Better Government

‘PC’, ‘Woke’ Orwellian censorship – 1984, official lies, media lies, ‘socialism’, death of freedom

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

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.”

 

***

 

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:

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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How the elite indoctrinate us

How the elite indoctrinate us  By WantToKnow.info , 8 April 2023

Editor’s note: Some of the links have already been ‘unlinked’.  This invariably happens when an article is too close to exposing the ‘official’ version.

Regular readers of WantToKnow.info know that the vast majority of people are regularly deceived and manipulated by the major media and government on a variety of vital topics. Yet few who have gone down the rabbit hole realize how they themselves are also being manipulated, polarized and radicalized by sophisticated secret operations of what we can call the power elite.

Obsessed with power and control, this power elite have many billions of dollars at their disposal to forward their hidden agendas and keep them out of the public eye. Yet it’s important not to paint the power elite as a unified force or as a small group of evil men bent on controlling the world. They are split into factions which compete with each other for power and control. And some factions are more benevolent than others. Yet when something occurs which might expose their manipulative tactics, all factions quickly close ranks to keep the public from learning about their immense, hidden power.

One key area on which the power elite have spent billions is behavior modification, i.e. the manipulation of human behavior. In intelligence circles, this is referred to as psychological operations or PSYOPS, though the Pentagon is now using the innocuous term “Military Information Support Operations” or MISO, believing the term psyops has been given a bad rap.

Whether it’s MISO or PSYOPS, the sophisticated tactics developed are used in the battle for the minds of both the general public and those who are aware of the major manipulations going on behind the scenes. And the amounts spent are staggering. Here’s a quote from a 2009 NBC News/Associated Press article  article titled “Pentagon Sets Sights on Public Opinion”:

“The Pentagon is steadily and dramatically increasing the money it spends to win what it calls ‘the human terrain’ of world public opinion. In the process, it is raising concerns of spreading propaganda at home in violation of federal law. Over the past five years, the money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year. About $489 million … goes into what is known as psychological operations.”

Consider that in addition to the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other intelligence agencies around the world all have their own hefty psyops budgets. That adds up to literally billions of dollars every year spent on influencing and manipulating human behavior, whether it be individuals, organizations, or entire nations. How many experts can be hired with that kind of money? How many agent provocateurs can be paid to infiltrate movements which are counter to the elite’s hidden agendas?

It’s vitally important to the power elite that the public never finds out about the many gross and subtle violations of law and ethics they commit in pursuit of their goals. Thus the billions spent on manipulating human behavior, much of which is channeled into keeping their agendas secret. That said, those involved fully expect that there will be leaks of information. To keep anyone from finding anything near the whole truth, a vast trove of tactics have been developed under the rubric of PSYOPS.

Among the core tactics used are:

  1. Control the narrative
    2. Push polarization
    3. Infiltrate, dominate, and incite violence
    4. Marginalize and radicalize those who know the truth
  2. Control the narrative

A highly effective way to keep key unwanted topics from public scrutiny is to control the information that is made available to the public through news reports and social media. With vast resources at their disposal, the power elite are able to place undercover operatives in key choke positions in both the major media and social media. The powerful individual in a media corporation who decides what gets published and what gets nixed is one such key position. If the elite don’t want a certain topic to gain public attention, they instruct these operatives to nix any of these stories.

Created in 1952, the existence of the National Security Agency was kept secret for decades as the choke positions in all media knew that they were not to allow any stories about it. Only decades later was its existence revealed. This 2002 CNN article states: “So clandestine is the NSA’s operations that people in the intelligence loop even joke that NSA really stands for ‘no such agency.'” The existence of the psychic spy program was also kept out of all media for decades and actively denied until after the official program was shut down in 1995. Those who claimed either of these existed were harshly ridiculed and even labeled “conspiracy theorists.”

Another glaring example of how this works can be seen in this ABC News article titled “U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba” and published May 1, 2001. It states:

“In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. … ‘We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,’ and, ‘casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.’”

This stunning news should have spread like wildfire in all major media and drawn intense public scrutiny.  But that never happened. No media other than ABC reported on this astounding story of blatant manipulation by the top generals at the Pentagon. How is that possible? The author of the story, James Bamford, was an award-winning producer at ABC who had enough clout and was above the intelligence choke point, so that he managed to get this sensational news published. Yet using their operatives in all other media, the power elite made sure that not one other news organization picked up on this bombshell story, effectively controlling the narrative.

