If we need a date when the West started to go seriously wrong, let’s start with Rome in the early 5th century
By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times
In 2020, we saw the enshrinement of techno-feudalism – one of the overarching themes of my latest book, Raging Twenties.
In lightning speed, the techno-feudalism virus is metastasizing into an even more lethal, wilderness of mirrors variant, where cancel culture is enforced by Big Tech all across the spectrum, science is routinely debased as fake news in social media, and the average citizen is discombobulated to the point of lobotomy.
Giorgio Agamben has defined it as a new totalitarianism.
Top political analyst Alastair Crooke has attempted a sharp breakdown of the broader configuration.
Geopolitically, the Hegemon would even resort to 5G war to maintain its primacy, while seeking moral legitimization via the woke revolution, duly exported to its Western satrapies.
The woke revolution is a culture war – in symbiosis with Big Tech and Big Business – that has smashed the real thing: class war. The atomized working classes, struggling to barely survive, have been left to wallow in anomie.
The great panacea, actually the ultimate “opportunity” offered by Covid-19, is the Great Reset advanced by Herr Schwab of Davos: essentially the replacement of a dwindling manufacturing base by automation, in tandem with a reset of the financial system.
The concomitant wishful thinking envisages a world economy that will “move closer to a cleaner capitalist model”. One of its features is a delightfully benign Council for Inclusive Capitalism in partnership with the Catholic Church.
As much as the pandemic – the “opportunity” for the Reset – was somewhat rehearsed by Event 201 in October 2019, additional strategies are already in place for the next steps, such as Cyber Polygon, which warns against the “key risks of digitalization”. Don’t miss their “technical exercise” on July 9th, when “participants will hone their practical skills in mitigating a targeted supply chain attack on a corporate ecosystem in real time.”
A New Concert of Powers?
Sovereignty is a lethal threat to the ongoing cultural revolution. That concerns the role of the European Union institutions – especially the European Commission – going no holds barred to dissolve the national interests of nation states. And that largely explains the weaponizing, in varying degrees, of Russophobia, Sinophobia and Iranophobia.
The anchoring essay in Raging Twenties analyzes the stakes in Eurasia exactly in terms of the Hegemon pitted against the Three Sovereigns – which are Russia, China and Iran.
It’s under this framework, for instance, that a massive, 270-plus page bill, the Strategic Competition Act , has been recently passed at the US Senate. That goes way beyond geopolitical competition, charting a road map to fight China across the full spectrum. It’s bound to become law, as Sinophobia is a bipartisan sport in D.C.
Hegemon oracles such as the perennial Henry Kissinger at least are taking a pause from their customary Divide and Rule shenanigans to warn that the escalation of “endless” competition may derail into hot war – especially considering AI and the latest generations of smart weapons.
On the incandescent US-Russia front, where Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sees the lack of mutual trust, no to mention respect, as much worse than during the Cold War, analyst Glenn Diesen notes how the Hegemon “strives to convert the security dependence of the Europeans into geoeconomic loyalty”.
That’s at the heart of a make-or-break saga: Nord Stream 2. The Hegemon uses every weapon – including cultural war, where convicted crook Navalny is a major pawn – to derail an energy deal that is essential for Germany’s industrial interests. Simultaneously, pressure increases against Europe buying Chinese technology.
Meanwhile, NATO – which lords over the EU – keeps being built up as a global Robocop, via the NATO 2030 project – even after turning Libya into a militia-ridden wasteland and having its collective behind humiliatingly spanked in Afghanistan.
For all the sound and fury of sanction hysteria and declinations of cultural war, the Hegemon establishment is not exactly blind to the West “losing not only its material dominance but also its ideological sway”.
So the Council on Foreign Relations – in a sort of Bismarckian hangover – is now proposing a New Concert of Powers to deal with “angry populism” and “illiberal temptations”, conducted of course by those malign actors such as “pugnacious Russia” who dare to “challenge the West’s authority”.
As much as this geopolitical proposal may be couched in benign rhetoric, the endgame remains the same: to “restore US leadership”, under US terms. Damn those “illiberals” Russia, China and Iran.
Crooke evokes exactly a Russian and a Chinese example to illustrate where the woke cultural revolution may lead to.
In the case of the Chinese cultural revolution, the end result was chaos, fomented by the Red Guards, which started to wreak their own particular havoc independent of the Communist Party leadership.
And then there’s Dostoevsky in The Possessed, which showed how the secular Russian liberals of the 1840s created the conditions for the emergence of the 1860s generation: ideological radicals bent on burning down the house.
No question: “revolutions” always eat their children. It usually starts with a ruling elite imposing their newfound Platonic Forms on others. Remember Robespierre. He formulated his politics in a very Platonic way – “the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, the reign of eternal justice” with laws “engraved in the hearts of all men”.
Well, when others disagreed with Robespierre’s vision of Virtue, we all know what happened: the Terror. Just like Plato, incidentally, recommended in Laws. So it’s fair to expect that the children of the woke revolution will eventually be eaten alive by their zeal.
Canceling freedom of speech
As it stands, it’s fair to argue when the “West” started to go seriously wrong – in a cancel culture sense. Allow me to offer the Cynic/Stoic point of view of a 21st century global nomad.
If we need a date, let’s start with Rome – the epitome of the West – in the early 5th century. Follow the money. That’s the time when income from properties owned by temples were transferred to the Catholic Church – thus boosting its economic power. By the end of the century, even gifts to temples were forbidden.
In parallel, a destruction overdrive was in progress – fueled by Christian iconoclasm, ranging from crosses carved in pagan statues to bathhouses converted into churches. Bathing naked? Quelle horreur!
The devastation was quite something. One of the very few survivors was the fabulous bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, in the Campidoglio/ Capitoline Hill (today it’s housed in the museum). The statue survived only because the pious mobs thought the emperor was Constantine.
The very urban fabric of Rome was destroyed: rituals, the sense of community, singin’ and dancin’. We should remember that people still lower their voices when entering a church.
For centuries we did not hear the voices of the dispossessed. A glaring exception is to be found in an early 6th century text by an Athenian philosopher, quoted by Ramsay MacMullen in Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eight Centuries.
The Greek philosopher wrote that Christians are “a race dissolved in every passion, destroyed by controlled self-indulgence, cringing and womanish in its thinking, close to cowardice, wallowing in all swinishness, debased, content with servitude in security.”
If that sounds like a proto-definition of 21st century Western cancel culture, that’s because it is.
Things were also pretty bad in Alexandria. A Christian mob killed and dismembered the alluring Hypatia, mathematician and philosopher. That de facto ended the era of great Greek mathematics. No wonder Gibbon turned the assassination of Hypatia into a remarkable set piece in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (“In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher”).
Under Justinian – emperor from 527 to 565 – cancel culture went after paganism no holds barred. One of his laws ended imperial toleration of all religions, which was in effect since Constantine in 313.
If you were a pagan, you’d better get ready for the death penalty. Pagan teachers – especially philosophers – were banned. They lost their parrhesia: their license to teach (here is Foucault’s brilliant analysis).
Parrhesia – loosely translated as “frank criticism” – is a tremendously serious issue: for no less than a thousand years, this was the definition of freedom of speech (italics mine).
There you go: first half of the 6th century. This was when freedom of speech was canceled in the West.
The last Egyptian temple – to Isis, in an island in southern Egypt – was shut down in 526. The legendary Plato’s Academy – with no less than 900 years of teaching in its curriculum – was shut down in Athens in 529.
Guess where the Greek philosophers chose to go into exile: Persia.
Those were the days – in the early 2nd century – when the greatest Stoic, Epictetus, a freed slave from Phrygia, admirer of both Socrates and Diogenes, was consulted by an emperor, Hadrian; and became the role model of another emperor, Marcus Aurelius.
History tells us that the Greek intellectual tradition simply did not fade away in the West. It was a target of cancel culture.
And without parrhesia, there is no basis for materialist dialectics in the public sphere.
Without materialist dialectics, there can be no genuine evolution, only vulgar metastasis.
You being a 21st century global nomad” who eschews all allegiance to a collective should know that the so-called West is certainly not unique in shutting down dissent and deviation from the norm. Certainly Russia and China have had their turn at cancel culture throughout history. If it wasn’t burning people at the stake, it was chopping off heads and tearing the poor dissident voice limb from limb.
