Many from the ‘Left’, progressives, Cultural Marxists and activists keep trying to stymie democracy and the individual with their shrill, often illogical, Orwellian and ideological views and variations of mind control. Orwell’s 1984 Ministry of Truth is alive and well. The following articles provide evidence.
Links to more articles follow the four below
- Gold, Kamala, Trump, Control, Cash, Murder & Water – Catherine Austin Fitts By Greg Hunter On October 19, 2024 In Market Analysis, Political Analysis
- The current woke and evil world, as seen from Australia By Max Bolte, 7 October 2024
- How News Corp’s lies and deception By Shane Dowling, Kangaroo Court of Australia, 29 September 2024
- Covid^J 911 ^0 Forever War September 12, 2024
- A Brutal Russian Take on ZionismFrom Henry Makow, HenryMakow.com, 11 July 2024
- What Nobody Told You About Julian Assange David Sorensen, StopWorldControl.com. 26 June 2024
- We Approach ‘State’ Singularity From Zerohedge, 19 June 2024
- Democracy won’t work whilst most media lean far left By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR Founding Director, 27 September 2023
- CULTURAL INJUSTICE^J HOW NEW ZEALAND IS APPLYING APARTHEID By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 6 August 2023
- Archbishop Vigano accuses the Vatican of corruption From Forbidden Knowledge, 13 July 2023
- George Bernard Shaw^J the Fabian Society and a ‘Brave New World’ By Rhoda Wilson, 22 June 2023
- Cracks in woke capitalism Nick Cater, The Australian, 5 June 2023
- The Coming War — Time to Speak Up By John Pilger, from Consortium News, 2 May 2023
- Australia Could Use a Machiavelli By Gary Furnell, Quadrant Online, 11 April 2023
- How the elite indoctrinate us By WantToKnow.info , 8 April 2023
Gold, Kamala, Trump, Control, Cash, Murder & Water – Catherine Austin Fitts
Gold, Kamala, Trump, Control, Cash, Murder & Water – Catherine Austin Fitts By Greg Hunter On October 19, 2024 In Market Analysis, Political Analysis
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com (Saturday Night Post)
Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), Publisher of The Solari Report, financial expert and former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 41 Admin.), gives her take on gold, Kamala, Trump, control, cash, murder and water. On gold’s rocket rise, CAF says, “Gold is very important. We divide gold into two positions: Your ‘core’ position and your ‘investment’ position. . . . Right now, gold looks phenomenally attractive as a core position. It is also attractive as an investment position.”
Why the big move up now? CAF says, “Part of it is the incredible monetary policies and the monetary inflation coming from the central banks. The other is too many people are watching government implode in a variety of different ways, and people are saying I want a core position in gold. We are also seeing the BRICs . . . and seeing states in the US move to put gold and silver in a position to be used as a currency. So, we are watching people put monetary reserves in gold and monetary liquidity in gold. That is happening steadily, and more and more people are saying they need a percentage of their assets in gold. . . . We are in a long-term bull market in gold.”
On Kamala Harris, the operative word is “meltdown.” CAF says, “Kamala is in, what we call in a campaign, a ‘meltdown.’ If you look at the current meltdown, I am baffled because why would somebody with her characteristics be made the nominee? You are talking about major donors putting major money behind her. Why would they spend that much money if there were serious holes in her vetting and she is inclined to melt down this way? It’s kind of baffling.”
On Trump, what is the first thing he should do if re-elected? CAF says, “He should stop the poisoning of the American people. This is one of the reasons we did this issue on water. The American people are being poisoned. . . . I travel a lot by car. I see deterioration in the air, in the water, in the food–they are being poisoned. And, of course, the big one is the CV19 vaccines. Vaccines are poisoning Americans. There was just a big ruling against putting fluoride poison being added to municipal water supplies. One of the things you can do is to march down to your city or county and tell them to stop wasting money on putting poison in your water. If you reverse that, it is one important action you can take.”
The Deep State and central bankers want total control of your money and your life. Fitts says this is why she started pushing the use of cash instead of digital transactions. She calls it “Make Cash Great Again.” . . . If we don’t fix the finances from an actuarial standpoint, they are going to continue to delay benefits or lower life expectancy, and that is what they are doing. They are balancing the books by lowering life expectancy.”
One way to lower life expectancy is to inject people with a so-called vaccine that is really a bioweapon that murders and disables people. That is exactly what happened with the CV19 vax, and the deaths or murders are still piling up. CAF says, “You can cut back on the fraudulent rackets, or you can cut back on the people.” They are cutting back on the people by any measure.
There is much more in the 54-minute interview.
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with the Publisher of The Solari Report, Catherine Austin Fitts, for 10.19.24.
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The current woke and evil world, as seen from Australia
The current woke and evil world, as seen from Australia By Max Bolte, 7 October 2024
How much longer is the woke world going to put up with this nuclear madness direction that the axis of evil Zionist Jew-controlled New York/Washington/City of London/ Israel/Brussels/Switzerland/Paris/Canberra/Amsterdam war mongering evils are taking us? In Australia Albanese, Dutton, Simon Birmingham and their cohorts have sold their souls to the Zionist devil in supporting the 1917 Balfour Agreement sellout of the Palestinian Arabs and the 2014 Jew takeover of Ukraine. The 2023 October 7th ” invasion ” was a Netanyahu planned invasion – the Israeli Defence Force machine gunned their citizens – their soldiers were stood down. In Ukraine Zelenski, a Jew, was installed as President and since March 2022 has sent over 400,000 patriotic Ukrainian Orthodox Christian soldiers to their death as cannon fodder – the Kazarian (Zionist) Jews want Ukraine as their second homeland. The EVIL of these nonhumans running the World into a giant bloodbath calamity knows no bounds. These EVILS and their shills [Biden, Harris, Trump [possibly one of the fake ‘Trumps’?], Vance, Boris Johnson (a Jew), new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (also a Jew), Albanese, Dutton and Co are less than 0.1% of the world population]. This orchestrated evil hasn’t just started with the execution of JFK, the Oklahoma City Bombing, WACO, Port Arthur mass murder (the Queen gave John Howard a medal – he disarmed Australians), 9/11, dozens of political assassinations – it goes back centuries, run by the same culprits.
– Boer War for South African gold and diamond riches – thousands dead, soldiers and Boers so the Rothschilds (head of Zionist Jew Cabal) and the British Royal Family can get control of the bonanza.
– WW1 – another Rothschild (Zionist) orchestrated operation – over 100 million killed
– 1917 New York Jew funded Russian Revolution – between 1917 and 1957
66 million Russian Christians murdered by the Jew controllers in the most gruesome ways along with patriot leader the Tsar and his family.
– WW2 – yet another Rothschild operation – another 100 million plus killed in their world control agenda – 1.6 million surrendered German soldiers murdered on the orders of Swiss Jew General Eisenhower in American prison camps.
– in 1946 Jew shill Lyndon Baines Johnson (later became US President after the JFK assassination – how convenient) was sending loads of machine guns and weaponry to Palestine in advance of the Jewish invasion.
– in 1948 Australia let in boatloads of Jews, some with bags of cash as reward for murdering Palestinians and over the following 76 years they have taken control of Australia, using bribery, blackmail and whatever else. They control the Liberal National Party, the Labor Party and quite a few senior public servants who have sold their souls to the devil also – you don’t get any promotion unless you are all part of it. The Freemasons are right in at the top of the pyramid. The senior police of Australia’s forces and senior executive positions are all approved by the Freemasons and all part of the Cabal. Some of these idiots don’t realise the depths of evil they are part of. They use whatever resources they have to influence every sphere of importance.
These same vermin have moved into the Northern Rivers, in stealth, over the last 30 years and quietly asserting their influence.
I have just spent 3 weeks touring rural NSW. The peace and serenity of the countryside was intoxicating. These evil forces running the world are hellbent on turning the whole beautiful world into yet another World War apocalypse.
On several occasions I have invited a conversation, over a coffee, on these seriously pressing issues, but to no avail. Only a handful of aware patriots, such as the White Rabbit, seem to have any guts and commitment.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians are getting slaughtered in their hundreds every day – the Israelis are restraining themselves – they would like it to be thousands. You can thank Lord Balfour, England and the Jew Rothschilds for all the death and misery of Palestinians since the secret signing of the sellout Agreement in 1917. In Ukraine, Zelenski is sending hundreds of the cream of the Orthodox Christian patriot population to their slaughter everyday in a war that could have been stopped and never started in March 2022. The major powers of NATO, the USA, England, France, Germany and several backroom countries have pushed Russia into this conflict which should never have started, if they had just heeded Putin over the previous 8 years. Millions of dead doesn’t mean anything to these germs – as long as they achieve their goals. History repeats itself. I don’t see too many princes lining up on the frontline and going over the top. I guess you could say it (“WAR”) is just one more DEPOPULATION TOOL they have in their basket of many tools they are using on their trusting loyal citizens.
Max Bolte BScAgr, former Liberal Candidate for the seat of Redlands, Qld, Foundation President of Redlands Rugby Club. Disgusted that the Liberal Party can pick scoundrels like Howard, Morrison and Dutton as their leader. Disgusted that the Labor Party could give powerful positions to such incompetents (or worse) as Albanese, Bowan and Rowland.
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How News Corp’s lies and deception
How News Corp’s lies and deception By Shane Dowling, Kangaroo Court of Australia, 29 September 2024
Edotor’s note: Click on link above to view PDF download that shows graphics in this article.
Lachlan Murdoch explains how News Corp’s lies and deception works with help from Rick Morton and Anthony Klan
Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch controlled News Corp and Fox News are well known for being propaganda businesses masquerading as news businesses but having that in effect said by Lachlan Murdoch and 2 of his former journalists has a lot more power than others saying it.
In the below article and videos you will see Lachlan Murdoch on video talking about how he controls “the positioning and the messaging” of the news at News Corp and Fox.
You will also read what former News Corp journalist at The Australian, Rick Morton, said about News Corp in 2019 which ended his career at the company within days.
There is also video of former News Corp journalist at The Australian, Anthony Klan talking about how News Corp manipulate the media and readers. What is interesting is that Anthony Klan is using the same News Corp strategy now in a financial fraud scam trying to control the narrative, and profit from, his reporting on the NACC / Robodebt scandal.
With the federal election coming up it is worth having a look at not only how News Corp operate but also how they influence new media, independent journalists and social media.
We often read and hear about News Corp infiltrating and influencing the ABC and other media. But the News Corp culture and tactics is also infiltrating independent media and will continue to do so given thousands of journalists were trained by Murdoch’s News Corp.
So, it is up to us to be aware of News Corp’s expanding influence and deal with it when need be.
Lachlan Murdoch – He is the executive chairman of Nova Entertainment, chairman of News Corp, executive chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation.
In 2023, he was listed 33rd on the list of Australia’s wealthiest people, with his wealth estimated at A$3.35 billion (US$2.1 billion).
As of September 2024, the Murdoch family is involved in a court case in the US in which Lachlan’s brother James, his sister Elisabeth and half-sister Prudence are challenging their father’s bid to amend the family trust to ensure that Lachlan retains control of News Corp and Fox Corp. (Click here to read more)
In January 2023 I published an article titled “Lachlan Murdoch’s big mouth set to cost Rupert Murdoch, Fox and himself $billion in the Dominion defamation case” which has a video of Lachlan Murdoch being interviewed at the New York Times Deal Book Conference in November 2018. I said in the article in relation to the video:
One of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s defences from any personal liability in the court cases is that in their management roles, they do not tell journalists what to say.
But in the below video, Lachlan Murdoch says that he “works closely with the managers of those newsrooms and it’s important they get the positioning and the messaging right”. Those “managers” would be the editors who work directly with the journalists overseeing what the journalists write.
So, Lachlan by his own admission is only one step away from directly telling the journalists what to write.
Lachlan also says he works closely with the managers of the Newspapers. So why doesn’t Lachlan leave it to the managers of the newspapers to work closely with the editors? Why does Lachlan override the managers of the newspapers and give direct instructions to the editors?
It’s because Lachlan and Rupert want to give direct instructions on what is and isn’t written or said because they are running a propaganda business masquerading as a news business.
That is proven by Lachlan’s line where he says, “and it’s important they get the positioning and the messaging right”. A news business reports the news, so they don’t need to worry about “positioning” and “getting the message right”.
Lachlan then says, “we don’t always get it right”. Well, they would get it right if they focused on reporting the news and not worrying about the “positioning” and “getting the message right” for Rupert and Lachlan’s propaganda.
In the video one person asking a question points out that Lachlan Murdoch told the audience he is left-leaning which is a blatant lie. Lachlan is not left or right, he is a criminal who says anything to make a dollar.
Lachlan says at the end of the video we have to get along and be more tolerant of others yet it’s Lachlan and his father Rupert who sell and promote hate and division via their media.
Like most criminals, Lachlan Murdoch is not overly bright, he just has a lot of money which gives him access to a lot of advisors and speech writers so in public he generally doesn’t seem as stupid as he really is. (Click here to read more)
The video below is Lachlan Murdoch being interviewed at the New York Times Deal Book Conference in November 2018. I published the video on the 28th of January 2023. (Click here to watch the below video on the Kangaroo Court of Australia YouTube channel)
Rick Morton – Former News Corp journalist at The Australian
Rick Morton’s career at News Corp ended after he gave a talk on the 8th of May 2019 to journalism students at the University of Technology, Sydney. The talk was published as a podcast by UTS. (Click here to listen to the podcast)
The Guardian reported on the 10th of May 2019:
News Corp journalist has gone on the record with critical remarks about his own paper, the Australian, saying “the craziness has been dialled up” in recent months.
The paper’s social affairs writer, Rick Morton, told journalism students at the University of Technology, Sydney, that senior writers know what the editorial line is and write stories to fit.
Asked whether the Murdoch paper’s journalists were uncomfortable with the Australian barracking for the Coalition in the election, Morton said they were “more uncomfortable certainly now than at any time I’ve been there in the past seven years”.