I discovered another unusual method of controlling the narrative in my work as a language interpreter with the U.S. Department of State. We were welcome to take our esteemed foreign visitors to any major media office in the country, but when one guest wanted to visit the infamous tabloid National Inquirer, we were told “no visitors allowed.” It turns out this tabloid is actually a CIA front. With outrageous features stories like Justice Scalia being murdered by a hooker or Khloe Kardashian’s boobs going bust, a big story that might blow the cover of an elite agenda can be quickly published in the Inquirer so that anyone else who covers the story will be ridiculed as parroting a trashy tabloid.

When key information revealing the elite’s agenda does leak out, another powerful control mechanism used is to have stories published in the media ridiculing any who report on this leak. Consider the hundreds of respected doctors who had great success treating COVID with inexpensive treatments. This threatened the huge profits of Big Pharma and the elite’s control agenda. These once-respected doctors were harshly ridiculed and even shamed by the media. And their work was censored by almost all social media. YouTube even removed two videos of U.S. Senate hearings discussing these treatments.

Yet another potent tactic used to control the narrative is the deployment of thousands of fake social media accounts. These fictitious accounts are used to distract the public from any news revealing the power elite’s agenda and to counter, ridicule, and disparage any who are posting these revelations. Lackeys of the power elite are paid full time to use these fake accounts to slam any who question the official narrative and to promote strict adherence to what the elite want us to believe.

  1. Push Polarization

The elite know very well that the more polarized any group or organization becomes, the less effective they are and the easier it is to manipulate them. Divide and conquer has been used successfully for millennia by countless global leaders to keep the public from knowing who is really pulling the strings. Time and again, polarization has been very effectively used to split entire nations (red vs. blue) and to split any movement which opposes the elite agenda.

Using their key choke positions in the media, the elite focus on getting polarizing articles and information into the media. And knowing that adversity and polarization attract more readers, most reporters go right along with this agenda. How often do you see articles presenting both sides of a story and inviting conscious thoughtful dialogue where both sides of a debate are respected?

The red/blue and conservative/liberal divisions are obvious examples of the many polarizations exploited to their fullest to keep people fighting against each other. Yet more subtle polarization can be crafted or exploited in any organization working to expose the elite agenda. The 9/11 movement became so caught up in arguing the relatively minor issue of whether or not a plane actually hit the Pentagon that huge amounts of time and energy were poured into this one topic. This has fractured what could have been a much more potent movement. And you can bet that there were elite operatives egging on both sides to fan the flames of this rift.

Very few people and organizations realize the extent to which they are being manipulated into polarized positions by powerful puppet masters who don’t want us to know about their nefarious activities. How much does it serve any of us to fall into polarized viewpoints? How might our world change if ever increasing numbers chose to focus less on the us vs. them paradigm and more on inviting compassion and mutual understanding of our differences?

  1. Infiltrate, dominate, and incite violence

The control-obsessed elite track closely any groups working to expose their agendas. They take very sophisticated measures spending many millions of dollars to infiltrate and eventually dominate any movement which starts exposing their hidden agendas.  In this way, the elite are able to exert powerful influence on almost any organization that poses a threat to their agenda.

As soon as an organization or movement opposing the elite’s agenda grows large enough to reach their radar, they take action. Brilliant, charismatic operatives are tasked with learning about and then infiltrating the organization. Before long, as those in the organization see their skills and intelligence, these infiltrators rise to leadership positions as they initially pretend to powerfully support the organization’s goals while secretly reporting back to their bosses about the plans of the movement. Yet once established in their positions of leadership, they subtly steer the movement away from its original goals. They identify any potential fissures and use their leadership roles both to dominate and to polarize the movement as much as possible.

A very effective method these provocateurs use to polarize an organization or movement is to steer its members towards violence. They know that once an organization is perceived by the public as being violent, they will suffer a great loss of support. Violence also serves to polarize the targeted group. The more radical elements of the organization, usually a small but vocal minority, will join in this call for violence, while most others advocate non-violent means of change. This is how many movements founded on nonviolent principles eventually lose public support as they become increasingly fractured and ineffectual.

A prime example of this is the Occupy Wall Street moment, described in Wikipedia as “a 59-day left-wing populist movement against economic inequality and the influence of money in politics.” The U.K.’s respected Guardian ran a penetrating article titled “Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy.” Here’s a quote from this incisive piece:

“New documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall … was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters – was coordinated with the big banks themselves.”