The West is unique in that its initial imperialist impulse was based on chosenness, the idea that Europeans were destined by God to displace indigenous people all around the world, steal their land, and in the case of the former American Confederacy, own them. Manifest Destiny is white supremacy through and through. The European Ashkenazim are doing the very same thing in Palestine. If you don’t believe this is the case, just ask any Native American or any Palestinian.
The eugenics experiment never ended, it just went under ground, I know, what a pain in the neck.
If indeed it ever went underground, you can rest assured that the South will rise again, and again, and again… In the USA Manifest Destiny morphed into Christian Zionism. That’s why US evangelicals get along so well with the Likudniks in Palestine. They are all European white supremacists bent on domination and exploitation.
Isn’t it odd then that that the Kalergi plan undermines that wonderful relationship in Europe and elsewhere?
” in the case of the former American Confederacy, own them.”
It seems to be that an analysis of the interaction of “the West” with the rest of the world has to include and account for the role of slavery in “the rest of the world.” As with so much else, “the West” was able to take slavery to a new level and in a sense give it new meanings because of technological superiority (arms, navigation, etc.).
Is it purely a matter of scale and the magnitude or profits to be made by utilizing slaves in a capitalist system? I don’t pretend to know an answer.
But western imperialists certainly did not invent slavery, and in the end it was civilians in these countries that made the first meaningful moves to put an end to slavery.
IMHO, theories or grand statements about the depredations of the West on the rest, or analyses of western imperialism and slavery, have to account for these points.
Katherine
Catherine Austin Fitts is of the opinion that slavery is one of the all-time really big-profit generating rackets. So it was inevitable that the violently-usurping settler culture of the Europeans in the Americas was going to latch onto this very ancient example of an old, universally-seen racket (still with us today, of course, in mediaeval dictatorships like the tinpot oil$ fiefdoms opposite Iran on the Persian Gulf, and similar moral-midden ‘states’).
And far from us-all whiteys undergoing an evolution of moral decency, that idea – as usual – was simply the herd-steering, cannon-fodder-recruiting, feel-good-about-ourselves smokescreen rhetoric behind a growing cold-blooded realisation amongst Euro-American ruling ‘elites’ that new, technology-driven ways of doing economics – especially viciously genocidal and exploitative invasional imperial economics – was now available, to replace slavery. Britain and the US gain zero brownie points for the Abolition. “If was just business…”
Slavery in the West morphed into wage slavery. Capitalists eventually realized that owning slaves meant that you had to take care of them. Workers in sweat shops on the other hand could be paid starvation wages and when they eventually succumbed, there were always others in the slums of big cities to take their place. In the South, many of those “freed” slaves were worked to death as tenant farmers as they had no other options other than moving to the North. Poor whites were told they were at least better off than the poor blacks. Racism kept them in their place just as assuredly as it did people of color. And then there were the Native Americans…
Tommy: Regarding the abolition of slavery, yours is part of the story, but not the whole story.
Since capitallism presumably arose in Europe, why didn’t slavery arise in Europe?
All of these aspects of encounter have more than one thread, including that with Native Americans.
Recommended reading: Frederick Law Olmstead, The Cotton Kingdom; John Ehle, Trail of Tears.
Katherine
Regarding the locus of the use of slaves, it is one of history’s huge ironies—one that I have not seen discussed, but I probably just missed it—is that Germany with the Third Reich ended up a society reliant on slave labor.
The Germans are a culture of incredible industriousness, wherever they went. German practically worshipped the virtue of hard work, This is also evident in accounts of the antebellum South, where German farmers were the ones with productive, orderly farms, sans slaves.
Walter Ruttman’s film Berlin: Die Symfonie der Grossstadt also gives witness to the intense labor that built up that city and (re)made it into a world capital in the twenties, under the depredations of Versailles. You can also see basic public-health measures in place that go far to explain why the average German was far healthier than his or her English counterpart (as evidenced by witness accounts from WW2). I may be getting too far off-topic here so I’ll just restate that my point is this gross historical irony that Germany became a slave state for ca. 12 years. The film is extraordinary; you can view it at Kanopy.com.
The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen all over Europe at the same time, Katherine. It started first in what Saker calls the AngloZionist Empire, then in Central Europe, and last of all in Russia. Wage slavery was the new innovation that came into being with the rise of industrialism, first in what is now the UK and then in the USA. The rise of the Labor movement and eventually state socialism was the first response to it. Also, class warfare that is going on to this very day.
Hi, Tommy:
Those info points are not new to me!!
But thanks anyhow.
I don’t think they really address the questions I raised, though.
K
It is also noteworthy that one of the earliest banking and “venture capitalist” families in Germany, the Fuggers, also initiated a system of social welfare and housing for the needy. The Fuggerei can still be seen in Augsburg today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuggerei
Katherine
“But western imperialists certainly did not invent slavery, and in the end it was civilians in these countries that made the first meaningful moves to put an end to slavery.”
But, no, they weren’t. The british Slavery Abolition Act is from 1833. In the US the Confiscation Acts and the Emancipation Proclamation are from 1863 and the thirteenth ammendment is from 1865.
However, in Argentina, all people were born free since 1813. And slavery legally ended with the Constitution in 1853. Same in Chile, 1811 and 1823. Same pattern goes all over the Americas.
And Russia turned its slaves into rural serfs in 1679 and into household serfs in 1723.
“Sovereignty is a lethal threat to the ongoing cultural revolution. That concerns the role of the European Union institutions – especially the European Commission – going no holds barred to dissolve the national interests of nation states. And that largely explains the weaponizing, in varying degrees, of Russophobia, Sinophobia and Iranophobia”.
Ongoing cultural revolution ? That’s a pretty fancy phrase for imperial gangsterism where globalists – private banks and corporations – are trying to introduce their New World Order, a laughable phrase for world wide imperial tyranny and plundering, where little traitors like Guaido and Navalny are promoted in order to sell out their own countries.
Russia and China are standing in the way to this imperial tyranny, wanting to secure a multilateral international system, as apposed to the unilateral one promoted by Anglo-American bankers. Iran is giving a helping had, although it’s debatable if it could last out without Russia and China.
The 21st century is beginning to resemble the barbarism of the Dark Ages. Not only are attempts made at subverting and destroying the sovereign status of Russia and China – the two chief obstacles to globalism – but we are witnesses to the destruction of European sovereign states, compliments of the EU, which was created for that very purpose. One of the chief tools for that destruction is wide scale immigration from third world countries, where multiculturalism is promoted. The globalists who promote this know perfectly well that it cannot work, which is the reason why it is done. The masses who pour into Europe have no intention of assimilating, but demand that native populations assimilate to their ways. In other words we are dealing with invading armies armed with fake passports instead of guns. These subversive policies are backed by “political correctness”, ie. tyranny. A few days ago French generals and lower ranks warned – in an open letter – that France is facing civil war and disintegration due to immigration. It is highly unlikely that a civil war in France can be averted.
About eight years ago a Polish website warned that if Europe does not reverse it’s immigration policies, then the whole native population of Europe will end up in Russia. I think the website was referring to the population of Western Europe. What the website stated might sound bombastic and melodramatic, but it is not impossible. For years I have been following the interest of West Europeans of moving into Russia.
Finally, one has to ask the question if the globalists will succeed in their Agenda. No, I think they will fail, as they have bitten more than they can chew. As the old army rule goes, “he who tries to defend everything ends up defending nothing”. In the case of the globalists one can say ” he who wants to invade and plunder everything ends up invading and plundering nothing”. However, before they are defeated, the globalists will have caused immense damage. We shall have to wait and see how much damage they caused.
I pretty much agree with what these comments are all saying. What I am seeking is some definition of what “woke culture” and “cancel culture” actually are. They appear to be a combination of mass feeling and manipulative control of that feeling on the part of a partial agency, who seeks to use and control that feeling for the interest of a specific group.
Is it not fair to say that woke culture and cancel culture are manifestations of distorted and manipulated mass feelings? This seems to be a defining element for me. So I am left with thinking about a time old tradition of the western patriarchal ruling class. A tradition that the Romans built up and has been in operation ever since.