“There is a real mood that something has gone wrong,” “People will tell you going back a decade it used to be a very great paper, and in many ways it still is, but some of the craziness has been dialled up.
“We know what the empire is, we know what the papers do, but something has changed in the last six months. I don’t know what it is. Death rattles or loss of relevance? And journos pretty much spend all day talking about it.”
Morton said editors did not give explicit instructions, but senior writers wrote within accepted parameters or found stories that were so good the paper had to run them despite their slant.
“We kind of know what the editorial line is at the paper,” he said. “The people at the top know what it is and there are key staff … who are old enough and ugly enough to deal with the awful truth that occasionally there is a line that will come out of [news] conference.
“It’s not always a Murdoch line; it’s just that Murdoch hires editors who are very much like him.”
Morton said orders did not come from Murdoch directly except when he was in Australia, and then “he will tell you what interests him”.
“If you’re senior you will know what the line is roughly and you will file stuff that fits; everyone else is just left alone to their own devices.
Reporters were often confronted with their copy being changed and inaccurate headlines on their stories, he said.
“Often times the headline bears no resemblance to the story filed,” he said.
“I’ve seen it happen to other journos who wake up in the morning and their copy is changed. Or the headline is screaming with something they didn’t write.”
Morton said front page stories were spiked if they didn’t fit the “tone” of the paper’s election coverage.
“It’s a constant battle, it doesn’t happen as often as people think it does but it does happen.
“It is a moral quandary that I have wrestled with for the entire seven years I’ve been at the Oz.
“Am I lending credibility to a horrible machine? I don’t know? Does my journalism change things in people’s lives for the better? That I do know.” (Click here to read more)
The AFR reported the 18th of May 2019 was the last time The Australian published any articles by Rick Moreton which was a week after the UTS talk.
Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch obviously have glass jaws and can’t handle the truth.
Rick Morton now works at The Saturday Paper and I wrote about him having a fallout with another journalist, over ethics, in an article titled “Robodebt crook Renee Leon organises free promotion and defence from her friend Chris Wallace in The Saturday Paper” published on the 26th of September 2024. (Click here to read the article)
Anthony Klan – Former News Corp journalist at The Australian
I published an article about Klan on the 12th of September 2024 titled “Independent journalists Anthony Klan, Michelle Fahy and Elizabeth Minter running a scam with their dodgy reporting on the NACC / Robodebt scandal”. (Click here to read the article)
In the article I accused Anthony Klan of suppressing key evidence of the NACC / Robodebt cover-up from his audience so he could try to control the narrative of the story to make it look like he was the hero journalist exposing the key evidence. I also accused Klan of reporting lies and stealing content from me and likely others.
As you will see in the below video Klan says News Corp uses “suppressing information from the public” as a strategy which Klan has also been doing recently.
The 12th of September article on Klan’s corruption and lies and my ongoing investigation into his handiwork led to this article.
Anthony Klan worked for News Corp for 14 years or 15 years (he uses both as per below) from 2005 to 2019 and tweeted on the 10th of June 2019 that he had resigned from News Corp’s The Australian the previous month which is about the same time Rick Morton left The Australian.
Klan said in the message regarding his resignation from News Corp, “Hi all, a month ago I resigned from The Australian after 15 years. I had, and have, serious misgivings about the direction that is now being taken. Australia faces unprecedented external threats. To do otherwise, I felt, would be treasonous.” (Click here to see on Twitter)
Klan also tweeted on the 24 May 2024 the below message: (Click here to see on Twitter)
Five years after leaving News Corp’s The Australian Anthony Klan said in the above message he “adored” his 14 years there.
What did he adore? The lying to the public? The deceiving the public? The undermining of democracy? Being in “the pocket of the lobbyists of the minerals, the mining, the gas and of the big banks”?
In 2019, when Anthony Klan left News Corp, he said it was because it “would be treasonous” to stay and he had “serious misgivings about the direction that is now being taken”. But now he is saying he “adored” being there.
Most liars don’t have good memories and forget what previous lies they told. Why Klan left News Corp is something we will probably never know, but it certainly wasn’t because of ethical reasons.
The below video is from an interview Anthony Klan did on Aljazeera TV in 2020.
Video Player
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01:49
Klan says in the above video:
“When I started at the organisation I believed it was 90% ideology at least, but now I’ve come to the opinion it’s 10% ideology and the rest of it is money and vested interests,”
Klan also says News Corp are “suppressing information from the public” and is “incredibly in the pocket of the lobbyists of the minerals, the mining, the gas and of the big banks”.
Anthony Klan’s lies an deception
Anthony Klan spent 15 years lying and deceiving the public and “suppressing information from the public” on behalf of News Corp yet he wants us to believe, “When I started at the organisation I believed it was 90% ideology at least, but now I’ve come to the opinion it’s 10% ideology and the rest of it is money and vested interests”
Klan also says News Corp is “incredibly in the pocket of the lobbyists of the minerals, the mining, the gas and of the big banks”. But it has been like that for decades and certainly for the whole 15 years Klan worked at News Corp.
News Corp was the same in the 1970s
The Guardian reported in May 2019
After the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1975, the Australian’s journalists went on strike during the subsequent election campaign over what they saw as the newspaper’s biased coverage. (Click here to read more)
Kevin Rudd’s 2010 super profits mining tax cost him the Prime Ministership and the loudest critic was News Corp who were, and still are, getting paid $millions by the mining companies for adverting. But apparently Anthony Klan didn’t notice that.
Why didn’t Anthony Klan say in 2010 or 2011 that News Corp was “incredibly in the pocket of the lobbyists of the minerals, the mining, the gas and of the big banks”?
Because Anthony Klan was also “in the pocket of the lobbyists of the minerals, the mining, the gas and of the big banks” via his weekly paycheque from News Corp.
And Anthony Klan stayed in their pockets for another 8 years after the mining companies, with the help of News Corp, got rid of Rudd.
So no, Anthony Klan is not a whistleblower on News Corp corruption. Klan is a long-term crook, who left News Corp for an unknown reason, who is now trying to cleanse his reputation by ratting on his fellow crooks at News Corp.
But Anthony Klan has already been caught out recently trying to use the News Corp business tactics, he learnt and used at News Corp for 15 years, in his own small media business.
News Corp’s influence on independent media and journalists
Anthony Klan isn’t the first and won’t be the last journalist to leave News Corp and continue with a life of crime and corruption.
There are and will be many other ex News Corp journalists and journalists from other media companies who will claim to be independent journalists but will lie and deceive, just as much as the Murdochs do, as they try to build their profile and small media business. So keep an eye out.
I never came up with the phrase the Murdoch’s are running a “propaganda operation masquerading as a news service“. University of Melbourne academic Denis Muller used the phrase in an article for The Conversation which means even University students are now learning about what News Corp really is.
I could say a lot more but the Murdoch’s and News Corp’s influence on independent media and journalists will grow and needs to be reported on a regular basis to try to keep it in check. So, I will save further comment for another article in the future.
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Covid, 9/11 & Forever War
Covid^J 911 ^0 Forever War September 12, 2024
From the war on terror to the “pandemic”, the elite are constructing fake threats to start wars that never have to end.
by Kit Knightly, OffGuardian
originally published September 13, 2021
“The war was not meant to be won. It was meant to be continuous.”
George Orwell, 1984
Our 9/11 coverage this year, the 20th anniversary, has been focused on viewing the attacks of 2001 through the lens of the Covid “pandemic” rollout.
The point is not that both Covid19 and 9/11 are necessarily part of the same grand plan, were carried out by the same people, or were in any way directly connected. Rather, they are thematically connected, on the meta-level.
They spring from the same collective urge all rulers and governments harbour, and are employed to the same end.
They are different tools designed to achieve the same end. Different approaches to the same problem. Different evolutionary stages of the same animal: The decades-long change in the core aims of warfare and even the very meaning of “war” itself.
War has always been vital to the preservation of the state. Wars make rulers rich, and people scared. They unite nations behind leaders, and distract from domestic political issues.
But, as nations become more powerful, weapon technology more advanced, and global power centralises in giant corporations rather than nations, war – in the traditional sense – becomes more expensive, more dangerous, and largely meaningless.
Essentially the old-fashioned motivations for warfare no longer apply, but the ancillary domestic benefits of war-like policy remain. While the state, and their corporate backers, no longer need to take part in pitched battles over the best farmland, they do still need their subjects to believe they are under attack.
In short, by necessity, “war” has gradually shifted from genuine inter-state conflicts over control of resources, into a top-down tool of psychological manipulation.
And the first stage of that evolution was 9/11.
9/11 and the war on terror
9/11 was an inside job. Any objective examination of the evidence can only lead to that conclusion. (I’m not going to lay that out here, we have dozens of articles detailing that. That’s not what I’m writing about today.)
The US government blew up their own buildings, killed their own civilians, terrified their own people. The ruling class engaging in what Orwell called “war against their subjects”, in a very literal sense.
Much like the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany, this staged “attack” was done to create a war-like mentality. To make people believe they were under threat, and serve as the basis for new “temporary emergency powers” for the government.
But 9/11 went further, serving as the casus belli for a war: “The war on terror”.
The War on Terror was a new kind of war, yes it was used as a starting point for more traditional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then proxy wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen, but its main target was actually domestic. A nationwide psy-op war designed to keep 350 million people in a semi-permanent state of fear.
It was the natural next step in the Orwellian redefinition of “war” as a concept.
If the primary aims of your war are a) To maintain domestic control of your population, and b) To funnel tax-payer money into bloated contracts with the private sector, then do you really need to declare war on a foreign country?
In fact, do you need an actual physical “war” at all? Isn’t the idea of a war just as good?
And if all you need is the idea of a war, what better way than to declare war on an idea. Why not make your enemy an abstract concept?
Because the great thing about going to war on an abstract concept is you can’t ever lose, and you never have to win. The war can go on forever.
This idea was first trialled with “the war on drugs”. But that didn’t work because a) people actually quite like drugs and b) Drugs are a vital income stream for the deep state. So it fizzled.
The war on terror is better. Since “terror” is an abstract noun with no solid reality, it can mean anything you want it to mean. “The war on terror” can be domestic or foreign, political or military, overt or covert or both. It can’t be won, it can’t be lost, and it only ends when you say it does.
It’s perfect.
Well, almost perfect.
There are still a few issues.
For example, it’s actually quite difficult to keep people afraid of an abstract concept. You need real-world reminders. Essentially, for the war on terror to continue, you need to keep reminding people terror is out there. Which means terrorism needs to happen. Which means either letting it happen or making it happen (the vast majority of the time it’s the latter).
If you’re staging terror attacks they either have to be real, resulting in real victims and real grieving families asking real questions…or they’re fake, meaning paying actors. Either way is logistically complicated, difficult to control and potentially embarrassing.
There’s also the problem of the terrorists themselves. You’ve publicly declared war on them…but they’re also very useful. There’s a reason you’ve funded them for decades. The inevitable result is you end up with “good terrorists” in country A, and “bad terrorists” in Country B. And when they are revealed to be essentially exactly the same, well that looks bad.
But the biggest problem, really, is that it caps your ambition.
You may have chosen an abstract concept as the target of your war, but that concept needs to take human form somehow. And any human enemy can only be so scary, and can only do so much damage. There’s no way you can frighten everyone at once that way.
Plus, picking a human enemy – along racial, national, ethnic or ideological lines – is inescapably divisive. You can’t ever unite everyone behind that flag.
In short, a war on terror and terrorists is fine if you want to rule a country, but what if you want to rule a planet?
Well, what you need then is a new enemy. An enemy that can be anywhere and everywhere, and that definitely isn’t human.
The war on Covid
The Covid19 “pandemic” has been pitched to the public as a war from the beginning.
As early as March 2020, the UN Secretary General was urging countries to “declare war on the virus” and already calling Covid “the greatest threat since World War II”. A sentiment UN spokespeople have repeated. A lot.
National leaders were just as eager to equate Covid as a new grand cause, in line with the fight against fascism.
Italy’s Prime Minister referred to the nation’s “darkest hour”. New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian told the press “this is literally a war” just last month.
In the UK, the government made numerous transparent attempts to instil a Churchillian “spirit of the Blitz” atmosphere. Unashamedly working World War II parallels into all their Covid messaging, the Queen’s cloying public speech of shamelessly using the line We’ll Meet Again.
In America, ever the hub of military metaphors, Trump called himself a “wartime President” fighting an “invisible enemy”. Former Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo referred to healthcare professionals as “soldiers” in the battle against Covid.
Worldwide, pundits frequently compare Covid to the war on terror, and Covid to terrorists. The war metaphor has been ubiquitous in speeches, headlines and TV spots.
The message is clear and simple: The virus is our enemy. We are at war.
And this war really is perfect.
It has all the benefits of a real war, and none of the drawbacks. All the ephemeral malleability of the “war on terror”, and none of its potential complications.
Think about it…
In the name of Covid we have seen taxation, censorship, surveillance, state expenditure to the private sector and state powers all increase. These are all the cliche “emergency powers” the state seeks out in wartime.
And they’ve achieved it with a simple three-stage trick.
First, take a virus, give it a name and attribute to it the exact same symptoms of every other cold and flu virus. You just created a new disease.
Second, take a test that can “find anything in anybody”, run it on everyone who goes into hospital (especially the terminally ill) and change the legal definition of “cause of death”. You just created “deaths” from your new disease.
Third, start running that same test on everyone, multiple times a week. You just created millions upon millions of “asymptomatic cases”.
Combine these three, and you have created a “pandemic”.
They created an enemy out of thin air, through a wave of propaganda and statistical manipulation. “Covid” is nothing but a filter, a lens placed in front of the public eye that distorts reality without actually changing anything at all.
Just as with the “war on terror”, the real threat is almost entirely imaginary, but this time the optics are so much better. Instead of worshipping the troops, we now pay homage to “healthcare heroes”, the “soldiers on the frontline against the virus”. No bombs, no violence, just dancing nurses.
