undone those things that we ought to have done, but we have even left undone those things that we wanted to do

It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern man—in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past? Have we really fulfilled all the great historic ideals one after the other, from our naked ancestor who was brave enough to kill a mammoth with a stone knife, through the Greek citizen and the Christian saint to our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who may have been sabred by the Manchester Yeomanry or shot in the ‘48? Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them? Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared? When we decline (in a marked manner) to fly the red flag and fire across a barricade like our grandfathers, are we really declining in deference to sociologists—or to soldiers? Have we indeed outstripped the warrior and passed the ascetical saint? I fear we only outstrip the warrior in the sense that we should probably run away from him. And if we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed him without bowing.

This is, first and foremost, what I mean by the narrowness of the new ideas, the limiting effect of the future. Our modern prophetic idealism is narrow because it has undergone a persistent process of elimination. We must ask for new things because we are not allowed to ask for old things. The whole position is based on this idea that we have got all the good that can be got out of the ideas of the past. But we have not got all the good out of them, perhaps at this moment not any of the good out of them. And the need here is a need of complete freedom for restoration as well as revolution.

We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again. We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose. It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it; but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim: the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that should seem to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying cold and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen. I claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best way out of our troubles. It would be a way out of some of our troubles; we could not have in a small state, for instance, those enormous illusions about men or measures which are nourished by the great national or international newspapers. You could not persuade a city state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman, or Mr. Dillon a desperado, any more than you could persuade a Hampshire Village that the village drunkard was a teetotaller or the village idiot a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths should be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose that Clapham should declare its independence. I merely declare my independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe; and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they have been used.

Featured: The Deluge, by Winifred Knights; painted in 1920.

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 books. He 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.

Students Are Standing Up

A lost generation? Are today’s 20-year-olds all without a backbone? Journalist Patrik Baab disagrees. Students supported him in his legal dispute with Kiel’s Christian-Albrechts University. This did not go down well: an open letter was not allowed to be sent via the university distribution list. But the students didn’t give up up. A positive experience. The CAU had terminated Baab’s teaching contract because of his research in the Donbass. On April 25, the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court ruled that the termination was illegal. The ruling is not yet legally binding.

Nimble hands dipped brushes into pots of paint. On a banner, lying on the ground, they wrote out red letters. Faces could not be seen. But the slogan was soon visible: “Solidarity with Patrik Baab.” A few more hands hung the banner on the bicycle bridge over Olshausenstrasse at Kiel University. After the night-and-fog action, it remained there for days. In mid-February, students took their protest against censorship and restrictions on freedom of the press to the streets—and to the Internet: a video of the action went viral. The reason: After research in the Donbass and a press campaign, my teaching assignment for practical journalism was cancelled. As an eledged election observer, I would have legitimized Putin’s “sham referendums” and thus the “Russian war of aggression.” No one bothered to check if this was actually true or not. It was just more jumping on the bandwagon—for clicks and advertising revenue. The fact that the majority of people in the Donbass actually think of being pro-Russian does not fit in with the West’s propaganda.

(See, “The Donbas Rift,” by Serhiy Kudelia, and Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, pp. 156ff).

On Good Friday 2023, my friend Friedhelm, his daughter Luise and I wanted to have a nightcap in the Kiel pub, Palenke, around 10:30 PM. The waiter came up to me: “Mr. Baab, you are a conspiracy theorist. You won’t get any beer here. Leave the pub immediately!”

Appalled, we left. Luise commented, “This is how I imagine 1933!” Reason enough to wash down our horror elsewhere. Conspiracy theorist; lateral thinker; Covid denier; right-wing extremist; Putin legitimizer; anti-Semite: These are the denunciation labels of the ecolibertarian and national reactionary bourgeoisie. They serve to enforce propaganda, to exclude dissidence, to divide the population, to destroy the existence of the target, to force anticipatory obedience by generating fear. Behind it all is one goal—to secure the rule of the power elites. But these campaigns are orchestrated by their academic and journalistic satraps. The waiter at the Palenke is named Moritz, studies at Kiel University and works at the campus radio station.