That being; be aware of the religious fervor of the masses. Take the aristocratic initiative to define and control the understanding of that mass energy in a manner that strengthens aristocratic control. Take possession of the religions of the people. “Control what the words mean Alice.” So that the religions become instruments of class rule. It worked wonderfully for the Romans. So I am asking folks here is it accurate in your opinion to think of the forces behind the specific distortions we can find in these woke and cancel “cultures” to be revealing once again that same old aristocratic game of making sure we define and control the religions of the peons who can’t read. Divide and control in the mass mind. Build the Death Star by ripping off real living energy in the masses and mentally twisting into an instrument of class domination. Am I missing anything here? I sure don’t feel like a “wokist”!
And the debtor didn’t feel tardy, until the banker went bust.
It is just neo Marxism. The globalists took over education and have been teaching it in all the schools for the last 20 years.
Dark Ages is a better way to think about it than feudalism.
Whatever new world we are into, to call it “feudal” is an abuse of language. It’s one of those terms that lacks a clearcut definition, much like fascism. And like fascism, it is a term that people throw around thoughtlessly.
Feudalism featured reciprocal obligations, from lower to higher and higher to lower. All were seen as part of an organic whole.
The oligarchy now ruling the United States feels no sense of obligation towards real Americans, and in fact see them as an enemy to be subjected, defeated and erased from history.
Good point. However, I think the evolving situation will create communities based on feudal-style relations even if the bosses continue with their selfish ways. When things become very uncertain and trust is in short supply then new networks will emerge and new hierarchies will be established. Today’s oligarchs will have to change their ways because the world they are moving us towards is too devoid of life to be sustainable.
The pushback has started. These radical left-wing lunatics are not going to complete their takeover. The vast majority of people are opposed to all of this hateful ideology. Unfortunately most people don’t pay attention to politics until it starts to hit them, and it is hitting them now. Sadly, it turned out that fear of disease was an incredibly successful weapon against freedom, but even there people are waking up to the ocean of lives they have been fed.
Apologies, but I’m confused on one point, here. Most of the cancel culture crowds are capitalist in their thinking, are they not?
Yes Yowzah; That is my whole point – cancel culture is a deliberate distortion of the Left and the feelings that drive it. The distortion is engineered to make the impulses of the Left serve the agenda of the capitalists. Hence the twists and distortions that characterize it. So the observer can get really confused about what he or she is confronting. That’s the point. If you can’t rule by convincing them, then rule by confusing them and turning them against themselves. Harvard and the New York Times figure prominently and set the media agenda.
” Harvard and the New York Times figure prominently and set the media agenda.”
You are so right. I am in a position to see more of this than the general public grasps.
How entities like the Gates Foundation gain a foothold and create a beach head for themselves from which to set agendas, create and disseminate propaganda, and influence the young. All the while, sidelining true cutting-edge scholarship in favor of “woke” social agendas such as “inclusion.” There will be no critical scholarly inquiries into “inclusion.”
So a university such as Harvard is gradually infiltrated and brought to heal. Of course big money/”philanthropy” plays a significant role in this.
Katherine
Right on. Thanks.
Thank you Pepe, for this keen, aware article, and thanks also to our host, for bringing it to me.
I think the analysis and comparison as are exact as is possible across the globally altered epistomology between the 5th century “west” and the current imperial hegmon, which drapes itself in the flag of the “west” (or shall we say, “western tradition”).
So, in summary, we are bearing witness to the imposition of a new religion, which (co-incidentally?!), includes the same magnitude of censorship, and (what now is described as) cancel culture.
We see independent though, and even, if I may be so bold, rational thinking, effectively outlawed.
The difference is that in past historical comparisons, the capability to destroy the biosphere did not exist for cultures doomed to self-imposed collapse, as the collective “west” is now enacting.
In the past, we would expect the more functional cultural/civilizational models, i.e. the sovereign axis of resistance, (RUS, CHIN, IRA) to continue to improve the livelihood and quality of life, with an ability to resist the lurching death throws of Rome (both east and west, in their own ways and timelines), and eventually, come in, suppress the ongoing barbarity by presenting superior cultural norms, which may take root, and displace the decrepit, insane elite-controlled cultural/ideology.
One with such a perspective, can only applaud the very survival of Iran, under the ongoing warfare (informational 75%, economic 20%, kinetic 5% – by way of proxies and stand-off munitions) auspices of the empire.
Unfortunately, even RUS and CHIN will not be immune to the capability to destroy most life on the planet, controlled by an ideology (decrepit, insane elite-controlled cultural), which overtly propounds a scorched earth policy as the only alternative to complete control.
Defeating this scourge is a new challenge, never before encountered by humanity.
For this reason, it is important, if not critical for the survival of humanity, to identify the roots, history and contemporary drivers of the ideology, which has usurped a western tradition which in all fairness, did advance the culture and understanding of humanity to new levels (of course, not without negative externalities).
In this, I think the example comparison to Rome is germane.
Though the details of this topic has already been censured by the controllers of the ideology, sooner or later, to truly address this, the greatest existential threat ever faced by humanity, the facts will have to be un-memory-holed and disseminated!
Of course, time is running, and as it is running, as I write, the infrastructures enabled by the silicon-based information management technology, on the communications platform of the world wide web, and implanted into most human individuals via personal information devices (smartphones), and lastly, monitored and controlled by, even currently existing, Artificial Intelligence will make it virtually impossible to evade the censorship and outright perception (and thus behaviour) management, which will inevitably be controlled by the same decrepit, insane elite-controlled cultural/ideology.
This will be such an advancement in harnessing and focusing human effort that it is doubtful that the axis of sovereign nations will have any choice by to also adapt.
We are at a new cross roads for humanity, and this situation will be at least partially mitigated within 5 years, or never…
Call for action
1. Development of lexicon and/or framework to open the the discussion of the root cause of the current (insane, i.e. foreseeably leading to a high probability of planetary annihilation, thus… suicide) dysfunctional, by undermining the existing control system which is in place, and functioning well, inhibiting discussion of the root causes, i.e. the dysfunctional, and increasingly dominant control ideology.
2. Full discussion.
3. Development of risk mitigation approaches
4. Implementation of risk mitigation program to excise the root cause(s)
addendum: there is an interesting article that seems to complement this one at UNZ: https://www.unz.com/article/review-of-david-skrbinas-the-jesus-hoax-how-st-pauls-cabal-fooled-the-world-for-two-thousand-years/
“We are at a new cross roads for humanity.” Yes. But who is there to heed this call to action – or any other?
As Katherine reminds us, all the institutions have been over-run by the “woke,” who are determined to cancel all other voices.
The US and the West as a whole are doomed: the cancel forces are now too powerful to resist, and hardly anyone seems to even try to resist. So your call to action is just a lone voice that no one will heed.
So it will all go the way Pepe describes about your ancestors.
Allowing a critical mass of psychopaths to control us is the root cause.
Due to their mentsl defects, they cannot care about others even if they wanted to. Its like putting a fox in charge of a hen house.
Plus we have a whole Psychopath Support Group masqureded as a religon controlling and owning JUSSA politicians, banks, media etc….combined with easy and chesp to brobe Anglozio sheeple….
“One of his laws ended imperial toleration of all religions…”
Cancel culture has nothing to do with the law or imperial edicts.
It is a societal phenomenon where one group of individuals (tech & social media CEOs, university profs) abuse their position to censor dissenting opinions.
It’s the ultimate ad hominem: When you are not able to attack the argument, you “cancel” the person.
This looks to me like a perfect example of cancel culture:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/19/co-author-anti-lockdowns-letter-appeared-far-right-radio-show-martin-kulldorff-great-barrington-declaration-richie-allen-show
The article does not explore the views of Professor Kulldorff , a professor of medicine at Harvard Med school**, concerning the costs and benefits of lockdown, but spends column inches on a guilt-by-association takedown of Kulldorff. After all this the article gives a prof at Kent University the last word, and it is not a very scientific one at that.
[**Martin Kulldorff
@MartinKulldorff
Professor Harvard Medical School. Disease surveillance methods. Infectious disease outbreaks. Vaccine safety. Free SaTScan, TreeScan and RSequential software.]]