And what can’t happen with Covid? Simple, anything they don’t want to happen. Because of the very nature of the manufactured pandemic, they have total control of the narrative.
They can control the “cases” through the tests. They can control the “deaths” through the definition of “cause of death”. They can just tweak the meaning of a word here and there, and start and stop the “pandemic” on a whim. They can slow down the “spread”, or speed it up. Introduce a new test or treatment or “cure” it, then create a new variant to bring it back.
This war doesn’t even really exist, so it never has to end and they definitely can’t lose.
Meanwhile, every new law that passes expands the power of the state over the citizen, and every step of the way there new bloated private sector contracts up for grabs. Testing and tracing and PPE. Vaccines and ventilators and quarantine hotels. Public money is pouring into private hands.
And the best part? It’s all being done in the name of “helping people”.
Following 9/11, the Patriot Act empowered mass surveillance, detention without charge and huge infringement of civil rights, because people might be terrorists.
Now, allegedly anti-Covid “public health measures” are allowing the exact same things…because people might be sick.
The state has transformed. What was once considered paranoid and aggressive, is now simply beneficent and paternalistic.
That’s the genius of the War on Covid.
The real forever war
So…how are Covid and 9/11 linked?
One flows directly into the other. They form a continuum of control narratives designed to frighten people into accepting draconian limitations on their freedom, whilst justifying a permanent society-wide warlike mentality.
“The war on terror” and the “war on Covid” are twin psy-ops that show the transformation of “war” from a foreign policy into a purely domestic one.
Orwell described it perfectly in 1984:
War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
In just the last two years we have all seen the truth of this. Covid has shown us supposedly enemy nations suddenly come to an accord and demonstrate almost total unity of purpose to spread one big lie.
The global capitalist hegemony doesn’t need to conquer land or steal resources anymore. They already own everything worth owning, all they need now is to control their workers and preserve the inequality they have created.
That’s the real war being waged here. Not the ridiculous war on terror. And not the laughable war on Covid. No, the real “forever war” is what Niels Harrit calls the vertical war, waged by the very top against everyone below them.
Covid is the most recent and most overt expression of this, but for years now the corporate media has been the spokesperson of the authoritarian heart of the state.
I have written before that we are entering the era of “progressive” statism. Where tyranny is sold as a regrettable inevitability and our leaders are portrayed as a new breed of reluctant dictators, sculpting dystopian political landscapes out of necessity, and with only the purest intentions.
We’re told that our caring masters aren’t controlling or dictatorial because they want to be, but because they need to be, for our sake.
The “great reset” is not a malign “conspiracy theory”, it’s just our kindly overlords child-proofing the world to protect us from ourselves. Tearing our society down so they can build back better into a neo-feudal utopia, where nobody owns anything and everyone is happy and everyone does what they’re told…or else.
This “pandemic” is the thin end of a rapidly widening wedge. Next comes the flu and obesity and global warming. No more meat. No more sugar. No more vacations. They’re bad for you, and bad for the planet, and bad for the polar bears.
Ban homeschools and protests and misinformation. Ban the wrong kind of books and the wrong kind of speech and the wrong kind of thoughts.
Wear the mask and take the jab and live in the pod and eat the bugs.
Global hegemony isn’t going to come about via traditional warfare or Imperial conquest, instead it is being shaped by a conglomeration of restrictions on individual freedom.
That’s the war that links 9/11 and Covid. The real war, and it’s not against drugs, or terrorism or even Covid…it’s against us.
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A Brutal Russian Take on Zionism
A Brutal Russian Take on ZionismFrom Henry Makow, HenryMakow.com, 11 July 2024
The real issue is Jewish Power posing both as Right and Left, nationalist and globalist, Zionist and Communist.
In 1991, Vladimir Stepin wrote: “The Jews must have, and will have, undivided, absolute power over the whole world. The only point is that the money and the power, but particularly the power, will be achieved soundlessly, without attracting attention, and without occupying the leading roles until the very end.”
This is why resistance — “anti-Semitism” — is banned.
“We have already…possessed the minds of the goy communities…[they are] looking through the spectacles we are setting astride their noses.” (Protocols of Zion, 12)
from Feb 22, 2019
The Nature of Zionism (1991)
by Vladimir Stepin
(Excerpts by henrymakow.com)
The foundations of Zionism were formulated in ancient times, some three thousand years ago, and they are:
- The Jews are God’s chosen people.
- All other peoples are merely two-legged animals (goys).
- The Jews have both the right and the obligation to rule the world.
The second and third points of this three-in-one formula actually follow from the first. The formula, which was the brainchild of an undoubtedly talented politician, was among the foundations of the religion of Judaism (see the Book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament).
At that time people understood very well that if one is to lend force to one’s intentions, one must express them as religious ideas. And one must also strengthen not only the religion but also its influence on people. …
Another point is that the power of this formula lies in that it legitimizes and sanctifies the idea of robbing other nations. Why need we care about two-legged animals? If we are the chosen people and it is our inalienable right, and even our duty, to rule other peoples, then God himself ordered us to grow rich at their expense, as the saying goes.
In this way, nationalism is placed on a material basis. Rob and rule! Rule and rob! Money and power! From the time the above-mentioned formula begins to operate, this becomes both a means and an end, but it nevertheless also becomes a more important means, a means for attaining the main objective contained in the third item of the formula: the Jews must have, and will have, undivided, absolute power over the whole world. The only point is that the money and the power, but particularly the power, will be achieved soundlessly, without attracting attention, and without occupying the leading roles until the very end.
ZIONISTS SET UP CONCENTRATION CAMPS FOR NON-JEWS ACCUSED OF ANTISEMITISM WHICH THEY ORGANIZED
During the civil war in Russia, the Zionists also performed another task. Using some units of the Red Army – Trotsky was the chairman of the country’s Revolutionary Military Council – they organized the Jewish pogrom in Seversk. The result of this was the “Law on Those Involved in Pogroms” of 27 July 1918.
In accordance with this law, a monstrous Zionist terror raged in Russia for ten years: a person accused of antisemitism was, without any argument being allowed, declared to be involved in pogroms and placed against the wall to be shot. Not only anti-Zionists, but the best representatives of the intelligentsia of Russia, could be accused of being antisemitic, and so too could anyone one felt like accusing of it. People saw who was exercising power in Russia and expressed their discontent with it. 90% of the members of the Cheka – the Soviet security organ, 1918-1922 – were Zionists.
Apart from the law on those involved in pogroms, the Zionists practised genocide against the ethnic groups inhabiting Russia, and they did so by accusing people of counter-revolutionary activities, sabotage, and so on, irrespective of whether or not the people in question really had conducted such activities. It was standard practice merely to put them against the wall to be shot.
The major operations conducted by the Zionists included setting up a system of prison camps. Skilfully using as a pretext the interests of discipline and orderliness, Trotsky and Dzershinzky organized the concentration camps in 1918. These were monstrous machinery for exterminating the people of Russia, machinery of oppression and intimidation, machinery of undivided power.
[MAKOW- If I were a betting man, I’d say Zionists put Hitler into power.]
MONEY IS POWER
The Zionists’ money is their most important tool. Money is power – that is a well- known truth. But does everyone know that in the USA, for example, over 70% of the capital belongs to Zionists, and that their capital prevails all over the world? They have been accumulating it for centuries. The gold of all times and nations is amassed in the vaults of their banks. Both in the past and today, the Zionists’ finances have not only served the basic function of finance, namely the principle that money brings more money, but have also been …used to finance one measure or another, to provide loans, to organize conquests, wars and coups, to bribe persons in office, to bribe and finance leaders, groups, parties, to hire armies and bands, to develop trade and industry, to raise matters up or to bring them to destruction – all depending on the tasks being pursued by the Zionists.
In this connection, the corrupting power of money is colossal. A person who has become keen on the idea of accumulating money in order to obtain some benefits or other is already to some extent in the clutches of Zion. By operating with benefits and money, the Zionists can easily make such a person do the things they require: making jobs available, carrying out measures necessary to the Zionists, exerting pressure on unwelcome persons, taking part in financial machinations, and the like. When such a person enters into financial contact with Zion, he quickly understands its strength and bases himself on it. It is not difficult to continue to work on such a person in the spirit required by Zion and turn him into a reliable and obedient tool of Zionism.
FREEMASONRY
Zion has many arms, and one of them is Freemasonry. Freemasonry practically came into being along with Zionism and is its fellow-traveller.
The Freemasons fulfill approximately the same role for Zionism as the Jesuits do for Roman Catholicism. The early Freemasons were the builders of the Temple of Solomon. Large numbers of secret Freemasonic lodges have at all times served as a means of fooling people by promising to build a better world, a world of goodness, charity, equality and justice, but in actual fact as a means of enticing people into the nets of Zion, of placing them under Zion’s command and, through those people, directing countries and events. There is a distinction between Jewish and Gentile Freemasonic lodges and organizations.
The Gentile ones are of course lower in rank, but it is precisely through them that Zion exercises direct control. Influential politicians, public figures, scholars, persons active in literature and art, military men, members of the administrative machinery, and the like, are drawn into the Gentile lodges and organizations, and it is through such people that Zion’s decisions are put into effect.
Freemasonry is strong. But it is still only one of the arms. The head is Zion. Freemasonry must be combated. But the main blow ought to be dealt against Zionism, which controls Freemasonry. At the same time, one should bear in mind that, even without Freemasonry, Zion, by using its own strength, has achieved, is achieving and will achieve its own objectives if it is not stopped.
Related– The Zionist Protection Racket
Global Zionism Exposed: Fourth Beast Rising – YouTube
Note — Leyba Davidovich Trotsky, whose real name was David Bronstein, said: “We must turn Russia into a desert populated by white negroes upon whom we shall impose a tyranny such as the most terrible Eastern despots never dreamt of. The only difference is that this will be a left-wing tyranny, not a right-wing tyranny. It will be a red tyranny and not a white one.”
“We mean the word ‘red’ literally because we shall shed such floods of blood as will make all the human losses suffered in the capitalist wars quake and pale by comparison. The biggest bankers across the ocean will work in the closest possible contact with us. If we win the revolution, we shall establish the power of Zionism upon the wreckage of the revolution’s funeral, and we shall become a power before which the whole world will sink to its knees. We shall show what real power is. By means of terror and bloodbaths, we shall reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a state of complete stupefaction and idiocy and to an animal existence… At the moment, our young men in their leather jackets, who are the sons of watchmakers from Odessa, Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitsa, know how to hate everything Russian! What pleasure they take in physically destroying the Russian intelligentsia – officers, academics and writers!…”
Taken from the “Memoirs” of Aron Simanovich, a jeweller at the court of the Tsar’s Imperial Majesty.
From the newspaper “Russkoye slovo”, No. 1.
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What Nobody Told You About Julian Assange
What Nobody Told You About Julian Assange David Sorensen, StopWorldControl.com. 26 June 2024
Editor’s note: this very important article is easier to read in the PDF document from the link above. This document includes several graphics.
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We Approach ‘State’ Singularity
We Approach ‘State’ Singularity From Zerohedge, 19 June 2024
Authored by Bruce Pardy via The Brownstone Institute,
Many citizens of the West believe that they live in free societies, or something close…
But as time goes on, public authorities increasingly insist on having a say in everything…
People cannot build things on their own land without permits. They cannot run businesses without approvals and inspections. They cannot give advice without professional designations. They cannot educate their children outside of state-mandated curricula. They cannot hire employees without triggering a myriad of workplace and tax requirements. They cannot produce and sell milk, cheese, or eggs without a license. They cannot earn money, spend money, or hold property without being taxed, and then taxed again.
Jeffrey Tucker recently described three layers of omnipotent managerial technocracy.
- The deep state, he suggested, consists of powerful and secretive central government agencies in the security, intelligence, law enforcement, and financial sectors.
- The middle state is a myriad of ubiquitous administrative bodies – agencies, regulators, commissions, departments, municipalities, and many more – run by a permanent bureaucracy.
- The shallow state is a plethora of consumer-facing private or semi-private corporations, including banks, Big Media, and huge commercial retail companies, which governments support, protect, subsidize, and pervert. The three layers work together.
For instance, in the financial sector, as Tucker illustrates, the deep state’s Federal Reserve pulls the powerful strings, the middle state’s financial and monetary regulators enforce myriad rules and policies, and the shallow state’s “private” titans like BlackRock and Goldman Sachs dominate commercial activity. It’s a system, Tucker writes, “designed to be impenetrable, permanent, and ever more invasive.”
We are approaching state singularity: the moment when state and society become indistinguishable.
In physics, a “singularity” is a single point in space-time. Inside black holes, gravity crushes volume to zero and mass density is infinite. In computer science, “technological singularity” is unitary artificial superintelligence. At the singularity, everything becomes one thing. Data points converge. Normal laws do not apply.
At state singularity, the state becomes society and society is a product of the state.
Legal norms and expectations become irrelevant. The state’s mandate is to do as it judges best – since everything and everyone are expressions of its vision. Powers are not separated between the state’s branches – the legislature, the executive, the bureaucracy, and the courts. Instead, they all do whatever they deem necessary. The bureaucracy legislates. Courts develop policy. Legislatures conduct hearings and prosecute cases. Government agencies change policies at will. The rule of law may be acknowledged as important in principle while it is rejected in practice.
State singularity is the ultimate collectivism. It resembles old-style fascism and communism, but it is neither. Fascist states enforce an idea, often nationalist in sentiment (“The motherland for the superior race”), and recruit private actors, especially corporations, to the cause. Communist regimes champion the working class and outlaw private property (“Workers of the world unite”). Singularity, in contrast, is not propelled by an idea other than singularity itself. To justify its own hegemony, the state champions a variety of other causes. In the modern era, social justice, climate change, transgender rights, feminism, economic reform, and many more have served to extend the state’s reach. Problems are rarely solved, but that is not the reason for taking them up.