It is precisely against this “Cancel Culture” that students at CAU are now standing up. They are not alone: At Prof. Ulrike Guérot’s “conciliation hearing” before the labor court on April 28, about 100 students demonstrated against her dismissal by the University of Bonn; Prof. Michael Meyen, who is being dragged through the mud by the Süddeutsche Zeitung in particular, also finds support among many students and staff at the University of Munich. It is still a minority that is fighting against the anti-democratic rallying movement of media like T-Online, universities and state-supported denunciation platforms like Zentrum Liberale Moderne, Amadeu Antonio Stiftung or the Mobile Counselling Team against Right-Wing Extremism in Hamburg. But every day there are more of them. Because they know: These witch hunts are not about arguments, but about power. It is about using anti-democratic means to enforce the dominance of discourse. At Kiel University, too, the democratic culture of debate has collapsed—an alarm signal for universities, had it not been for the fact that the lecture halls have long since been colonized by a morally armored extremism of the ecolibertarian center.

But soon the witch hunters could become the hunted. Because now there is the working group “Dialogue on Fundamental Rights and Health Protection” at CAU. Founded in February 2022, it officially has ten active members. One of them is Julian Hett: “Unofficially, we are a lot more, because graduates remain loyal to the group. The community is much larger, maybe a hundred young people in Kiel alone. Our first topic was Corona – and what state organs took out during that time. The Covid measures at Kiel University were also completely disproportionate.” It didn’t stop at Covid. The Covid measures were only one step in the continuing attempt to impose authoritarian structures. Kiel University is part of an unfortunate tradition: Hooray-patriotism in lecture halls in 1914; academic Freikorps during the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch in 1920; “Sturm-Uni” of the Nazis from 1933; secret service involvement of professors during the Cold War and afterwards.

(“Sturm-Uni,” or “Sturm-Universität,” literally a “Stormtrooper university,” is a term from the Nazi-era, which simply means a university entirely aligned with, commited to and thus promoting state ideology—Ed.).

The students of the Arbeitskreis Grundrechteschutz (Working Group for the Protection of Fundamental Rights) know this, and they know what it’s all about. That is why they are organizing a solidarity event for me. On April 11, my lawyer Dr. Volker Arndt and I spoke in front of more than 100 people. In the home of the Kronshagen sports club, there was enthusiastic applause and more than three hours of critical debate about media, propaganda and the Ukraine war. Reason-led discussion against cancel culture and irrationalism, entirely in the spirit of the Enlightenment, as Immanuel Kant wished: “The critical path alone is still open.” For this, the Working Group booked a room, distributed flyers, put stickers on lamp-posts, and uploaded a recording on the web. Anyone who has ever done something like this knows that all this is no small feat.

Student protest. Kiel University.

The commitment of the Kiel students reminds me of my own beginnings—in the alternative newspaper movement at the end of the 1970s. With the founding of the Provinzblatt Homburg (Homburg is a small city in the southwest of Germany) , we wanted to take a stand against the machinations of the local construction lords and the one-sided reporting of the monopolist Saarbrücker Zeitung. The success remained modest—but nevertheless a circulation of 800 copies. At the meeting of alternative newspapers in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1977, those who later promoted the founding of the Taz (Die Tageszeitung) came together. They met again at the peace demonstration in Bonn’s Hofgarten in 1981. Six years later, they were joined by participants in the Olof Palme Peace March in the GDR. The central demand: a nuclear-free zone in Central Europe and a press oriented toward the interests of the people—demands that are still highly topical today.