Then just a few days ago Kulldorff was removed from a CDC advisory committee because he disagreed with the conclusions of the committee. He was invited on Fox and Friends, where he discussed his reasoning.
I think this trashing of Kulldorff, a major international-level expert, because he disagrees with the official narrative on the disease is one example of cancel culture in action. Just get rid of the people you disagree with, whether it concerns medicine, politics, gender issues, whatever, and deny them a platform.
Then when they are invited to speak on a platform that the wokesters consider right-wing, that becomes the focus of the attack. It is noteworthy that way back in March 2020, when the SARS-CoV-2 topic was quite new and very confusing, Joe Rogan invited Dr. Michael Osterholm, the head of CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the U of Minn, the top-class location in the USA for this area of study), on his show for a long interview, which gave Osterholm an opportunity to explain a lot about viruses to the general public. Rogan thanked him for coming on the show, to which Osterholm said, “You are the only one who has asked me for an interview! I have been waiting for someone to call!”
Open debate and examination of evidence are too time-consuming and old-fashioned.
And require critical thinking from debaters and listeners alike. Canceling is much easier.
Katherine
Although it may appear to be the case that the oligarchic psychopaths talking about conducting a “Great Reset” are the cause of all the world’s troubles, this is in fact not the case. Something far more basic, fundamental, SYSTEMIC and, most importantly, as Mr. Escobar states, but in reality is even more ANCIENT, is the cause of all the world’s troubles.
My wife and I recently watched the sci-fi movie “Passengers”. At its beginning, a gigantic spacecraft, moving along smoothly and silently through space, runs into a cloud of rocks that just happen to be in the path of the fast-moving craft. One of the rocks is massive enough to penetrate the craft’s invisible shield and strike some unknown part of the craft. The spacecraft’s “passengers” and crew have all been placed in a state of hibernation or suspended animation since even before they were placed on the craft, so none of them realize what’s happened. The AI control system of the craft attempts to make corrections to compensate for what in the future will turn out to be a mission-fatal strike by the rock. But small, seemingly insignificant, failures begin to occur in the various systems that the AI system controls long before “the big one” will occur.
One of those initial failures causes the early awakening of one of the craft’s 5,000 passengers. He soon realizes that he is the only passenger that is awake and, not only that, that he has been awakened ninety-something years before the craft will reach its destination. To put it bluntly, the probably-early-thirties passenger is going to die many years before the craft reaches its destination.
Two other passengers wake up – one, intentionally, by the lonely wokee, and the other by another AI mistake – the latter being, luckily, one of the ship’s crew who is very knowledgeable of just about all technical matters concerning the craft. The latter also soon determines that the AI system is failing and will continue to fail, massively, to correct something that cannot be corrected, until the craft self-destructs.
Working and searching effectively through all the crafts complicated systems, together, the only three woke people among the 5,000 un-woke people discover the deep-down fundamental flaw – the penetration by the rock of the craft’s propulsion-control hardware – again, a flaw that would cause the inevitable failure of the mission and the deaths of all the passengers.
IMO, “Passengers” is an allegory of the human race’s journey through space on the spacecraft-earth that created us. We must all, not just a few of us, “wake up” and discover the REAL, fundamental, flaw in our NOT-artificial intelligence system, or we will suffer the same fate as those passengers in that movie. The great thing is that in the case of our very real journey, the fundamental flaw is, once again, basic, fundamental, SYSTEMIC and, most importantly, ANCIENT to the dawn of mankind and it is not any problem with any of earth’s environmental or other systems. Human beings created the fatal flaw long ago. Human beings must correct that fatal flaw today. Fortunately, the fatal flaw can be quite easily determined by logical analysis – which is something human beings have proven themselves to be quite adept at (I’m typing on that proof right now).
Can we correct the eons-old flaw that is causing the rapidly deteriorating conditions of our lives TODAY? “Things” are getting so deteriorated that we now even have great difficulty agreeing upon the meanings of words – a problem that can not be overemphasized. Band-aid solutions/repairs are “working” for shorter and shorter periods of time.
Because we have to start our search for the “rock-strike” on spaceship earth somewhere, let’s start by answering a question. Just exactly HOW do population, wars and financial crises “relate” to each other?
Population size by itself is important, but it is the economic and political ramifications that accompany, or even force, an increase in population that are even more important. For just one real example, what the Bank of Japan and Japanese government are both doing, hand in hand, is the one and only possible response that a formerly growing, growth-requiring, capitalist system can have to a national economy that has a stable, let alone shrinking, population.
(During our diagnostic journey, let’s keep fully in mind that the Japanese government did not issue a diktat or pass a law that the Japanese population must get smaller. There is a “systemic” reason why it did, and that very same reason is why the same is happening in various capitalist nations around the world.)
To put Japan’s untenable situation very simply, just as it is impossible to contain liquid hydrogen in an un-vented steel tank at room temperature without that tank eventually exploding as a result of the “natural” physical properties of hydrogen and steel at room temperature, I say that the constrained internal “pressure” of the present Japanese capitalist system will likewise “naturally” increase until the Japanese people are literally forced to either have more babies, or, more importantly, import more people, thereby increasing the population and causing “economic growth” which is, right or wrong, the present fatally-flawed criteria of judging the success or failure of an economy.
The explosion must inevitably occur or the fundamentals that form the “foundation” of the present economic system must be replaced! (Unfortunately, those people or corporations that benefit from, or, more importantly, are invested in, the present “system” will do, as Mario Draghi has put it, “whatever it takes” in their financial and political power to keep the system exactly as it is in order to prevent or infinitely delay the realization of losses on investments– the economic equivalent of the hydrogen tank exploding, and that includes rigging elections and passing laws that allow the 24/7 propagandization of a citizenry.) Let me explain why those are the only two possibilities without any reference to “money”.
The life-expectancy of each generation determines or restricts the total number of generations that can be alive at any moment. If a 2-child-per-couple rule is followed/enforced, a stable population will be reached (assuming no early deaths) in a relatively few decades.
However, I can not over-emphasize enough that all of the “stuff” produced by the individual members of each generation — the homes and contents, the tools, capital equipment, technology and, in particular, the labor-saving devices– do not die with their creators! All of these things are passed on to (inherited by) the next generations.
This means that if the “inheritances” passed on from the dead generations are “built to last a thousand years”, the succeeding generations do not have to produce any of these vital things for themselves. (I’m going to ignore all forms of money, including gold, fiat, credit, IOUs, etc. as inheritances.)
Therefore, the succeeding generations can do something else rather than spend their lives re-creating all that stuff. They’ve got spare time on their hands. And this leads us directly to the ultimate question for all of humanity, at any moment in time, including today. What will that “something else” be? In other words, just exactly HOW are all these inheritances — these investments for the future; these opportunities; this inherited capital equipment; this land — going to be used (to be “cashed in” or further invested) by their living beneficiaries IN THE PRESENT ECONOMY?
Over many thousands of years there has always been living among the populace (on spacecraft-earth) a very small number of very powerful, vastly-wealthy people (up in the control room) who have, in one way or another, inherited, and therefore owned, a large percentage of all the stuff, including the land, and, “naturally”, those few people wanted to have a “return” on their inheritances (investments). “Naturally”, they did not “invest” the stuff that they had inherited in anything that they did not believe would end up INCREASING the value (the size) of their inheritances/investments. Stated differently, they did not allow anyone to benefit from (to use) their stuff/inheritance/investment unless that anyone gave back to them (the owners of the inheritances) something of GREATER size (value). The difference in size (value) between what was used and what was returned eventually came to be called profit or interest.
The vast majority of the people of past and present generations were (are) born with very little or no inheritance/investments. That is, very little has been bequeathed to them by their similarly-poor ancestors.
And, therefore, with all of the aforementioned fully in mind, all we now have to do is study history to observe the result (humanity’s previous “answers” to the aforementioned ultimate question) of an ancient system in which, over the centuries, a microscopic percentage of the population has owned and controlled the vast amount of stuff (including capital equipment, labor-saving equipment, natural resources, etc., for their own astronomical profit), upon which the vast majority of the population vitally depends for its day to day existence.