State singularity develops gradually and insidiously. Whereas fascist, communist, and other centralized power regimes often result from deliberate political revolution, in the West omnipotent managerial technocracy has grown, spread, and infiltrated the nooks and crannies of social life without sudden political upheaval. Like a form of institutional Darwinism, public agencies, no matter their formal purpose, seek to persist, expand, and reproduce.
At the singularity, all solutions to all problems lie with government in its various forms. More, never less, programs, rules, initiatives, and structures are the answer. Like black holes, state singularities absorb and crush every other thing. Corporations serve state interests and participate in managing the economy. Singularities destroy voluntary community organizations by occupying the space and placing obstacles in the way. Both the left and the right seek to harness state power to craft society in their image.
In a singularity, one cannot propose to eliminate government. Doing so would be contrary to prevailing ideology and vested interests, but more fundamentally, the idea would be incomprehensible.
And not just to officials. Citizens dissatisfied with the services they receive want more service and better policy. When schools sexualize their children, they demand changes to the curriculum instead of the end of public schools. When monetary policy makes houses expensive, they demand government programs to make them cheap instead of the end of central banks. When government procurement is revealed to be corrupt, they demand accountability mechanisms instead of a smaller government. State singularity is found not just in the structures of government but in the minds of the people.
Modern states have capacities they have never had before. Technological advances are providing them with the ability to monitor spaces, supervise activities, collect information, and require compliance everywhere all the time. In the collectivist regimes of old, governments knew only what human eyes and ears could tell them. Soviet authorities were tyrannical, but they could not instantaneously monitor your cell phone, bank account, fridge, car, medications, and speech.
We are not at the singularity yet. But have we crossed the event horizon? At a black hole, the event horizon is the point of no return. Gravity becomes irresistible. No matter or energy, including light, can escape the pull to the singularity at the core of the abyss.
Our event horizon beckons. We cannot evade it by merely slowing down on the path that we are on. Liberation requires escape velocity in the other direction.
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Democracy won’t work whilst most media lean far left
Democracy won’t work whilst most media lean far left By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR Founding Director, 27 September 2023
As the election closes in, there appears to be an overwhelming mood for change.
New Zealanders have had enough. The chickens are coming home to roost for Labour as disgruntled voters, sick and tired of the incompetence, the lies and deceit, search for alternatives.
Election campaigns can be noisy affairs, and this one is no different. Given the unprecedented manner in which Labour has crushed democratic rights and imposed their destructive agenda onto the country, protesters are out in force, expressing their concerns directly to those who are seeking their vote.
But is it really any worse than it’s ever been?
In the nine years I was in Parliament and the four election campaigns I was involved in, shouting, yelling, heckling, pushing, and shoving, were all part of the rough and tumble of politics.
It wasn’t out of the ordinary to have to break through lines of protestors to get into an event, and I well remember giving one speech to an audience, where the barrage from opponents was so loud, even I couldn’t hear the address!
What seems to be different this time around, is that the media are also copping the wrath of a disgruntled public. And it’s not hard to see why.
When Jacinda Ardern was elected leader of Labour just before the 2017 election, the gushing media coverage was so extreme it was given a name: “Jacindamania”. From that point on, any semblance of media impartiality was swept aside, exposing the strong political bias of mainstream journalists.
That bias was revealed by journalists themselves in the “Worlds of Journalism Study 2.0. Journalists in Aotearoa/New Zealand” published last October by Massey University. In this third such survey undertaken by the Worlds of Journalism Study group – a collaboration of academics from more than 120 countries – a snapshot of the 1600 journalists who work in print, digital and broadcast media, is provided.
Almost 60 percent of the workforce are women, 10 percent are Maori, and as far as age is concerned, the profession is split between those in the younger 25 to 30 age group, and older 50 to 65 year-olds.
When it comes to political bias, the results are definitive – journalists overwhelmingly identify as left wing: “There are very few strongly right-wing journalists, but a substantial number of moderately or strongly left-wingers.”
The survey reveals 5 percent describe themselves as “extreme left” and 15 percent as “hard left”. Of the rest, 22 percent say they are “left”, 20 percent are “mild left”, and 23 percent are “middle left”, while 6 percent identify as “middle right”, 4 percent “mild right”, and only around 1 percent all up say they are “right”, “hard right” or “extreme right”.
In other words, nine out of ten New Zealand journalists are socialists, with one in three hard-core. Only one in ten journalists claim to have no socialist inclinations.
When it comes to ethics, the survey shows there’s been a significant shift in attitude, with journalist support for adhering to their professional code of ethics dropping 28 percent since the last survey in 2015.
And when it comes to the role of journalists, there is now a growing disconnect between what the public expects from the media and what journalists believe their role to be.
While the public wants journalists to report the news in an unbiased manner, presenting both sides of the argument on contentious issues so they can make up their own minds, that’s no longer how most journalists see it.
They regard ‘educating the audience’ as their most important role, followed by ‘countering disinformation’. But in some cases, this has led to a concerning development: hard-core left-wing journalists describing information they disagree with as “fake news” or “disinformation” in order to discredit those with alternative views.
Journalists still regard monitoring and scrutinising political leaders as important, but letting people express their views has declined significantly. Also dropping is the notion of ‘being a detached observer’ and ‘providing analysis of current affairs’.
The role that rose the most sharply, albeit from a low level, was ‘supporting government policy’.
In other words, the gulf that has opened up between what the public has traditionally expected from the media and what the media themselves believe their role to be, is no doubt responsible for the decline in public interest in the mainstream news.
Making things worse is the fact that journalists overwhelmingly believe the Treaty of Waitangi should be a key part of their reporting.
The survey, which was carried out just after Stuff announced its absurd apology to Maori for its historic news coverage – and other organisations such as Radio New Zealand and TVNZ had started to become more ‘inclusive’ – says this: “Asked to what extent did the Treaty apply to what they wrote, almost a third (31%) said it applied to everything. Another 43% said it applied to most things, such as any stories that involve legislation or politics, culture or society in which the treaty is referenced. A minority (16 percent) thought it only related to some things, such as stories for Maori about Maori issues, while 2% thought it had no relevance to journalism.”
It’s no wonder the media are seen to be increasingly out of step with society.
This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, freelance journalist and former newspaper editor Karl du Fresne, believes these developments are the consequence of the transfer of journalism training from the newsroom to the lecture room:
“Earlier generations of journalists learned on the job from other journalists. Many of my contemporaries came from working-class backgrounds. They didn’t go to university and were proud to regard journalism as a trade rather than profession. The importance of neutrality, fairness and balance was drummed into them. They had no delusions of grandeur.
“But from the 1970s on, journalism was subjected to academic capture. Budding journalists were inculcated with a highly politicised vision of journalism’s purpose. They were encouraged to acquire degrees that were often based on esoteric theories far removed from the simple, practical concerns of good journalism. Over time, that has had the fatal effect of creating a widening gap between journalists and the communities they claim to serve. Even more dangerously, it has led journalists to think they are wiser and smarter than the people who buy newspapers and watch the TV news, and even morally superior to them. As the Marxist American journalist Batyar Ungar-Sargon puts it, they climbed up the status ladder and became part of the elite.”
To make matters worse, most mainstream media organisations accepted handouts from Labour’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, and as a result, became echo chambers for government propaganda. This was especially the case with regards to promoting Labour’s fraudulent Treaty ‘partnership’ claim that underpinned their whole unmandated race-based He Puapua agenda.
With tens of millions of dollars of additional taxpayers’ money also poured into the media through Government advertising and sponsorship, it’s no wonder the public became worried the media had been ‘bought off’ and could no longer be trusted as a reliable source of information.
There have been stand-out pockets, of course – mainstream journalists who continued to speak the truth and hold the Government to account – but they are few and far between. As a result, alternative media channels have emerged to fill the vacuum.
As Karl says, people no longer look to our mainstream journalistic institutions to reflect the society they live in. “The crucial nexus between media institutions and the community they purport to serve has been strained to breaking point. In fact the media often seem implacably opposed to the society they live in and determined to re-shape it, whether people want it or not.”
With journalists now advocating politics rather than merely reporting it, it’s little wonder that they are now being berated with the same contempt the public has for politicians.
While thankfully the media lovefest with Jacinda Ardern began to wane before she actually left Parliament, the impact of her incompetent leadership on our society has been devastating.
More than anything, what Labour’s time in office has taught us is that for our democracy to function properly, we need balanced journalism.
And if anyone needs further explanation, look no further than Three Waters.
Three Waters was the brainchild of Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta, and her Maori Caucus colleagues. Their primary motivation was to pass control of fresh water to Maori, but to dress it up as necessary reform for the public good.
If journalists had been doing their job of holding the government to account, the policy would have never withstood their scrutiny.
Let me explain.
Water supplies in New Zealand have traditionally been regulated by the Ministry of Health. Their annual water quality audits showed excellent results – as did the regular surveillance reports from the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR).
But to create an imperative for reform on the scale Labour needed, a water quality crisis had to be created.
Minister Mahuta did this by resurrecting a report that had been prepared for Helen Clark’s Labour Government in 2006. ESR scientist Andrew Ball had been contracted to provide information on the incidence of endemic waterborne gastro-intestinal disease in New Zealand. While he found no real problem with water quality – “the size of most outbreaks is small, averaging nine cases per outbreak in 2000-2004, and is smaller than any other countries for which data are available” – there was insufficient local data to calculate the incidence of endemic disease.
As a result, Dr Ball used UK statistics to estimate between 18,000 and 34,000 infections a year in New Zealand, but he qualified his findings with a disclaimer: “The reliability of this method is questioned by the author.”
In other words, even he knew these estimates were not accurate.
Unfazed, Minister Mahuta used that old report to claim – as a mantra – that the main reason for the Three Waters reforms was that “At least 34,000 New Zealanders become ill from drinking tap water every year.”
We exposed the Minister’s claims as rubbish, knowing that if 34,000 people each year got sick from drinking tap water, we would all know about it because the issue would never be out of the news headlines.
The recent water contamination problem in Queenstown, where 30 or more people are reported to have become ill from drinking tap water, which dominated the news for days, has demonstrated what a huge lie the Minister’s 34,000 claim has been.
And the point is this – if the media had questioned the Minister about her ridiculous claim instead of regurgitating her lies, the whole senseless Three Waters scheme would never have got off the ground – saving the country billions of dollars that will have been utterly and completely wasted once the scheme is cancelled by the new government.
The Ardern legacy is about to come to an end and a new government will need to set about correcting a multitude of wrongs. But the media should also reflect on the status of its industry and what it needs to do to restore public trust. The damage done is such that restoring their reputation will be no small task.
Predominantly journalists need to go back to their role as neutral observers and reporters of the news. And with regards to contentious issues, they need to return to providing a balance of perspectives so that their audience has reliable information on which to make up their own mind.
In particular, they need to recognise the dreadful division within our country that Labour has created – with their assistance – and they need to help rebuild our society and heal the harm.
In summary, we don’t need the media to advocate political agendas – we have politicians for that. But what we do need is balance and truth in the news. Is that too much to ask?
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CULTURAL INJUSTICE, HOW NEW ZEALAND IS APPLYING APARTHEID
CULTURAL INJUSTICE^J HOW NEW ZEALAND IS APPLYING APARTHEID By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 6 August 2023
Two separate shootings in Auckland over the last three days that have left two people dead and one critically injured are the second and third serious gun incidents in the city in just over two weeks. They follow the shooting rampage of Matu Reid, who killed two co-workers and injured ten others, before taking his own life.
These events are indicative of the rise in crime that has become such a major problem for our society.
Broadcaster Peter Williams has some numbers: “ In the three months to the end of April, there were 45,046 retail crimes reported. Police attended 1 in 10 of them and made 1041 arrests. If you run a shop and get burgled, you have just a one in ten chance of the police coming and only a 2.3 percent chance that an alleged offender will be arrested.”
These damning figures are contributing to the growing sense of lawlessness that’s now enveloping New Zealand. This anxiety was picked up in a May survey of 1,000 people published by the Herald. It shows two-thirds of Kiwis are more concerned they may become a victim of crime today than they were five years ago.
The most revealing statistic is the diverging trend between reported crimes which increased 33 percent between 2017 and 2022, and the 26 percent decline in Police arrests, the 25 percent drop in convictions, and the 38 percent fall in prison sentences.
These are very significant numbers. Quite simply, Labour’s soft on crime policy is failing to keep New Zealanders safe.
Furthermore, the system is full of paradoxes. Here’s one.
In 2021, a farmer, found guilty of breaching Regional Council Resource Management Act consents, received a three-month prison sentence.
Meanwhile in 2023, 24-year-old Matu Reid, who attacked his girlfriend so brutally that she needed hospitalisation, ended up with a community sentence – in spite of already being under supervision for a previous violence offence and being assessed by his probation officer as being at high risk of causing harm to others.
How is it that our justice system could deliver such inconsistency: A man who was no risk at all to the safety of others was thrown in jail, while a violent offender was released into the community, where he was able to access a pump-action shotgun and kill his workmates after being sacked from his job?
To address this, let’s first look into some of Labour’s changes to the justice system – starting with Corrections.
According to briefing papers to the incoming Labour Government in 2017, on any given day the Department of Corrections managed around 10,400 offenders in prison and 30,000 in the community.
Offenders receiving a Court sentence of two years or less are eligible to serve their time in the community doing between 40 and 400 hours of unpaid community work. Those whose offending is at the more serious end of the scale are subjected to more intensive supervision, including electronic monitoring, curfews, and home detention.
When it came to the ethnicity of prisoners, the Corrections’ report stated, “Maori have made approximately half of our prison population for at least the last 30 years.”
Prison statistics show that in September 2017, Maori comprised 50.7 percent of inmates, Europeans were 31.6 percent, and Pacific Islanders were 11.1 percent.