The Provinzblatt Homburg has long since ceased to exist. But back then we were able to learn to stand when the wind was blowing against us. I have remained true to my ideas from back then: The power elites must face criticism; research is an oppositional concept. I offered a seminar on this at the CAU; something obviously stuck with some of the participants. The Taz is quite different: The paper has degenerated into a mouthpiece for the ecoliberal elites. Thus, Esther Geisslinger also joined in the campaign against me and called me a “Putin propagandist.” For more than 20 years I have been critically examining Putin’s Russia. These films are online. But Ms. Geisslinger apparently can’t even manage to use a search engine or listen in a courtroom. My lawyer forced the Taz to publish a counterstatement. The lying press—the students in Kiel are also mobilizing against this.

Journalist Thomas Moser did a reality check and wrote: “The treatment of NDR reporter Patrik Baab by universities and the media shows how deeply divided Germany is and how ruthless it is when militarized nationalism spreads.” Like the students from the Working Group, he speaks of an attack on the freedom of the press. He says, “This is a culture war. It has to be fought out now. It’s about preserving democracy. That’s why we need a new 1968, a new extra-parliamentary opposition.” But the mood among fellow students is divided. In Kiel, the campus radio and the student newspaper, Der Albrecht, are more on the identity politics trip. There, the right attitude apparently counts more than a researched reality check. Sociologist Oskar Negt had this to say about such attitudes: “Opportunism is the real mental disease of intellectuals.” A disease that is also widespread at Kiel University.

“A whole generation is missing,” I hear the peace movements of yesteryear, those who have long since turned gray, lament. But who educated this generation to conform? Who pushed through the Abitur after eight years? Who pushed for the restructuring of university courses? Who purged the content of critical questions and introduced multiple-choice exams in social studies? It was us—today’s 60-year-olds. Gustav Heinemann, the third German president, once said: “Those who point at others with their index finger are pointing at themselves with three fingers of their hand.” But is an entire generation really missing?

No. The oral court proceedings show the opposite. In front of the Administrative Court in Schleswig on April 25, flags and banners: “Free journalism deserves support.” A signpost at the CAU in Kiel—”Pluralism of opinion”—deleted. Twenty-five supporters in the hall, half students of Kiel University. “We rarely have that at the administrative court,” says the chairman of the chamber, Dr. Malte Sievers, “but here fundamental rights are also weighed against each other.” Meanwhile, in an editorial office I know, the internal word is, “We ignore that!” The entire misery of the self-proclaimed quality media is bundled in these three words. The press, which had already disgraced itself in tendentiously covering the demonstration by Sarah Wagenknecht, of the party “Die Linke,” and the publicist of the feminist magazine, Emma, Alice Schwarzer, for peace talks to stop the war in Ukraine, on February 25 in Berlin, continues to disgrace itself. The students from the Working Group are therefore also concerned with counter-publicity—against the manipulative of the established public spheres. This is reminiscent of the “Stop Springer” campaign in 1968 (a campaign against the Murdoch-like German media tycoon Axel Cäsar Springer and his press empire).. So, a touch of APO after all?

For that to happen, the few would first have to become the many. The ground is prepared for this: The sanctions against Russia and the accompanying inflation are impoverishing large parts of the population. Gradually, even many younger people are realizing that Germany could be drawn into a war in which there is much to lose but nothing to gain. The propaganda of the bellicose elites becomes all the more vehement. It is a “drastic reminder,” says Noam Chomsky, “that the arena of rational discourse collapses precisely where there should be hope that it will be defended.” That is, in academic circles.

Whether Kiel University has the strength to put its reputation as a “storm-trooper university” behind it this time—I have not yet formed a final judgment on that. But it is a signal that the students are taking the protest to the streets. Because—as in 1976 when the so-called anti-terror laws were introduced—it is about defending the republic—against an academic-media-political complex that wants to drive the country into a post-democratic elite-rule and new wars. The weapons of counter-Enlightenment are far from being blunted—not even at universities. That is why the Working Group for the Protection of Fundamental Rights is planning further actions. The fight goes on. For me, the support of “my” students is important. Thank you for that!