As of today, human beings’ “answer” has been to create over 7 billion people (many of whom have been, and still are, essentially, slaves); more and more stuff; more and more war; and to suffer all of the increasingly-horrible consequences of those “answers”. In short, even though those answers may not, and probably were not, the results that were consciously intended or expected by the beneficiaries of inheritances over the ages, they were, under such a system, literally the only ones possible!
And, therefore, absolutely ALL of the economic/financial/monetary/political acrobatics and juggling and churning and outright lying and regime-changing and vote-rigging that are being performed by the governments and central banks of the world at the present time are the one and the only way to prolong a fatally-flawed economic system that has in the past proven beyond any shadow of doubt that it required, and still requires, both a wildly-expanding population AND gigantic, vastly destructive, real wars — both of which, by “whatever it takes”, providing the inheritances from perhaps-long-dead generations to their present beneficiaries, the “profit” that their beneficiaries demanded through the generations, and continue to demand now, or else.
Speaking of “or else”, the above is the reason for the “whatever it takes” future-taxpayer bailouts of the worldwide TBTF banks a few short years ago. Elite VIPs Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner etc. were absolutely correct when they said that the financial system (again, of a very few people owning the vast majority of wealth) would have “failed” had those VIPs not done what they did. However, doing what was done has steered the present whatever-you-want-to-call-it “system” into what is essentially a laboratory experiment in the nature of economics. At the very least, one would have to say that what the transnational Elite’s central-bank slaves have be doing since the financial crisis a few short years ago is “flying by the seat of their pants”. Or, as Lord Jacob Rothschild put it a few years ago:
“The six months under review have seen central bankers continuing what is surely the greatest experiment in monetary policy in the history of the world.”
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160819/1044443930/rothschild-gold-dollar.html
Unfortunately, to ensure humanity’s long-term survival (to continue its journey through space) the “failure” of that fatally flawed system is precisely what MUST happen and the sooner the better, because the drums of irresistibly-profitable, capitalist-system-prolonging, human-race-eradicating wars are being beaten harder and harder as I type. The “pressure” of impending loss is rising. WHO is going to take that unavoidable, inevitable loss? THIS is what wars have been, and will continue to be, fought over. Ultimately, this is what “Ukraine” is all about!
Unfortunately, all 7+ billion passengers on spacecraft earth are fully awake (at least their bodies are). Two or three individuals or 2 or 3 thousand individuals who know exactly what’s wrong with “the system” have to somehow convince the rest of the passengers not only that the fatal flaw in the human-created system (a BEHAVIORAL system) must be corrected, and that very soon, but they must also imagine in great detail a non-fatally flawed behavioral system to replace it. The former can/must not happen until the latter has been designed. THAT is the challenge for those who understand the true seriousness of the seemingly insignificant rock-strike that took place in human brains literally thousands of years ago……….. on a spacecraft that used to have very few human “Passengers”.
Very soon the number of corrections (the amount of “money” and exactly how it should be used being just one of literally millions of ultimately-futile adjustments and corrections) required to keep the present system going will exceed the capacity of human or artificial intelligence to make. (Neither human nor Artificial Inelligence will be able to get blood out of a stone.) This will be the point at which, as Georgi Derluguian told Oksana Boyko, one of the 5-D chess players picks up a brick and smashes the other players in their heads.
Here’s the biggest problem of them all. In the late 1990s my wife and I used to know a then-70-year-old man in Florida who was a heavy smoker. After the three of us finished eating a meal of fried chicken and banana-cream pie in our favorite restaurant, he told us that about a year before we met he was diagnosed as having lung cancer and his doctors told him that it was unlikely that he would survive for long. But a miracle happened. He was operated on, got radiation therapy and after that treatment he was told that his cancer (his fatal flaw) had been completely cured (repaired). While he was telling his amazing story, he lit up a cigarette and started puffing away and (unlike Bill “Mr. Cigar” Clinton) inhaled deeply. Of course we asked him how he could possibly be doing that after his brush with death and miraculous cure. “My life isn’t worth living without smoking”, he replied. And he was a man who had very little money and absolutely NO political power.
Brilliant!
Excellent summation and explanation, Ishka.
An interesting attribute of Cultural Revolutions is they generate from the reigning power vector.
This magnifies the cult behind the power structure. With the power and authority of the governing elite, the “revolution” is really a crazed destruction of the existing culture and historic social structure.
We see this in distant and the near past and in the present.
They tend to use “transformation” as their key word, not “destruction”.
But it is pure destruction, thus, the “cancel” descriptor in the action phrase.
Always, this nihilism flows from the cult’s ideology. A few dogmas exist in their minds and they destroy all and any who challenge those dogmas. They cannot abide competitive ideas or continue honoring the achievements of the past.
What are the dogmas of today’s woke pathology?
Climate Change is the eucharist of their ideology.
White Supremacy, Systemic Racism, 1619 revisionist history, Open Borders, Gender Choice, Sex With Children are some of their “fundamental” dogmas.
On Rome Armstrong has an interesting historical piece which fits the above article. I mean just this one paragraph surely explains the present age does it not?
Perhaps the greatest of all fake news reporters was none other than Cicero (104-43 BC). He was an Optimat (Oligarch) and thus was against Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) who was a member of the Populares (for the People) rather than the Oligarchs. The leader of the Optimates was none other than Cato. It was Plutarch who reported that when a friend of Cicero remarked that the constellation of Lybra was due to rise the next day, Cicero snapped – “Yes, by edict.”
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/press/the-real-danger-of-bigtech-censorship/
The rest is an amazing read and I will not soon forget this one paragraph about propaganda:
“But the one thing victims were never able to do was to counter and inform the public on a scale equal to their oppressors.”
Wow, how true, how so very true!!!
As for the Christians and the current Vatican how can they be so ignorant of what the Bible actually teaches is a perplexing conundrum. Just take for example all this nonsense about climate change? If the Vatican thinks they are going to effect any kind of change globally with “Inclusive Capitalism’ they are sadly misinformed. Climate change is about sin and Divine Communication not industrial pollution?
In any case Rome was actually won by the blood of martyrs and then what a 5 centuries later we went from being the persecuted to being the persecutors? Wasn’t Tertullian the one who tried to stop the persecution of Christians by arguing with the authorities ‘why do you persecute us, we are the best citizens?’ If he had been around in the 5th Century I doubt very much he would have stood for what was described above. But it was all written anyway:
“Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.
For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock.
Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them.
Therefore watch, and remember, that by the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears.” Acts 20:28-32
How does that saying go? Power corrupts and power corrupts absolutely.
I would also say that Milvian Bridge was a hoax perpetuated for an emperors power. As if God would have allowed such a thing for the purpose of war to unite an empire? AS IF?
Just a further point to on this “Inclusive Capitalism” and Catholicism. Scripture makes it clear that for the Church no matter the denomination the concern economically is always first and foremost the care of widows and orphans:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” James 1:27
Likewise in the Old Testament God made it clear to the new nation of Israel to never allow the cry of the widows and orphans to reach His ears. Nothing is worse in life than to end up as such.
As for keeping oneself from being polluted by the world and what that means ultimately is simple really. In another portion of scripture it runs like this:
Lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh and the pride of life. 1 John 2:16
If one lives keeping oneself outside of this one has fulfilled the law and the prophets.
Now why does it take a Pope or a Calvin or Luther or a Chrysostom to tell us different or more?
And have to wonder don’t you if Inclusive Capitalism is being polluted by the world?
Good piece Pepe!
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius
The new thing that I recently heard about was if you had indoor plumbing, like sewer, you just moved up to middle class.
I actually thought the bar was higher than that in the past.
@ Alabama
Nope!!! There was some time ago some documentaries on how ancient cities dealt with their sewage problems. I watched the one on Rome and shocking doesn’t even begin to describe the outdoor toilets etc that went on. How they survived to become an empire is beyond me. I thought to myself wow even apes in jungles have better sanitary ways?
Watching the docu also reminded me so much of the sanitary laws of God from the Old Testament.
Thank you Pepe. You are a wise man.