By late 2019, when prison numbers had fallen slightly to 10,040 and the proportion of Maori had increased to 51.9 percent, the Minister of Corrections Kelvin Davis announced an ambitious new strategy, Hokai Rangi, to reduce the number of Maori in prison: “The ultimate objective is to lower the proportion of Maori in Corrections’ care to a level that matches the Maori share of the general population.”
In other words, he wanted to reduce the numbers of Maori in prison from 52 percent down to 16 percent!
When questioned by Q+A’s Jack Tame, Kelvin Davis claimed racism is the reason there are so many Maori in prison: “I believe there are parts of the system that are extremely racist.”
When asked what parts of the system are the most racist, the Minister said you just need to look at the numbers: “Why is it that Maori are over-represented? They’re prosecuted for similar crimes that other people aren’t.”
But when Jack Tame said that’s because Maori are committing these crimes, Kelvin Davis responded, “We can go back and talk about how history has impacted on outcomes for Maori… but Hokai Rangi is about looking at the Corrections system and making sure it works and is effective for our people.”
Hokai Rangi, which was co-designed by iwi, adopted a “Maori world view” and promoted co-governance. It transformed Corrections “from a system based on Western schools of thought in its operating approach to one that prioritises and elevates matauranga Maori.”
According to the Minister, the strategy, to be implemented over the five years from 2019 to 2024, would focus on accountability: “Action-planning and measurement, so that we can track our progress, is fundamental to this strategy, as is a commitment to weave accountability for outcomes throughout the Department at all levels.”
While progress reports remain virtually impossible to find, the latest April 2023 Corrections statistics show a dramatic 18 percent fall in the prison population to 8,513, but a rise in the proportion of Maori to 52.7 percent!
This rapid reduction in prison numbers has fuelled concerns that Labour’s ‘soft on crime’ changes are responsible for the increase in crime. Not only that, but the fingerprints of iwi and Labour’s Maori Caucus are not just over Corrections, but the Police as well.
Broadcaster Kate Hawkesby highlights this in her outline of what happened to a tourist who was the victim of a serious unprovoked assault by a nightclub bouncer:
“The Police turned up, were shown video footage, CCTV footage, they spoke to everyone concerned, they had everything there right in front of them including the culprit. Did they make an arrest? They did not.
“The Police at the time were unsure what to do; they said they needed to ‘think about it’. The next day, many questions were asked, including why no charges had been laid. They’d be ‘following it up in due course’ they said.
“Witness statements were made, reports filed – and then silence…
“Then, seven whole months after the event, a police spokesperson got in touch with an update. The bouncer had been offered… an ‘Iwi Community Panel – where the participant is given the choice of attending a panel hearing or going to Court. Panels are made up of three community people. They are not judges or lawyers. Their job is to decide what should happen as a result of the offence.’
“The offender had to ‘meet some outcomes’ the police spokesperson said. What outcomes? Who knows. Who’s checking he meets them? As far as the police were concerned, it’d been ‘dealt with’. They’d handed it over to the community panel. Case closed.”
As Kate says, a violent attack that sent a tourist to hospital resulted in no arrests, no charges, no court, no sentence – only a chat with a community panel of iwi.
Given the lack of consequences, will this offender be deterred from reoffending? Unlikely.
Will this tourist come back to New Zealand? Definitely not.
Labour’s soft on crime approach is clearly harming our country!
The Police panel that ‘dealt’ with this criminal was a ‘Te Pae Oranga Iwi Community Panel’, which operates in ‘partnership’ with iwi.
According to the Police website, “Te Pae Oranga means to talk, listen and become well. It uses tikanga and kaupapa Maori and restorative justice practices…”
They say, “It can be more effective than prosecuting someone, as more serious options can do more harm than good: having a criminal conviction can have long-lasting consequences. A criminal conviction makes it harder for an offender to get their lives back on track.”
They maintain “Te Pae Oranga is not a soft option”.
Kate Hawkesby’s tourist would disagree!
It seems the Police have now become “an inclusive partner for Iwi Maori”.
The Police Commissioner has established a 21-member Maori Focus Forum that not only co-designs policing strategy for dealing with Maori offenders, but also plays a “governance role”.
The end result of this partnership with iwi is that Police “live up to the joint expectations of those partners, to improve long term wellbeing for Maori who come to Police attention.”
In other words, Maori justice is all about the offender – ensuring they have a positive outcome. There is little regard for the victim.
As a result, offenders who are Maori now have a different pathway – one that looks past the victim to embrace the culture of the offender.
This is dangerous.
The paradox that led to Matu Reid being released into the community points to other failings in the criminal justice system.
In his sentencing notes the District Court’s Judge Bonnar explained the process: “[W]hen I decide on the final sentence for you, Mr Reid, I am going to set a starting point for the strangulation charge. I am then going to take account of the other charges, and then consider what credits I can apply because of things in your favour.”
The Judge determined the appropriate sentence for Matu Reid’s assault on his partner was two years and three months’ imprisonment. Given the violence, the vulnerability of the victim, and the fact that he was under supervision at the time of the offending, the sentence was lifted to three years.
The credits applied were a nine-month discount for pleading guilty, and a seven-month discount for having a ‘troubled background’ – as set out in a cultural report prepared under section 27 of the Sentencing Act 2002. That brought the sentence down to 20 months – under the two-year limit for a custodial sentence.
The Department of Corrections’ Prison Operations Manual provides guidance to Judges for the length of sentences: an offender is eligible for parole after serving one-third of a sentence of more than two-years, and is eligible for release after serving half of a sentence of two years or less.
In the Judge’s words, “A 20 month sentence of imprisonment would… equate to a 10 month sentence of home detention. However, I also take into account the time that you spent remanded in custody on these charges… five and a half months or so. Therefore, I am going to apply a further five-month credit on the home detention sentence. That reduces the total sentence, Mr Reid, to one of five months’ home detention.”
If Matu Reid had not been given a seven-month discount for his troubled background, he would have ended up in jail, and he and his two victims would still be alive.
Cultural reports have now become a multi-million-dollar industry. In just five years the number has exploded from eight a year to almost 2,500 last year, costing taxpayers over $6.5 million!
There are now calls for taxpayer funding for these reports to be removed and for the discounts that can be applied by Judges to be limited to exceptional circumstances only.
‘Maori law’ is not only in Corrections and Policing. An expectation is now emanating from our highest court that tikanga, or Maori custom, can be regarded as law. This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, King’s Counsel Gary Judd, disagrees:
“In the Ellis case, a majority of the New Zealand Supreme Court stated that tikanga was ‘the first law’ of New Zealand… [but] ‘tikanga’ cannot be the ‘first’ law because it is not ‘law’ at all…
“The ‘tikanga’ the judgment endorses as ‘first law’ is a set of beliefs, principles of a spiritual nature, a way of life… Beliefs and principles of a spiritual nature are not law. The way of life of some is not part of the law of the land.”
Labour has fundamentally undermined New Zealand’s criminal justice system since coming to power in 2017. The consequences are plain for all to see. It’s fixation with making the Maori incarceration statistics more ‘equitable’ is dangerous. New Zealanders have a right to feel safe, and they must demand better from whoever becomes the government on October 14.
TIKANGA IS NOT LAW
By Gary Judd KC
“Let it be clear: as New Zealand’s Bill of Rights affirms, everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief, including the right to adopt and to hold opinions without interference.
“Everyone also has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinion of any kind in any form.
“Further, every person has the right to manifest that person’s religion or belief in worship, observance, practice, teaching, either individually or in community with others, and either in public or in private.
“Therefore, anyone who subscribes to tikanga beliefs, and wishes to manifest them, is perfectly entitled to do so, without interference. Only when beliefs produce actions harmful to others do questions arise whether the law should intervene. The intervention, which then may occur, is not because of the beliefs but because of the harmful actions.
“Just as there should be no interference with the adoption and holding of tikanga beliefs, so also there should be no interference with others’ freedom of thought, conscience, religion, and belief. This latter interference may occur when people in positions of power seek to impose tikanga beliefs on those who do not hold them.
“The point is simply this: tikanga is not law because beliefs as such cannot be law. Calling tikanga something which patently it is not, not only offends reason but undermines the value of what it actually is…”
*To read the full article please visit the NZCPR.com website:
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Archbishop Vigano accuses the Vatican of corruption
Archbishop Vigano accuses the Vatican of corruption From Forbidden Knowledge, 13 July 2023
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò served as the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States from 2011 to 2016. He has since become a Vatican whistleblower, starting with the Vatican leaks scandal of 2012, exposing financial corruption and the blackmailing of homosexual clergy by individuals outside the Church. In a 2018 letter, Viganò accused Pope Francis and other church leaders of covering up sexual abuse allegations against former cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
In recent years, he has railed against the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, which is identical to the United Nation’s Agenda 2030, urging a global response to this global threat in the creation of an anti-Globalist alliance to “free humanity from a totalitarian regime that brings together in itself the horrors of the worst dictatorships of all time.”
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TRANSCRIPT
Dear friends,
For two years now, we have been witnessing a global coup d’état, in which a financial and ideological elite has succeeded in seizing control of part of the national government, public and private institutions, the media, the judiciary, politicians and religious leaders.
All of these without distinction have become enslaved to these new masters, who ensure power, money and social affirmation to their accomplices.
Fundamental rights, which up until yesterday were presented as invaluable have been trampled underfoot in the name of an “emergency”. Today, a “health emergency”, tomorrow, an “ecological emergency” and after that, an “internet emergency”.
This global coup d’état deprives citizens of any possibility of defense, since the legislative, executive and judicial powers are accomplished in the violation of law, justice and the purpose for which they exist.
It is a global coup d’état, because this criminal attack against citizens extends to the whole world, with very rare exception.
It is a world war, where the enemies are all of us – even those who unwittingly have not yet understood the significance of what is happening.
It is a war fought not with weapons but with illegitimate rules, wicked economic policies and intolerable limitations of natural rights.
Supranational organizations, financing large measure by the conspirator of this crude attack are interfering in the government of individual nations and in the lives, relationships and health of billions of people.
They are doing it for money, certainly – but even more so, in order to centralize power so as to establish a planetary dictatorship. It is the Great Reset of the World Economic Forum, the Agenda 2030 of the United Nations. It is the plan of the New World Order, in which a universal republic enslaves everyone and a “religion of humanity” cancels faith in Christ.
In the face of this global coup d’état, it is necessary to form an international, anti-globalist alliance, which gathers all those who want to oppose the dictatorship, who have no intention of becoming slaves to a faceless power, who are not willing to cancel their own identity, their own individuality, their own religious faith.
If the attack is global, the defense must also be global. I call upon rulers, politicians and religious leaders, intellectuals and all people of good will, inviting them to unite in an alliance that launches an anti-globalist manifesto, refuting point by point the errors and deviation of this dystopia of the New World Order and proposing concrete alternatives for a political program inspired by the common good, the moral principles of Christianity, traditional values, the protection of life and the natural family, the protection of business and work, the promotion of education and research and respect for Creation.
This anti-globalist alliance will have to bring together the nations that intend to escape the infernal yoke of tyranny and affirm their own sovereignty, forming agreements of mutual collaboration with nations and people who share their principles and the common yearning for freedom, justice and goodness.
It will have to denounce the crimes of the elite, identify those responsible, denounce them to international tribunals and limit their excessive power and harmful influence.
It will have to prevent the actions of the lobbies, above all by fighting against the corruption of state officials and those who work in the information industry and by freezing the capital used to destabilize the social order.
In nations where the government is subservient to the elite, they will be able to establish popular resistance movements and communities of national liberation, including representatives of all sectors of society who propose a radical reform of politics inspired by the common good and firmly opposed to the neo-Malthusian project of the Globalist agenda.
I invite all those who want to defend a traditional Christian society, to meet together in an international forum, to be able to be held as soon as possible, in which representatives of various nations come together to present a serious, concrete and clear proposal.
My appeal is made to political leaders and to rulers who care about good of their citizens, leaving aside your system of political parties and the logic imposed by a system enslaved to power and money.
I call the Christian nations, together from East to West, inviting heads of state and the healthy forces of institutions; the economy, labor, university, healthcare, information to join a common project: disrupting the old system and putting aside the hostilities that are designed by the enemies of humanity, in the name of Divide et Impera.
We do not accept our adversaries’ rules, because they are made precisely to prevent us from reacting and organizing an effective and unseizable position. I call upon nations and their citizens to align themselves under the Cross of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the only King and Savior, the Prince of Peace, In Hoc Signo Vinces.
Let us found this anti-Globalist alliance. Let us give. It is a simple and clear program and let us free humanity from a totalitarian regime that brings together in itself the horrors of the worst dictatorships of all time.
If we continue to delay, if we do not understand the threat that looms over us all, if we do not react by organizing ourselves into a firm and courageous resistance, this infernal regime that is establishing itself everywhere will not be able to be stopped.
And may your Mighty God assist us and protect us.
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George Bernard Shaw, the Fabian Society and a ‘Brave New World’
George Bernard Shaw^J the Fabian Society and a ‘Brave New World’ By Rhoda Wilson, 22 June 2023
There are over 7,000 members of the Fabian Society. It boasts being “the future of the left since 1884.” Members past and present include Tony Blair, Ed Miliband, Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan. Khan, who is not only London’s mayor but also the chair of C40 Cities, served as chair of the Fabian Society in 2008-10.
The Fabian Society’s website states that it has been affiliated with the Labour Party throughout the party’s history and is the only original founder that “remains affiliated in unchanged form.”
After Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997, over 200 Fabians sat in the House of Commons, including many of the cabinet. After the 2015 election and the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader the role of the society as a pluralist, non-factional forum within the Labour movement came to the fore. Labour’s defeat at the 2019 election saw the party turn back towards its Fabian roots.
So, what are the Fabian Society’s roots?
It was established in 1884 by a coterie of British eugenicists and Malthusians to promote a new social order designed to mould society into a new, mechanised order run by a managerial elite of “social scientists” from the top down.