The recent term “cancel culture” is basically shunning; we’re told it’s mostly done by “wokesters” but everyone gets beat up throughout their life— rejected, fired, demoted, betrayed, cancelled. Still hurts but it’s not new. “Woke” is a process of ranking: who’s smarter than me, who is below me… class rank in school, popularity ranking with prom courts, number of dates, invitations etc. The U.S. Democrat wing of the Empire has totally embraced a ranking system and is currently packaging it in the “woke” brand. Being smart– as they define it– matters. Class ranking, SAT scores, college rankings, resume building (and padding), fake multiculturalism, multilingualism, LBGT, smartphone apps that tell you how healthy you are. Tom Friedman “outs” their worldview. so does Krugman, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and on and on. They are the “cool kids”. And they have a big microphone. They are also facilitating the collapse of the U.S. empire.
Excellent piece! With vaccine passports I’ve been hearing much comparison to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. The 5th century Roman analogy is even better.
I’ve been amazed by how many fundamentalist Christians have fallen into line with the pro-lockdown agenda. Is it that easy for them to switch from being biblical literalists and believing in the absolute authority of the word of God to believing in the absolute authority of the state? Considering that Constantine and Justinian were the state, our modern Christians are keeping with their tradition and gravitating to power.
I’ve shocked Christian friends in the past by pointing out the religious tolerance that existed in the Roman Empire and was ended by Christian monotheism. I’m not meaning to blame Christians for the 21st century intolerance that is here. Many will certainly be part of it, however it’s not being driven by Christianity.
It is being driven by the Cancel Culture movement. Throughout my lifetime the Looney Left has won every battle in the culture war. Yet they are never satisfied. No surprise that Trannie washrooms would not give them the “bang for their buck”. Covid certainly has. The Woke Revolution’s latest and most ambitious offensive. Considering that getting everything they want is never enough, the intolerance they will be capable of could be beyond our imagination. Vaccine passports are not the end game, they are only the beginning!
The scary thing about all this is how many non-Woke people are not just on board but have turned Covid into a religious belief. The gene altering vaccines so many are rushing to get is their Holy Communion – with accompanying virtual signaling as these are 21st century westerners. Plus they have the absolute belief system of religious zealots. Anything government or medical “experts” say goes. Common sense and facts are blanked out of their new life view. As for the heretics who dare to not conform, they are worse than diseased individuals. They are non-believers! They shall share the fate of 5th century pagans and be abolished from society.
To end on a happy note, sort of. I think the best the Elites and Wokes will manage is a pyrrhic victory. Social and economic collapse means time is against them. There must be a massive explosion at some point. They are igniting fires throughout society with reckless abandon. We still all lose in the end. We have already lost our wonderful free society, thanks to people who were too afraid to know better and, instead, have acted like ignorant fools. Unfortunately the past 13 months have shown me how self righteous people can be. The legacy of Wokism or the legacy of religion?
Cyril the Bishop of Alexandria, in an act of Christian compassion, ordered Hypatia’s death, she was essentially skinned alive by a mob. Her teachings were becoming too popular. This wonderful man was declared a doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIII in 1882. His feast day is June 27th.
“Guess where the Greek philosophers chose to go into exile: Persia.”
And Syria. Aristotelians set up a new school there, and Aristotle was translated into Syriac. That is how a re-naissant Western Church got to re-learn Aristotle hundreds of years later.
Interesting take on woke madness.
But the Roman analogy is applicable, at best, to only half of our present predicament : the cultural madness that hides a financial and economic bankruptcy. In other words erasing the memory of all societally shared foundational narratives (religions, political ideologies, …) allows to get people so worked up that they forget about the empire’s bankruptcy and what all this implies for their daily lives…
But our present Western Late-Modernity radically bifurcates from Rome in the following ways :
— Rome had instituted Christianity as the new foundational narrative of the state, and the Roman woke madness helped Christianity to spread more rapidly in the minds of all Western Europeans. Late-Modernity has destroyed all foundational narratives and no new narrative is in sight that all would want to share !
— The role of worldviews is capital :
Whatever we might be thinking about religions the fact is that :
== sharing the narrative of Christianity is what carried Western Europe forward during the following 700 – 800 dark years
== tricking the populations to start an internal dialogue with god opened the mind of all to the notion of the “self” which instilled the roots of individualism in the minds of all. And at the first opportunity (crusades + luxury goods) individualism fostered the conversion of the minds to “the reason that is at work within capital”. And thus started Modernity…
The present situation in the West is rather different.
Thanks to Postmodernism all foundational narratives have been erased from the minds (Christianity, Marxism, etc…). This helped to spread Neoliberalism to the whole world but this came at a cost : people have been left on their own to answer their existential questions. This resulted in an epidemic of anxiety that fostered feelings of loneliness. People try to escape their loneliness on the web but their minds and bodies are aching ever more and there is no hope of a cure in sight.
In Western Late-Modernity there is no longer any foundational narrative to share and people are left to fend for themselves which leads to societal atomization (everyone starts to think that she or he knows better than everyone else) and a cacophony on the market for ideas that boosts distrust among all. Result : societal cohesion melts away and people are left with the feeling that there is no hope any longer.
— The second difference today with Roman times goes something like this :
== their world was a collection of closed regional worlds that were not in competition. So when Rome collapsed all its parts went their own way and the struggle of Western Europe eventually concluded in Modernity
== our present world is open and regions – nations are in a global competition. The atomized West with no hope in sight is crawling in pessimism and fear. In contrast people in China share a common worldview (Chinese Traditional Culture or animism+ as I prefer to call it) and a flourishing economy that instills in their minds an optimistic vision of the future. What does that bode for the future ?
Conclusion :
— Western Late-Modernity is on its death bed, pessimism reigns in the minds, and Western people are feeling lonely, hopeless, and angry.
— The Chinese nation is converting all the gains of their recent entry in Modernity into the continuity of their worldview and of their nation.
Chinese animism+ = Chinese Traditional Governance, Chinese Traditional Medicine, Chinese Traditional Culture, Chinese Traditional Architecture, Chinese Traditional Arts, Chinese traditional Martial Arts, Chinese Traditional Fashion, and so on…
— Seeing China sprinting forward Westerners start to feel left behind and they grow fearful of the future. The dualism at the root of the Western cultural field is forcing them to project the reason of their misery on a Chinese scapegoat.
— Scapegoating China is not going to procure Westerners any better feelings. If the West wants a livable future its citizens better start to research what is this Chinese animism+ that makes the Chinese feel so optimistic about their future. The fact is that our individual bodies grew into mental creatures that need to share a common meaning about what reality is all about in order to live harmoniously together. In the present Western void of meaning Chinese animism+ offers the perspective of some hope to those who are ready to dig …
Great post.
Although somehow I think there must be some version of animism that is inherent to the West. I can’t see Westerners, or Americans, getting much out of Chinese animism. Admittedly I don’t know anything about it, but how can one begin to understand such ideas if one doesn’t deeply understand the language and the history? You can’t just go into an idea restaurant and order up a helping of animism.
I will take a guess that the closest the West might have to animism is love of and identification with nature and all of creation. Unfortunately this realm has also been politicized. But that doesn’t mean that we have to go along with this and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Katherine
The ‘fatherland’ or the ‘motherland’ are expressions that define a state or country. The reason that was so for centuries was that infants were born in families with a father and mother and into a village of families and the villages were part of a larger family that eventually made a country. Great leaders, kings and queens were seen as not ‘heads of state’ more so heads of an extended family. Putin seems to fit this bill for the Russian family whereas China regards the family as the basic unit.
Indivduals are not born without mothers and fathers yet that is the way the culture of the west wants them to identify and where in the final reality they will achieve a geoeconomic loyalty that overrules loyalty to the family.
I recently examined the coal miners strike in the UK in the late 1970 – 80s in which communities based on family values held an extended and sometimes violent strike for a living wage. Amoung them were some who would fit today’s definition of individuals with a common ‘geoeconomic loyalty’.
In those days they were well known as ‘scabs’.
John – I think this needs a little clarification. I believe the strikebreakers who continued to work (refused to strike) or the non-union strikebreakers who were brought in to replace the striking union workers were referred to as scabs, per the following definition: Scab. A pejorative term used colloquially in reference to a nonunion worker who takes the place of a union employee on strike or who works for wages and other conditions that are inferior to those guaranteed to a union member by virtue of the union contract.. See https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/scabs
Many thanks Littlejohn for the clarification. I certainly defines to an even greater extent their ‘geoeconomic loyalty’ and individualism was to anything but the families of the strikers.