Among its early members was George Bernard Shaw who became the leading spirit of the Society. Shaw also advocated for the killing of those who could not justify their existence to a “properly appointed board” – a similar albeit darker vision of the social credit system our rights and freedoms are threatened with today.
Bottom of Form
Fabian Socialists are Statist, they are absolutely authoritarian in their philosophy, Avangelista wrote. Their long-term goal has always been a socialist dictatorship with the imposition of a legalistic society where the individual is simply a part of the collective.
The idea of social justice is the biggest selling point and perhaps the easiest to peddle to the people. To give a recent example, in her 2018 book ‘Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism’, Kristen Ghodsee freely quotes from the works of Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw to bolster her argument that capitalism is inherently sexist. Based on Shaw’s analysis, Ghodsee concludes that capitalism makes slaves out of women who, under socialism, would supposedly be happy and free.
The Fabian plan for a gradual socialist revolution was as definitive as it possibly could be, to say it has been a conspiracy is simplistic in the extreme. It instituted a widespread educational program for its leadership and its minions, as time progressed, it opened schools, such as the London School of Economics, and the New School of Social Research.
One stroke of genius was that instead of advocating a Socialist State, they assisted in the implementation of the Welfare State which is merely a few steps away from a purely Socialistic State.
In 1942, Stuart Chase, in his book ‘The Road We Are Traveling’, spelt out the system the Fabians had in mind:
- Strong, centralised government.
- Powerful Executive at the expense of Parliaments or Congress and the Judicial.
- Government-controlled banking, credit and securities exchange.
- Government control over employment.
- Unemployment insurance, old age pensions.
- Universal medical care, food and housing programs.
- Access to unlimited government borrowing.
- A managed monetary system.
- Government control over foreign trade.
- Government control over natural energy sources, transportation and agricultural production.
- Government regulation of labour.
- Youth camps devoted to health discipline, community service and ideological teaching consistent with those of the authorities.
- Heavy progressive taxation.
Read more: A Fabian Socialist Dream Come True, Avangelista, 6 September 2012
An example of the Fabian ideology that we are currently facing is a digital currency coupled with a digital identity that will apportion rewards based on your value to society. This is essentially an extension of the Fabian mindset into the world of financial transactions and monetary evaluations. Fabians believed that some form of socioeconomic tribunal would be needed in order for each citizen to be quantified according to their “worth” to society. The Chinese social credit score is a variant of that same concept.
This is the stained-glass window from the Beatrice Webb House in Surrey, England, former headquarters of the Fabian Society. “It was designed by George Bernard Shaw and depicts Sidney Webb and Shaw striking the Earth with hammers to “REMOULD IT NEARER TO THE HEART’S DESIRE,” a line from Omar Khayyam. Note the wolf in sheep’s clothing in the Fabian crest above the globe. Source: A Fabian Socialist Dream Come True In 2006, the Fabian window was installed in a library at LSE and unveiled by Tony Blair. Source: Hammering out a new world – the Fabian Window at LSE
The Fabians wanted to fulfil the goal of a New World Order of the Hermetics, but they believed that people would change with reforms, not a revolution as Marx had claimed. In fact, as they wanted to establish socialism under capital control, they aimed to impose socialism not only on the working class but also on the capitalists. To achieve this goal of changing society, they would advise governments, especially in the field of education, and change society through them.
Read more: Fabian Society: Roots, theory and practice of socialist think tank, Daily Sabah, 4 February 2022
It is said that if the Fabians had a more famous dystopia than ‘Brave New World’, it was George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ or ‘1984’. Thirty years after writing his 1932 book ‘Brave New World’, Aldous Huxley gave a speech at Berkeley which some say is an admission by Huxley that Brave New World was a blueprint rather than merely a fictional novel. This idea seems to be supported by a letter Huxley sent to Orwell in 1949 in conjunction with the purpose for which Huxley was in America.
Brave New World depicted a society characterised by medicated contentment, a widely accepted, eugenics-supported caste system and a government-enforced obsession with consumerism. 1984 depicts a state where daring to think differently is rewarded with torture, where people are monitored every second of the day, and where party propaganda trumps free speech and thought.
Huxley’s letter to Orwell stated:
The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.
Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.
My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.
Huxley was not positing whether 1984 or Brave New World would happen, he was arguing which of the two forms the future scientific dictatorship would take. He reiterated this message in his 1962 Berkeley Speech.
Huxley’s move from the UK to America was not happenstance. According to Marilyn Ferguson in her book ‘The Aquarian Conspiracy’, in the 1930s Huxley was sent to the US by the British government “as the case officer for an operation to prepare the United States for the mass dissemination of drugs … In effect, Huxley and [others] laid the foundations during the late 1930s and the 1940s for the later LSD culture.” Over the years Huxley was involved in dubious activities including the use of LSD to “brainwash influential people” and being in contact with the president of Sandoz, who was fulfilling a CIA contract for MK-Ultra, consisting of large quantities of LSD.
Further resources:
- Video: Aldous Huxley – The Ultimate Revolution ‘Brave New World’, 1962 Berkeley Speech 1962 (82 mins)
- Transcript: Aldous Huxley – The Ultimate Revolution ‘Brave New World, 1962 Berkely Speech
- Aldous Huxley, LSD and CIA programmes, Churchmouse Campanologist, 26 October 2014
George Bernard Shaw, Fabians and Eugenics
What is tricky about eugenics for those who like to call themselves progressives, is that most of its adherents came from the political left.
In 2019, The Guardian published an article that the great founding fathers of British socialism had dreams almost as vile as those of the Nazis. Eugenics, The Guardian stated, is the dirty little secret of the British left. The names of the first champions read like a roll call of British socialism’s best and brightest: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes, the New Statesman and the Manchester Guardian.
Many on the left of politics signed up for the Eugenics Society, which in the 1930s rivalled the Fabians as the fashionable salon of London socialism. HG Wells could not contain his enthusiasm, hailing eugenics as the first step toward the removal “of detrimental types and characteristics” and the “fostering of desirable types” in their place.
Further reading: Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left’s closet, The Guardian, 17 February 2012
Eugenics wasn’t the only distasteful society that some of these socialists belonged to. Many were also members of the Fabian Society. Both Wells and Shaw were Fabians who disdained the raggedness of the working class and sought in eugenics a means to attain socialism through gradualist reforms while supporting British imperialism. They were forerunners to the contemporary Labour Party.
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays. With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He belonged to the Protestant “ascendancy”– the landed Irish gentry. In the 1880s, Shaw became a vegetarian, a socialist, a spellbinding orator, a polemicist, a playwright and a Fabian.
In 1884 he became the leading spirit of the Fabian Society and the force behind the newly founded Society. Shaw involved himself in every aspect of its activities, most visibly as editor of one of the classics of British socialism, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), to which he also contributed two sections.
Shaw not only passionately hated liberty but for decades he was a staunch proponent of genocide, refusing to soften his views even after the full horror of the Nazi death camps during World War II was brought to light. While many have forgotten Shaw’s views, many others have brushed off his statements as mere “satire.”
Further reading: The Real George Bernard Shaw – Fabian Socialist and Hitlerian Advocate of Mass Murder
In a 1931 newsreel, Shaw advocated for the state to murder people who can’t justify their value to the state, and thus, their right to live. This clip is included at the end of a video compilation of statements made by Shaw which you can watch HERE.
It was also included in a 2010 special edition of the Glenn Beck programme on Fox News titled ‘The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die’. To give the clip some context you can watch the Glenn Beck programme HERE or uploaded in parts HERE and read the transcript HERE. In the lead-up to the 1931 newsreel clip, Beck said:
The fathers of communism, Marx, and Engels, believed that societies would evolve from capitalism to socialism. But they acknowledged that there were still what they called primitive societies that hadn’t even evolved into capitalists yet. They called them racial trash.
As the revolution happens, the classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. There was only one thing left for those too far behind in the process of societal evolution. “The chief mission of all other races and peoples, large and small, is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust.”
Up until the horrors of Hitler, prominent socialist supporters discuss these ideas out in the open. Nobel Prize winner, Fabian socialist and prominent Soviet supporter, George Bernard Shaw … And this was actually somewhat subtle for Shaw.
The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die, Glenn Beck, Fox News, 22 January 2010
In the 1931 newsreel, speaking about capital punishment, Shaw quickly turned to his eugenic viewpoint:
“There’s an extraordinary number of people whom I want to kill … It must be evident to all of you, you must all know half a dozen people at least, who are no use in this world.
“And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioners and say every 5 years or every 7 years, just put them there, and say, sir or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?
“If you can’t justify your existence; if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organisation of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”
“George Bernard Shaw reopens capital punishment controversy,” 5 March 1931 (1 min)
His words are not satire. In a 1948 article on capital punishment, Shaw wrote:
There is a considerable class of persons who become criminals because they cannot fend for themselves, but who under tutelage, superintendence, and provided sustenance are self-supporting and even profitable citizens … Reorganise their lives for them; and do not prate foolishly about their liberty … it may be asked whether they are to be allowed not only to read the newspapers but also to marry and breed … the ungovernables, the ferocious, the conscienceless, the idiots, the self-centred myops and morons, what of them? Do not punish them. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill them.
Capital Punishment, George Bernard Shaw, June 1948
And in the preface of his play ‘On the Rocks’, Shaw wrote:
Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly … That killing is a necessity is beyond question by any thoughtful person … what we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.
On the Rocks, Preface, George Bernard Shaw, 1932
Featured image: Eugenics, George Bernard Shaw and the need for a dramatic reckoning (left), Fabian Society coat of arms, a wolf in sheep’s clothing (right)
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A Devastating Exposé of America’s Colleges
A Devastating Exposé of America’s Colleges By George Leef, 6 June 2023
A new book examines ideological infiltration by brainwashing radicals.
It has become so generally known that the Left has infiltrated our colleges and universities that people seldom bother to produce the evidence of it. Without evidence, many who would like to see a return to depoliticized campuses tend to forget how bad things have become. We need a loud alarm bell to arouse us.
Professor Stanley K. Ridgley has written just the book we need: Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities. In it, Ridgley, who teaches at Drexel University, blows the whistle on the ugly phenomenon of using college to turn students into zealots who despise America. In the book, we learn about the organizations that are behind this covert operation and the tactics they use. If you are inclined to think that the Left’s control over our educational institutions is regrettable but not a matter of great concern, Brutal Minds is essential reading.
Here’s how Ridgley describes his book: “It’s a tale of how one of history’s great institutions—the American university—is undergoing an infiltration by an army of mediocrities whose goal is to destroy it as an institution of knowledge creation and replace it with an authoritarian organ of ideology and propaganda.”
The American university is undergoing an infiltration by an army of mediocrities.
The word “mediocrities” is carefully chosen. Ridgley shows that the faculty and administrators who are so adamant about imposing their utopian vision of “transformative education” are overwhelmingly the products of our schools of education. Ed schools, long known for their weak students, low standards, and susceptibility to academic fads, have in the last few decades been taken over by a cadre of Marxists who see only bad in America. Worse yet, they have built a pipeline that sends their graduates into faculty and administrative positions in our educational institutions.
Professor Sherry Watt of the University of Iowa is a good example of those academicians. She propounds her Privileged Identity Exploration model, which, Ridgley writes, “prescribes a psychological attack on persons with ‘privileged identities’ in her classes.” Why do that? Because, in her view, many American students have erroneous views about race that must be demolished before they can become “allies” in the fight for “equity.”
Some of the brainwashers are found in once-respectable academic programs. Ridgley points to Katherine Thorsteinson, a then-doctoral candidate in Cornell’s English department, as an example. In her writing course, she focused on the supposed evils of “white privilege,” declaring that “discomfort and confusion can actually be important for the racial (un)learning process, particularly for white students.” Students who need to learn how to write well are subjected to her obsession with race. A few, with enough “discomfort” thrown at them, might be won over to her views; none, probably, learn very much about good writing.
Most of the brainwashing, however, is not done in regular courses but, rather, in the ubiquitous “student affairs” offices. In years gone by, colleges had a few low-level employees to handle student life outside of academics, such as organizing a karaoke night. They still do such mundane tasks but during the last 30 years or so have decided to take on a new responsibility they call the “co-curriculum.” Ridgley explains, “The co-curriculum is the embodiment of the bureaucrats’ belief that they should be involved in all aspects of students’ lives outside the classroom.”
And they aren’t much interested in the old-fashioned extracurricular activities. They’re intent on using every bit of influence they have to get students to see things through a “social justice” lens. It’s because of this new preoccupation with teaching (as if student affairs bureaucrats were actual scholars) that we now find students having to participate in activities like the Privilege Walk and the Oppression Game.
Most brainwashing is done not in regular courses but in ubiquitous “student affairs” offices.
Incidentally, student affairs offices were never given this responsibility. They just declared it was theirs.
Most of the people hired into these positions have bright, shiny, education-school credentials, often master’s degrees or even doctorates. Earning those credentials, Ridgley makes clear, calls for little more than mouthing the right clichés about social problems. No true research is called for, and the standards are so flimsy that even the weakest student gets his or her degree. One student, for example, wrote about the problem of white privilege in comic books. This kind of faux education appeals to people who “see a route to professional advancement with only a minimum of actual expertise demanded.”
Once the eager educator-wannabees obtain their campus jobs, there are two organizations ready to help them maximize their impact with students: the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA). Both organizations are controlled by “progressives” who advocate using student affairs offices to promote their ideology.
Here, for example, is an eye-opening statement that Ridgley drew from a NASPA handbook:
Student affairs provide the theoretical foundation and practical strategies to effectively foster the development of social justice allies, specifically addressing pedagogical issues relating to negotiating sexual orientation, gender, disability and race. We outline critical pedagogical strategies for meeting community resistance in a manner that increases potential for enlisting them in the battle for social justice and equity.
ACPA is just as toxic. Ridgley points to its 2019 document entitled “A Bold Vision Forward: A Framework for the Strategic Imperative for Racial Justice and Decolonization.” Pure leftist ideology.
ACPA and NASPA sponsor conferences and workshops and publish what Ridgley calls “cargo cult” journals, consisting of tendentious articles with a veneer of academic authenticity achieved by citing similar works published by like-minded writers. Here’s a sample of such scholarship:
A critical cultural perspective helps student affairs practitioners understand the power of culture and, in so doing, enables them to dismantle oppressive cultural conditions.
The student affairs agenda is usually hidden behind innocuous phrases like “learning about race,” but there’s no mistaking the cultural Marxism that “practitioners” are expected to push.
Sometimes, the brainwashers overplay their hands and get called out. That is what happened at the University of Delaware. In January 2007, two student affairs staffers unveiled their Curricular Model (CM), which was meant to augment the actual coursework of students with additional learning the staffers regarded as essential. To their consternation, however, details about their project got out and ignited a protest.
Ridgley writes the following about this controversy:
It was exposed as a crude thought-reform effort of psychological coercion aimed at undergraduates. It turns out that almost 200 trainers at Delaware had been indoctrinated in a “Diversity Facilitation Training” session directed by Shaktri Butler, whose material is a mash-up of discredited pseudoscience, prejudice, and racialist Newspeak.
Delaware’s CM included mandatory dorm-based programs where white students were browbeaten with accusations until they confessed their undeserved privilege in society.
Although race is the lead card in this game, the deeper objective is to get students to embrace the full socialist agenda.
The opposition was severe enough that the university’s president had to shut the program down, meekly saying that it went too far. But that was just a slight setback for the student affairs radicals, who learned to operate more covertly. Their programs are now more widespread and more circumspect.
Although race is the lead card in this game, the deeper objective is to get students to embrace the full socialist agenda. As our author correctly observes, the “social justice” mindset leads to complete governmental social and economic control. In this, the student affairs minions are playing the role of the “useful idiots” who have so often helped to pave the way for tyrannical governments.
Ridgley concludes with helpful pointers to students and their families so they can recognize what’s facing them on campus. He argues that public officials need to pay attention to the subversion of true education in their schools and stop funding it.
Brutal Minds should make you angry at the way our educational “leaders” have permitted colleges and universities to be infiltrated by fake academics pushing poisonous beliefs on gullible students.
George Leef is director of editorial content at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
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PwC a victim of woke capitalism scam
Cracks in woke capitalism Nick Cater, The Australian, 5 June 2023
PwC’s global revenue topped $US50bn ($75bn) last year, more than the gross domestic product of Latvia or Bahrain but slightly below Slovenia. Not bad for a corporation where profit has become a dirty word.
PwC Australia acting chief executive Kristin Stubbins last week blamed the scandal that ended the career of her former boss last month on “a culture of aggressive marketing” that had “allowed profit to be placed over purpose”.
Leaving to one side whether the term “inappropriate behaviour” adequately describes the disclosure of confidential government tax information to clients, Stubbins’s open letter of contrition raises an interesting question: if the profit motive is a distraction, what exactly was PwC put on Earth to do? The mission, to which she alludes, is articulated in PwC’s global statement of purpose: “To build trust in society and solve important problems”.
Like other corporations that adopted the wokenomic business model, PwC has transitioned from a market-driven entity to one that identifies as a not-for-profit dedicated to a nobler cause than delivering a return to investors. “Our high standards of ethical behaviour are fundamental to everything we do,” it states in its official corporate documents. “Our values define who we are, what we stand for, and how we behave.”
The embarrassment sweeping PwC’s local division is a manifestation of the global crisis in woke capitalism. The claim of higher ethical standards has been exposed as a sham. No amount of rainbow-washing will remove the stain from PwC’s reputation.
The business case for LGBT+ inclusion was set out in a recent report by PwC. It estimated the global spending power of LGBT+ consumers to be more than $5 trillion. The “Ally Marketplace” of consumers who identify as fellow travellers with the LGBT+ community was eight to 10 times bigger.
READ MORE: Virtue signallers like PwC need to live up to their posturing | PwC tax scandal a wake-up call | Sayers breaks his silence on PwC scandal | Parliament to ratchet up pressure on bruised PwC
It claimed 78 per cent of LGBT+ people and their friends, family and relatives would switch to brands known to be LGBT+ friendly. More than 80 per cent of LGBT+ and non-LGBT+ millennials say an employer’s diversity and inclusion policies are an important factor when deciding whether to work for them.
PwC Australia has followed its own advice to the letter as a sponsor of last November’s Australian LGBTQ Inclusion conference in Melbourne. Former CEO Tom Seymour used his platform in the conference’s brochure to boast of PwC’s “inclusive culture which embraces differences – one that allows us to live our values every day, be ourselves and to feel empowered to realise and discover our potential”.
Perhaps this frivolous diversity gibberish did come from the heart and was not cut and pasted from countless other statements assuring us of PwC’s faithfulness to the official religion of our day. Or perhaps it meant nothing more than the removable rainbow tattoos worn by those who feel the need to show they care.
Either way, the cracks are appearing in woke corporatism, highlighted by a consumer backlash that has taken tens of billions of dollars off the value of US shares. Anheuser-Busch’s market value has fallen by $US27bn since April 1, the day Dylan Mulvaney, a man who identifies as a woman, announced his partnership with Bud Lite. Jared Dinges, beverage analyst at JPMorgan Chase, said: “We believe there is a subset of American consumers who will not drink a Bud Lite for the foreseeable future … we do not expect the lost sales to be recovered in fiscal year 2024.” An Anheuser-Busch spokesman said: “We want Bud Lite customers back, therefore Bud Lite is not going to get involved with political issues moving forward.”
Target in the US has lost $US13bn in market value since May 17 when it released its Pride collection of children’s clothing, which includes “tuck-friendly” female swimwear and other products. Other items in the collection include “gender fluid” mugs, “queer all year” calendars and books for children aged 2-8 titled “Bye Bye, Binary”, “Pride 1,2,3” and “I’m not a girl”.
Disney Corporation’s share price was already sliding when it was hit by a boycott in February last year provoked by its public opposition to a Florida law banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity to children between kindergarten and third grade. It undoubtedly contributed, however, to the $US125bn loss in Disney’s market value in the past 16 months and the decision to sack 7000 workers in March.
It is alarming that a company the size of PwC failed to see the cracks in the woke corporate business model that have been apparent from the start. The “subset of American consumers” refusing Bud Lite is not as small as they imagine, and neither are their necks necessarily red. Shareholders of Anheuser-Busch, Target and Disney have every right to be angry that boards did not apply due diligence before partnering with a movement pursuing radical social goals.
Trans activists have done a remarkable job of portraying themselves as the bearer of the civil rights torch handed down through the ages. If directors had fulfilled their obligation to guard their shareholders against risk, however, it would not be hard to discover the radical, neo-Marxist, postmodernist motives of the activists and the threat they pose to our institutions, including the family.
Vivek Ramaswamy blew the lid on virtue-seeking capitalism two years ago in his book Woke, Inc: Inside the Social Justice Scam. “Here’s how it works,” he wrote, “pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.” The mistakes by Anheuser-Busch and Target suggest it is a short-term trick. The public will only put up with hypocrisy for so long, as PwC’s tumbling reputation attests.
The five rules of values-driven behaviour that PwC claims raises its company to a higher ethical plane have been rendered meaningless by the breach-of-trust scandal embracing the company.
As he tends his geranium bed Seymour might have cause to regret he didn’t pay more attention to the rule urging employees to “act as if our personal reputations were at stake”. We’ll leave it to his former colleagues to say how closely he followed rules two to four, “care”, “work together” and “reimagine the possible”. Seymour, however, can hardly be accused of failing to live up to PwC’s imperative that employees should “make a difference”, even if it wasn’t in the manner intended.
Nick Cater is senior fellow at Menzies Research Centre.
NICK CATER
COLUMNIST
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre and a columnist with The Australian. He is a former editor of The Weekend Australian and a former deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph. He is author … Read more
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The Coming War — Time to Speak Up
The Coming War — Time to Speak Up By John Pilger, from Consortium News, 2 May 2023
Silences filled with a consensus of propaganda contaminate almost everything we read, see and hear. War by media is now a key task of so-called mainstream journalism.
In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on “the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists” to discuss the “rapid crumbling of capitalism” and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.
Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.
The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power.”
Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda:
“The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.”
Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:
On March 7, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on “the looming threat” of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.
No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A “panel of experts” presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the West’s war industry.
“Beijing could strike within three years,” they warned. “We are not ready.” Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough.”‘Australia’s holiday from history is over”: whatever that might mean.
There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway “lucky” country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained “experts.” What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.
The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, “national security reporters” I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.
“How did it come to this?” Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. “Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?”
Post-Modernism in Charge
The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans “foreign interference” by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of “identity.” American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for “advice.” Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Volodymyr Zelensky.
No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about “crumbling capitalism” and the lethal provocations of “our” leaders. The most infamous of these, Tony Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or “neo-Nazism” or “extreme nationalism,” as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s “Jewish policy,” which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Stepan Bandera torchlight parade in Kiev, Jan. 1, 2020. (A1/Wikimedia Commons)
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow.” The coup regime included prominent “extreme nationalists” — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the “white supremacist militias” active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.” The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the “Wolfsangel,” was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbass region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a “Putin apologist,” regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who travelled to the Donbass were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.
Silence of Intimidation
In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.
Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s “assets” in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.
The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the “important issue of academic freedom of expression” and found “Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech.” Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.
A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life.”
No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, “the last to raise his voice,” wrote Eagleton.
Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Richard Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as “the movement,” had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.
On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.”
At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the “political action and truth-telling” of the 1960s had failed and only “culture and introspection” would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense it was.
Within a few years, the cult of “me-ism” had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.
As for “the movement,” its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.
When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new “threats” on “America’s frontier” (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s “war on terror” was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
This figure does not include the dead of U.S.-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, “could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.”
“At least” one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or 5 percent of the population.
No One Knows How Many Killed
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. “No one knows how many” is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a “media personality.”
In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, “What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?”
He replied. “If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”
I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s “threat,” and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been “duped,” spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.
Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.
Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its “allies” and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?
Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945:
“Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”
One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Barack Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.
“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as “special operations” as no other president had done since the first Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday — reported The New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target.”
A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’
In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew…,” he said, “that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was a lie. The only “threat” was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of Western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.
Destroying Gaddafi’s “threat” and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the U.S., Britain and France, NATO launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”
When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: “We came, we saw, he died!”
On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the NATO attack on Libya which it described as an “array of lies” — including the Benghazi massacre story.
The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
Under Obama, the U.S. extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 percent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the U.S. African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds U.S. officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s “historic mission,” warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.”
In the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia.” Almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront the threat from China,” in the words of his defence secretary.
There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a “noose.”
At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any U.S. administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons.”
Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.
I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the 20th century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about “our” propaganda.
All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like “dominoes.”
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: 3 million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.
If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.
John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Royal Television Society prize. His Cambodia Year Zero is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Australia Could Use a Machiavelli
Australia Could Use a Machiavelli By Gary Furnell, Quadrant Online, 11 April 2023
Niccolò Machiavelli’s name is mud. Any scribbler vilifying a dodgy politician or lying lobbyist will reach for the poisoned descriptor Machiavellian. It suggests everything devious and cynical.
When I bought a copy of The Prince—Machiavelli’s most famous work—I braced myself, anticipating counsels of devilish sophistry on every page. But The Prince is far better than I imagined. Perhaps I was fortunate to read the Penguin Classics translation by Tim Parks with his illuminating introduction. Parks explores The Prince and Machiavelli’s scandalous reputation. Published in Italy in 1532 after Machiavelli’s death, it was placed on Pope Paul IV’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1559. Then time and chance intervened; they, Machiavelli had understood, multiplied the unpredictable. The Protestant Reformation and Catholicism’s Counter-Reformation were splintering Europe. Religious propaganda abounded, helped by that useful invention, the printing press. And Machiavelli garnered headlines: The Prince was lambasted by Protestants as a prime example of Catholic degeneracy, Italian trickery. This polemic—lasting for centuries—cemented Machiavelli’s wretched reputation and secured his fame.
And The Prince does counsel—when there’s no other option—cruel expedient action, including driving out the entire population from conquered territory if they’re rebellious. Other passages advise a ruler lacking qualities to at least appear to possess them. Machiavelli admired wise and august rulers, but most rulers are mediocre people. They need to sham virtues they lack. Machiavelli didn’t delight in these charades, but he acknowledged their usefulness at times. In his judgment, honesty is best—but politics is a shoddy business and it’s better to deceive occasionally than to lose power.
The Prince refers to God’s judgment, which rulers should fear. Machiavelli seems sincere, but he didn’t share his mother’s piety or his brother’s priestly vocation. Their father preferred the Roman Stoics. Unfortunately Niccolò’s habits compounded his bad reputation: he was a womaniser and whoremonger; he wrote tales of improbable seductions; he craved status and power.
He established prominence as a Florentine diplomat and soldier, but lost his position with a change of regime. Imprisoned and tortured, he later regained favour, only to be again dismissed. He turned to reading and writing during these turbulent years, studying history to learn how previous rulers came to power, kept and used it—or lost it. He had an insider’s knowledge of Florence’s unstable republic, its wars and intrigues with other Italian and foreign states. He travelled to European courts on diplomatic missions. He fought wars. His wide experience guided his writing. He hoped The Prince would commend him to Florence’s new rulers: the Medici clan. He wanted his political acumen seen and rewarded with high position. Instead, unsummoned to serve, he died at his rural estate in 1527 aged fifty-eight.
We might discount The Prince because of Machiavelli’s awful reputation. But he wrote amid unstable governments, “barbarous occupation”, frequent wars, political conspiracies and civil strife. Further, his purpose was not to theorise about an ideal realm but to detail what he saw, what he knew, what really happened. He considered different states and their different conditions. His approach was empirical, almost proto-existentialist: this is how people who want power—or have power—act, and by studying their actions and the consequences we can extract guiding principles.