Excellent as usual.
The roots of cancel culture are being exposed by corrosion of the very soil that covered them.
For those who wish to dig in deeper into the cancellation of Hypatia will find this interview with John Lamb Lash elucidating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuMKOOZt2wk
Thoughtful and substancial commentaries to which I have nothing much to add. Except that – perhaps inadvertently, in love with his own cleverness – Pepe Escobar is furthering one of the “attack” lines of the Empire.
In France it’s called “laïcité”; it’s joined by its sibling of fight against “séparatisme”. Thou shall not have any God except the State, and no prophet beside Corrupt Science.
Whatever the facts of the fall of Roman Empire, one should not forget that the acts of Jesus were real parrhesia – these acts revealed the powers of the prince of this world. It revealed those who govern by scandalizing people and rob them of their peace and trust in God.
We may also remember that He refused to outcast the sick, he went to them and let them walk.
It is surprising that in so many intelligent comments, no one mentioned that conventional oil peaked in 2005. The increase in oil production since then has been in the uneconomic shale sector. Now, the shale sector, which was never profitable, is finally having difficulties raising more cash – cash to burn.
Those behind the NWO are perfectly aware of the above. That is why their media never discusses this sensitive subject. It is clear to me that the Great Reset and the manufactured virus hysteria were brought about in order to reduce travel and oil consumption. If China, Russia and Iran do not restrain their oil consumption, they must be demonised. If the USA manages to reduce China’s oil consumption to that of the Mao period, the USA could survive for one or two decades longer. It really is a zero-sum game.
Please don’t be deceived by talk of Renewable Energy, Green Economy, Global Warming, electric cars and similar tosh. It is designed to bamboozle you. They want to greatly lower your standard of living and to reduce the number of souls on this planet – especially in the high oil-consumption countries.
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now alleging that Russia and its allies are deploying ET technology to harass the U.S. military. It is clear that the entire “disclosure” project is a scam meant to conceal the American government’s partnership with private entities to finance and develop black-budget projects, including the World War II-era, Nazi-linked antigravity technology, long in use experimentally, hence all the “UFO” sightings and the “alien” diversion meant to conceal secret military projects and craft. Unfortunately, the West looks to tie in the “Great Reset” and World War III via a “greater-than-9/11” false flag sometime later this year, deploying black-budget technology, to be blamed on a Russian-Chinese-Iranian-“alien”/“ET” alliance. Then the onus will be placed on Russia, China, and Iran to “stand with us” against the “aliens” instead of the “terrorists” or “climate change.”
The Green Party is becoming key to American foreign policy. The Greens in Europe and Australia are now the war party eager to raise the alarm about how ‘authoritarian’ Russia and China are ‘endangering our democracies’ as well as killing the planet with bad hydrocarbons. It looks like the Biden admin wants to restore it’s management position in Europe by leading the world against carbon emissions. At home they’ll be disinvesting in oil, or so they say. This and the new Larry Fink approved PR agenda of replacing corporate board members with highly visible women of colour and a few sexual variants for the sake of ‘the new look’. Soon, leading corporations will become model bastions of social justice and progressive equity. At home, the Green Party is basically an irritant that shouldn’t be there, if you’d ask the Democratic Party leadership. But abroad the Greens will be leading humankind to put it’s foot down and demand that China stop wrecking the planet. At least we need a world leadership that will effectively tax carbon production and consumption. That should raise the revenue needed to pay for the new world green leadership tasked with the millennial struggle to save Mother Earth. Russia, Iran, and Venezuela are the axis of hydrocarbon evil. China is the industrial enemy. The new international campaign to combat climate change will find ways of taxing the culprits and making them pay the costs. Well, they’ll try. Or I’m assuming that’s the idea. What else?
There’s a special role for youth to play. What financial capital needs is an international youth movement that wants to make the world a better place. They need to be everywhere. And they need to be connected. And they need to get out on the streets and say No to the Belt and Road developments. And they need to say No to the big oil goliaths of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Or they can just create havoc on the streets of any state that’s signed on with the Belt and Road and make themselves useful in that way.
Just as the war on terror is being replaced with the new ‘standing up to revisionist powers’ who fail to comply with the ‘rules based international order’ so also I’d expect that the model of the Arab Spring will give way to the new Cultural Revolution, the Children’s Crusade. The West has gotten as much value from the Muslim Brotherhood as they’re going to get. Now it’s time for the Gretas to be rebooted. Green is key. There’s an increasingly obvious affinity between financial capital and Green politics. It’s to be expected that we’ll see more of this.
Yes, this is very right.
America and the West are manipulating and weaponizing the issues of “Climate Change,” carbon emissions, and hydro-carbons against China, Russia, Iran, and others to attack the economies of these resistance nations.
And the Green Party in particular and environmentalists in general have a particularly sinister role to play in greenwashing this America-led imperial “reset” of the world and providing it with a (fake) progressive moral mask.
Wokeness will also play a crucial role in advancing this progressive propaganda mask with a Politically Correct multiracial, multicultural, gender fluid, LGBQTI cast of global overlords to follow.
Welcome to the Green World Order!
Alistair Crooke explains:
Biden and the ‘Yellow Brick Road’
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/03/08/biden-and-yellow-brick-road/
A Green-Washed Global Economy – A Delusion That May Crash It
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/03/22/a-green-washed-global-economy-a-delusion-that-may-crash-it/
Thanks, good links. I’m sorry I didn’t mention Alastair Crooke. He, along with Pepe, are the most insightful geopolitical commentators around these days.
I agree re Alistair Crooke.
The block quotes in the linked essay were not identified (that I could see).
Katherine
This sounds about right to me.
Many whom I would expect to be rebels have joined in the Greta cult.
The Greta cult, like Trump Derangement syndrome, leading into the covid hysteria, have softened up the populace for these propaganda-driven “virtuous” power grabs with “volunteer” armies of monitors, snitchers, and ultimately enforcers of behavior and speech and ideas.
It is really too bad that genuine nature lovers will be entangled in this and it will very hard to disentangle and separate out the truly virtuous from the crazed virtuous and frame a sane politics or course of action. I guess the only alternative might be to “cultivate one’s own garden”—if one is lucky enough to have one.
Katherine
The Greta kids are a worry. Their posture is similar to that adopted during the GP Cultural Revolution. The kids shaking the angry fist against their parents and grandparents in the belief that the latter selfishly burned up the planet for the sake of their consumer habits and now the kids are left with the mess and a darkened, possibly dismal future. And they might be right. As I don’t have a properly scientific bone in my humanistic body I won’t pretend to settle the issue of greenhouse gasses and all for the rest of humankind. I really have no idea. But that said, it really does appear that something dramatic is going on and we’ve got to deal with it whether we’ve got all the proper documentation or not. You raise a trenchant question that I take quite seriously. How to distinguish understandable anger and angst from the clearly manipulated drones in the service of agendas that are far above their heads and that are bent on turning the kids into the demonic forces well suited to the real aims of their managers. How to distinguish the truly virtuous from the crazed virtuous? I wish I could offer a clear and convincing answer, but I can’t. Still, your concluding remark, Voltaire’s ‘tend your garden’ got me thinking. Tend your garden. During the Cultural Revolution there were millions of deaths. The numbers remain indefinite, controversial. But what’s not controversial is that a whole lot of people starved to death. Tend your garden. When the kids come along, hungry enough, teach them how. Maybe you’ll become a mother (again?) to them. Anyway, thanks for commenting.
The Taliban initially claimed that they wished to hold direct talks with the U.S. instead of the Kabul regime because the U.S. controlled its proxies in Kabul. Now the Taliban are attacking the Kabul regime’s proxy forces instead of going after the U.S. and/or NATO puppet-master forces, violating earlier promises to directly target U.S./NATO forces in the event of a delayed withdrawal. This illustrates that the Taliban have always been U.S./NATO proxies backed by Israel, Pakistan, Turkey, and the GCC. The Taliban are aligned with al-Qaida and Daesh in Afghanistan, and seek to undermine Russian, Chinese, and Iranian influence in South-Central Asia. India is now also aligned with Pakistan’s GCC patrons and their Israeli masters, so India is allowing anti-BRI forces to gain influence in Afghanistan.