We may note the widespread success of Western democracies—delivering prosperity and basic freedoms—and consider Machiavelli’s advice relevant only to a darker, undemocratic time. But the lessons of The Prince are many and valuable. If Australia finds itself in a real crisis—not a Covid crisis or climate change crisis—when our freedom, our homes and lives are threatened by aggressors, then we’ll wish we had read and absorbed the best of Machiavelli’s advice. In a sense, he wrote a book during violent times for violent times.
As a political player, Machiavelli had two immense advantages over the current crop of Australian politicians. First, he had fought wars and seen the terrible consequences of military and foreign policy blunders: people were slaughtered, the countryside and towns were devastated and occupying forces were callous. Machiavelli had skin in the game. Most state and federal politicians—and their bureaucrats—don’t have skin in the game. They don’t risk their lives; they don’t suffer painful consequences for destructive policy mistakes. They still get generous pensions and cosy appointments. There’s no compelling inducement to realism. If they err, they’re not imprisoned and their joints wrenched apart, as Machiavelli endured. We would get far more prudent policies if our leaders faced severe punishments for their dreadful decisions.
A second advantage Machiavelli had over most Australian politicians and bureaucrats—and this is related to Machiavelli’s realism—was his Augustinian rather than Pelagian anthropology. Machiavelli knew that human sinfulness had better be taken into account. Everywhere people were self-seeking, proud, anxious, impulsive, short-sighted, fearful, opportunistic, ambitious, envious and inconstant. No one person—even the most evil—displayed all of these characteristics all the time, but they were lurking in every human heart and no one wise dared to overlook them. Pelagian anthropology acknowledges human sin but discounts its constant distorting power. Pelagians imagine that people and society are perfectible—able to be their best if given the right incentives by shrewd leaders. This is unrealistic. For example, our welfare and health systems are broadly Pelagian and consequently have inadequate protections against clients’ rorting, laziness, entitlement and self-destructive folly. Machiavelli would not have made this mistake.
Machiavelli condemns rulers seeking popularity through extravagant spending. It’s a short cut to sure ruin. The strategy appeals to rulers, but it’s a calamity for the nation and harms the lavish leadership. They’ll either have to raise taxes or withdraw their generosity or both. None of these actions will be popular; they risk being overthrown. Machiavelli observes:
If you’re determined to have people think of you as generous, you’ll have to be lavish in every possible way; naturally, a ruler who follows this policy will soon use up all his wealth to the point that, if he wants to keep his reputation, he’ll have to impose special taxes and do everything a ruler can to raise cash. His people will start to hate him and no one will respect him now he has no money. Since his generosity will have damaged the majority and benefited only a few, he’ll be vulnerable to the first bad news, and the first real danger may well topple him. When he realises this and tries to change his ways, he’ll immediately be accused of meanness.
Since a ruler can’t be generous and show it without putting himself at risk, if he’s sensible he won’t mind getting a reputation for meanness. With time, when people see that his penny-pinching means he doesn’t need to raise taxes and can defend the country against attack and embark on campaigns without putting a burden on his people, he’ll increasingly be seen as generous—generous to those he takes nothing from, which is to say almost everybody, and mean to those who get nothing from him, which is to say very few.
This is germane to Australia, where every election features a cash-splash from aspiring rulers. They rarely address debt, the urgent need for frugality with public money or the government’s responsibility to allocate funds prudently. Parsimony is unmentionable. Every newsletter from my federal and state MPs highlights increased entitlements, a multitude of funding commitments and grants. There’s no mention of government debt or cost-cutting measures. Recently, my state MP proudly announced spending for companion dogs to console people stressed in court.
The ruler’s parsimony has the great benefit of saving money for adequate defence forces, since defending the country is any government’s first priority. Constant penny-pinching in other areas provides funds for a well-equipped and trained military—without impoverishing the nation. A country burdened by reckless spending—and mounting debt—has already surrendered its capacity for self-reliance and independent action. It’s vulnerable, without ready cash to build defences and deter enemies. Alas, like Australia, they need alliances.
Florence was a small state surrounded by unstable or ambitious neighbours. France and Spain were the closest large powers; sometimes their policies were friendly, at other times hostile. In this tumult Machiavelli sought to discover the best strategies for Florence. There was no simple option.
Alliances appear attractive and confer some benefits, but alliances are problematic. A nation’s affairs are complicated by the demands of allies. And allies may not be trustworthy; almost certainly they’ll have different aims and priorities. Self-determination is compromised, sometimes to a disastrous degree. For example, an ally may take action which you’re under obligation to support, but support may be remote or even antagonistic to your own interests. Moreover, in war, if you win with an ally, you’ll have to share the spoils. Also, you may have created a more powerful partner and you’ll find yourself doing their bidding. If you lose a war alongside an ally, you’re on your own. Your ally will now be confronting the belligerent victor and have its own problems. If your ally loses a war, you’re still its friend and under obligation to help. At best, together your luck may turn.
Machiavelli called allies auxiliary armies. They’re not under your command and they have independent aims:
Auxiliary armies—that is, when you ask a powerful ruler to send military help to defend your town—are likewise useless … Auxiliaries may be efficient and useful when it comes to achieving their own ends, but they are almost always counter-productive for those who invite them in, because if they lose, you lose too, and if they win, you are at their mercy.
So, sensible rulers have always avoided using auxiliaries and mercenaries, relying instead on their own men and even preferring to lose with their own troops than to win with others, on the principle that a victory won with foreign armies is not a real victory at all.
Machiavelli valued a strong military always standing ready. Neglect was stupid; the unprepared ruler would be hated for his negligence if his people were conquered. Luck and changing circumstances are a constant in life and of course it’s hard to discern what might happen and plan for it, but war is so common and catastrophic there’s no excuse for being unprepared for battle. Machiavelli weighed luck and circumstances versus fate and free will, and concluded that humans have sufficient free will to make important decisions and be held responsible. No ruler can claim that failure in battle-readiness was fate or bad luck. He—or she—bears the blame.
One of Machiavelli’s priorities was to establish a Florentine army and militia. They could be relied on to fight with vigour because they were fighting for their own interests. In addition, they were familiar with their own territory; they knew their leaders and were ready to embrace their aims. Motivation and local knowledge were crucial to success:
No state is secure without its own army; if it hasn’t got men to defend it determinedly and loyally in a crisis, it is simply relying on luck. Those who understand these things have always thought and said: There is nothing so weak and unstable as a reputation for power that is not backed up by its own army. And having your own army means having a force made up of subjects, or citizens, or men dependent on you …
A ruler then must never stop thinking about war and preparing for war and he must do it even more in peacetime than in war itself … Another thing a ruler must do to exercise his mind is read history, in particular accounts of great leaders and their achievements. He should look at their wartime strategies and study the reasons for their victories and defeats so as to avoid the failures and imitate the successes.
Machiavelli preferred defensive wars; protecting one’s homeland was paramount. He knew that campaigns in foreign territory might be necessary at times but they were very complicated and the result could be ruinous. Offensive wars were best avoided because the invaders were not just fighting the enemy army—the entire population was against them. Even if the invaders were victorious, pacifying conquered territory was a long, damaging struggle. It required a powerful occupying force, or establishing dominant colonies or evicting the resident population. Uncertainty ruled these enterprises. Bloodshed, many troubled years and a depleted or empty treasury were certainties. One wonders if foreign policy boffins in Washington or Canberra have read The Prince.
A wise ruler looked after the interests of the common people rather than the nobles. It was simple mathematics: common people outnumber nobles. Plus, plots against the ruler come from the nobles. The commoners aren’t much interested in politics or especially ambitious. They’re content with sensible laws and freedom from tyranny so they can get on with their lives. Given these minimums, they’ll respect the ruler and fight for the status quo when the country is attacked. When treated fairly, commoners formed the most stable basis for government. The nobles had more complicated, often destabilising aspirations which needed to be watched and curtailed by the ruler, without causing undue antagonism. In Australia the equivalent of nobles might be leaders of party factions, senior bureaucrats, big business operators, union bosses, strident activists and the agents of international bodies like the UN, WHO and the IMF. They want rulers to rule for them, not for the people:
So long as he has the people on his side a ruler needn’t worry about conspiracies, but when they are against him he’ll have to watch everybody’s every move. Sensible rulers and well-run states have always done all they can not to drive the nobles to despair and to keep the people happy and satisfied; indeed, this is one of the ruler’s most important tasks.
A class of the common people that a ruler needs to encourage particularly are the merchants, entrepreneurs, small business owners and tradespeople. They—not the nobles—were the primary generators of employment, skills, wealth and innovation. Taxes and regulations should not be punitive:
A ruler must show that he admires achievement in others, giving work to men of ability and rewarding people who excel in this or that craft. What’s more, he should reassure his subjects that they can go calmly about their business as merchants or farmers, or whatever other trade they practise, without worrying that if they increase their wealth they’ll be in danger of having it taken away from them, or if they start up a business they’ll be punitively taxed. On the contrary, a ruler should offer incentives to people who want to do this sort of thing and to whoever plans to bring prosperity to his city or state.
The ruler’s trust and favour towards the common people even extends to arming rather than disarming them. Machiavelli insisted this was good sense. In war, a large number of people across the country familiar with weapons is a great advantage. A ruler who disarmed the people signalled his distrust of them and left himself without the benefit of their prowess. Perhaps it’s time for Australia to consider volunteer local defence forces, coached by the regular army in light infantry and insurgent tactics. Machiavelli reasoned:
When you’re the one giving people arms, those arms become yours; men who were potentially hostile to you become loyal, while those subjects already loyal become your supporters rather than just your subjects. It’s true you can’t arm everyone, but in favouring some you can feel safer about the others too. Seeing that they’ve been preferred, the men you’ve armed will be under an obligation to you. The others won’t be resentful, understanding that the people facing danger for you and binding their lives to you will inevitably deserve the greater rewards. But when you take arms away from people, then you start to upset them; you show you don’t trust them because you’re frightened or cagey. Either way, they’ll begin to hate you.
This sort of policy needs a determined ruler, but any other type of ruler is weak. People appreciate clear, sensible policies; they grow impatient with equivocation and confusion. Ambiguity in a ruler is self-destructive. In particular, if a ruler has to take harsh or unpopular action it must be done early in his rule, firmly implemented and thus completed quickly, allowing equilibrium and popularity to return. Assuming the policy was necessary, the benefits will show, the memory of distress fade and the ruler gain respect. But if done ambiguously, the pain and confusion will linger and the ruler will lose support. Rulers must be adaptable and discern the different responses required for different situations, but procrastination or mealy-mouthed neutrality is self-defeating.
The Prince is a short book, but its principles have many qualifications because politics and society are forbiddingly complex. It’s possible another reader might extract different lessons which would amend or refine the principles I’ve highlighted. Hopefully, every reader will avoid using Machiavelli’s name as an insult. It’s a slander on a man with faults, but who also was so scrupulous with his employer’s money that when investigated by Florentine officials for possible embezzlement, they discovered that they owed Machiavelli money for unclaimed expenses. His deviousness has been exaggerated, his honour and good sense unfairly impugned. The Prince is necessary reading for anyone interested or associated with politics.
Gary Furnell is a former librarian. His recent book The Hardest Path is the Easiest: Exploring the Wisdom Literature with Pascal, Burke, Kierkegaard and Chesterton is published by Connor Court.
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- cp-editorial-171116 – Cairns Post Editorial, Julian Tomlinson, 17 November 2016
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- Australians see all this as craven, cultural surrender by the ruling classes By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 1 September 2016
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- What Became of the Left Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for Political Economy, 20 August 2016
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- 21st-century Left waging new war on free speech By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 15 August 2015
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- Denial of speech is one step towards totalitarianism By Nick Cater, The Australian, 25 July 2016
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- Generation Snowflake By Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 21 July 2016
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- The silent majority starting to speak out By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 13 July
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- A march against democracy By Tom Slater, Spikes Online, 10 July 2016
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- Australia’s unprotected rebel against the political elites By Grace Collier, The Australian, 9 July 2016
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- Australia’s politics in disarray By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 7 July 2016
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- Censorship is not education By Julian Tomlinson – the Cairns Post, 30 June 2016
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- Brexit, this is what democracy feels like By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked Online, 25 June
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- No offence – but harden up! By Julian Tomlinson – the Cairns Post, 23 June 2016
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- The Brazen Left’s Bid to Kill Quadrant By Jeremy Sammut, Quadrant Online, 1 June
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- How to raise boys and avoid PC nonsense By Julian Tomlinson – the Cairns Post, 26 May 2016
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- The Greens, sirens of socialism By Nick Cater, The Australian, 3 May 2016
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- Leftists for the EU, the radical wing of the oligarchy By Brendon O”Neill, Spiked Online, 23 April 2016
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- A new authoritarianism has descended By Neil Brown, The Spectator, 11 April 2016
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- Don’t fear the freedom police By Julian Tomlinson, Deputy Editor, Cairns Post, 7 April
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- Australia’s Marxist-LGBTI engineers By Merv Bendle, Quadrant Online, 2 March 2016
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- Authenticity, the answer to PC pundits By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 17 February 2016
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- Progressivism’s clash with reality – by Merv Bendle, Quadrant Online 8 February 2016
- gloriously-unhinged-by-president-trump By Daryl McCann, Quadrant Online, 20 November 2016
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- cairns-post-editorial-201016 Laws of diminishing returns as the ‘nanny state’ takes over control of our freedom, By Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 20 October 2016
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- The Truth Behind Revolutions By Alexander Light, HumansAreFree.com; 27 August 2016
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- The counter-revolution against the Deep State From Inner Circle, 26 August 2016
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- The welfare state fails Aboriginals yet again By Gary Johns, The Australian, 25 August 2016
- I quit, the bureaucrats had beaten me By Charles Hugh-Smith, 13 August 2015