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2021/05/02/651786/Afghanistan-Taliban-US-NATO-Kandahar–
The economies of the arrogant nations was essentially destroyed long before this plandemic and it is now their motivation to not power slip out their hands like running water. Therefore this wicked notion of ‘great reset’ – inpsired by arrogance, hubris,perversity, or, if you prefer, evil.
Correct me if i’m wrong but didn’t Greek intellectual culture in fact have a flowering in this period among christians of the neoplatonism movement, many prominent christians who appropriated and adopted / adapted neoplatonic thought into ecumenical matters such as thomas aquinas and co.?
In some nominally christian groups parrhesia is more or less required. Not. however, in the groups that imagine Jesus needs money ( Carlin’s routine).
The story of the ethics of digging the Erie canal comes up, and one fellas declaims that if god wanted a river there he’d a made one. An’touther fella stands up and says and Jacob dug a well…and still another might stand up in the middle of a sermon and dispute with the minister…but of course not in the Roman Church….and as Jews say, y’got 2 Jews ya also got 3 opinions…but that’s not the Roman bit either. Pepe’s made a fine essay and accurate criticism.
Michael Parenti’s views about the assassination of Caesar come to mind. https://youtu.be/_IO_Ldn2H4o
(thesis is more or less that Caesar was trying to save the Republic, more like JFK than the Trumpster, never mind the the friendly WoB and the vacant dude…
Carlin> https://youtu.be/iouZYYzQEjU
(to be fair, Carlin was probably naive about the orthodox Christians)
Snow Leopard asked: “What I am seeking is some definition of what “woke culture” and “cancel culture” actually are. They appear to be a combination of mass feeling and manipulative control of that feeling on the part of a partial agency, who seeks to use and control that feeling for the interest of a specific group.”
We can answer that easily. The “woke culture” and “cancel culture” is completely controlled by the US MEDIA that is “governed” by The Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergs, and the Davos Group – groups of multi-billionaires, largely white folks.
We who DO NOT WATCH/ or READ any of the US media, are not in the least effected by this phony propaganda. But, sadly, many US citizens are extremely ignorant and illiterate to what is being perpetrated against them.
What is variously termed and understood by “woke and cancel culture” are an aberration of understanding as much as anything else, or a new way of trying to inadequately express morphing social phenomena that was never r met with clear spiritual insight. sorry about this explanation, it won’t get any applause, but it is the case.
If it has to do with 21st culture, it is not limited geographically, but will infiltrate the remotest parts of the globe in some ways, even if barely identifiable.
Yep pretty much what we have today… and can expect for tomorrow…
Do I really want to come back to Earth next lifetime… Don’t think so….. not at least for some say 500 years…
Another ‘free speecher’, doing everything in his power to ignore the fact that absolute truth exists, can be known and necessarily excludes all falsehood. Anything else would be self-contradictory. As such, the problem doesn’t lie with cancel culture, at all; but is simply a question of what is absolute truth? Once understood, a civilization would be raving mad not to base itself on that truth and shutdown anything which contradicts it. Only then will culture – in the strictest sense of that term – prevail. Enough, then, with the intellectual sloth of ‘free speech’, and let’s get into the meat of the matter: what is absolute truth?
And how many ‘intellectuals’ know how to go about this?
Hint: a good grounding in philosophy and theology are essential; or that which many think they have or can just disregard.
@ Vasily
“Absolute truth” is redundant. Truth is absolute in and of itself.
Truth is simply that which can’t be shown to be false in any way.
How many? Not enough.
The only things essential to ascertaining the truth are adequate life experience, fearlessness, and the ability to think.
Diana Johnstone exposes the role of Green Party in advancing America’s Green Reset of the world economy in particular and its “humanitarian” imperial order in general.
DIANA JOHNSTONE: Washington’s Green Branches in Europe
https://consortiumnews.com/2021/05/03/diana-johnstone-washingtons-green-branches-in-europe/
Very informed article as usual.
The last bit is more of a Cynic take than a Stoic one: you remember the things you want from that period of Christianity and not all that the transformation included.
Also you try to draw parallels between Christianity and Cancel culture. The parallels are too disinformative to be left unanswered. I am truly amazed that no one has commented on that. Only Serbian girl and Tartar touched some aspects.
I will try to dismantle it one by one.
You just need to take into account in what shape Christianity found those nations.
Sculptures and other pieces of art existed in Egypt too, even better than the ones in Greece. You cannot compare the society of Egypt with the one on Greece and in no way with the society of Byzantine empire.
You confuse the Christianity in the west with the whole of Christianity. You start with Rome on the 5th century then jump to the unnamed Athenian philosopher that someone wrote about in his book.
The 5th century was for the Western Roman empire the last century it existed. The Eastern part survived for another 10 centuries.
There was lots of destroying involving what Christians saw as idols. And converting temples to churches. In some places it was indeed like a revolution. People turned against and tried to change everything old. Poor Hypatia stood in their way as part of the elite. No one understood how close neoplatonism was to Christianity. The elite refused to understand how their sophisticated philosophy was very similar to the religion of the peasants.
The Three Hierarchs were all educated and had very good knowledge of stoicism and neoplationism.
In Greece we do lower the voice when we enter the church, out if respect for the house of God. Laughing, singing and having fun is in no way forbidden though.
“a race dissolved in every passion, destroyed by controlled self-indulgence, cringing and womanish in its thinking, close to cowardice, wallowing in all swinishness, debased, content with servitude in security.”
This is one of the main objections the old elite had to voice about Christianity:
A Christian, as humble man that does not own anything cannot be a good leader nor a good fighter. Christianity proved them wrong every time. Eastern Roman Empire survived longer than any empire ever.
The description of the killing of Nikiforos Fokas, one of the most legendary emperors of the ERE, is very informative and goes like this: the killers entered his bedroom in the night, having one of his servants by their side. As they went near the bed they noticed that no one was sleeping there. Alarmed, they stared at the servant. He nodded them not to worry. The emperor does not sleep in his bed. He pointed to one side of the dark room. As they went close they noticed the emperor, sleeping on the floor with his old monk cloth.
Justinian did forbid people from other religions from holding office.
Also Justinian wrote/gave the guidelines for the Codex Justinian I, the first legal system in the world,
Amongst other things, slavery was very rare after that although it disappeared completely during the 11th century.
Woman and man were deemed equal. This is not some renaissance trick, it was imposed by Christianity.
And most importantly there was almost no death penalty in the Eastern Roman Empire. Capital punishment was, and is not in line with Christianity.
When used it was reserved for rather heinous crimes or high treason.
Plato’ academy (undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of Ancient Greece) was closed on 529.
But in 425 Pandidakterion was founded in Constantinople. This is considered the first university in the world.
And guess what they taught there. You guessed it right, philosophy, law, mathematics.
Epictetus tradition was kept alive in Christianity. What changed it that humble people were counseling humble emperors in a more ordinary basis.
Some of the philosophers went to Persia.
I see no resemblance to cancel culture sorry.
Just wanted to add that the Eastern Roman Empire society was by all accounts an educated one. Primary education was widely available. After that there was the the Pandidakterion and lots of other schools, public and private. This was a huge change from Ancient Greece, where whilst education was available, it was always private and for therefore for the rich only.
With these comments I just wanted to clear some myths about the early Christian society and the differences between it and the ancient one.
Its been known for a while that in Persia (Iran) you can say what you like about the most things.
Things havent changed since Greek times.
And remember how civilization collapsed under Justinian’s reign.
The Dark Ages began and lasted for 500 years.
That is where the current EU UK US kabal will take us (they think).
‘The woke revolution is a culture war – in symbiosis with Big Tech and Big Business – that has smashed the real thing: class war. The atomized working classes, struggling to barely survive, have been left to wallow in anomie.’
2021 renassiance: After the industrial age and the invention of the camera and record player and everything became standard and affordable there exists in all the crafts the desire for a new renassiance. One that re-evalues those magic crafts from the past. This I believe is beginning to happen. In painting and in musc for the last 100 we will see a revival of the appreciation of skillful and well executed classical music and painted canvases. I made a short video regarding such crafts and the future.
https://youtu.be/jLSNUQ52Kog