Another excellent article lays out the long history of successful infiltration and polarization of once-powerful movements by undercover operatives and the media’s reluctance to report on this even when the evidence is clear. Consider the likely possibility that every major movement and organization working towards social justice and exposing corruption has been infiltrated and damaged using these tactics.

As these undercover agents are very well trained at their craft, it’s very hard to know with certainty who might have infiltrated an organization. If a leader gradually shows a clear shift towards polarization and inciting violence, that is a strong indicator that they might be a provocateur. Yet accusing someone of being an infiltrator can cause even more chaos and polarization. So the best tactic for those who care about the organization is not to accuse anyone of being an infiltrator, but rather to expose and isolate any who are pushing polarization and promoting violence, as whether or not they are an infiltrator, anyone who starts advocating for these may end up harming the organization.

The fact that Manchurian Candidates – spies who don’t consciously know they are spies – are sometimes used as infiltrators can make matters even more challenging to unravel. Organizations working for positive change would be wise to avoid doing a witch hunt for infiltrators, which can do more damage than good, and focus instead on identifying and resisting any tendencies towards violence and polarization.

  1. Marginalize and radicalize those who know the truth

This is one tactic that gets very little attention among those who have considerable knowledge of the hidden agendas of the power elite. Many millions are spent by the elite every year to marginalize and radicalize those who have uncovered their dirty deeds. Elements inside and outside of the military and government intelligence agencies pour millions of dollars into clandestine operations to manipulate those who have taken the red pill into believing that things are even more outrageous and crazy than they really are. The more radical a person or group becomes, the more likely they are to be marginalized and ridiculed by the general public.

The control-obsessed elite know well that ever greater numbers of people are awakening to their hidden agendas. And they know that a key method to counter this is to manipulate the paths people follow as they go down the rabbit hole. Experts on the elite payroll study the many paths that lead to understanding the secret agendas of the elite and how best to inject into them tasty morsels of real truth mixed with cleverly disguised falsehoods meant to radicalize those who ingest them. The best disinformation is often 80 to 90% true and verifiable, but it’s the remaining 10 to 20% that people then assume is reliable which can push them to unbelievable extremes. 

Elite operatives might claim to be whistleblowers as they purposely offer up real, valuable new information which can be verified. This convinces most people that what they are saying must be true. But then they add other outrageous claims which appear true but actually cleverly lead their readers into more radical beliefs that were actually propagated by the psyops teams.

As an example, those who begin to find out the hidden agendas behind 9/11, secret mind control programs, or high level sex trafficking organizations will run across many claims that Israel and the Mossad are behind it all. They will find verifiable evidence, some of which has been planted, proving Israeli involvement. But then further claims are made suggesting that Jews are the masterminds behind it all, when careful research will show that the Israeli faction of the cabal is but one of numerous elite groups involved. When those who take the bait then try to convince their friends it was the Jews or Zionists who were behind 9/11 or any other conspiracy, they are very likely to be written off as antisemites and “conspiracy theorists.”

Whenever any new aspect of the elite agenda is uncovered or even has the potential to be uncovered, entire squads quickly get to work creating sophisticated disinformation offering a coherent story filled with verifiable facts mixed with cleverly disguised falsehoods meant to marginalize those who ingest them. The more they can get people polarized and believing in outrageous conspiracies that they have created, the more these people will be ignored and discredited by those who haven’t taken the red pill.

The spooks have a great time working in teams to come up with outlandish conspiracy claims and to make them believable with a mix of real new information anyone can verify and disinformation which puts a spin on it that is much worse and less believable than the actual situation. They are masters at manipulating truth-seekers such that they end up marginalized and radicalized. Those who explore deep into NESARA and the allegedly huge gold stocks of the dragon family will find prime examples of how conspiracies can be manipulated and gain great traction using the above tactics.

So any time you are exploring new information put out on some conspiracy-focused website, don’t just believe what you read. Even if many others are claiming the information is true, think about whether it might have been planted there to lead you astray. Take some time to investigate and verify the most eye-catching “facts” and avoid jumping to conclusions. Reality is almost always more complex and nuanced than most would ever imagine.

Final Words

The best way to deal with all of the tactics mentioned here is to first be aware of when there is an official narrative being pushed by media and government and ask hard questions. Resist the temptation to believe too strongly any side of a story, which can easily lead to more polarization in our world. Focus instead on identifying and understanding the motivations of all sides of any issue.

And whenever you notice leaders in any movement intent on creating polarization or promoting violence, be courageous in pointing out their behavior and rallying those around you to inspire collaboration and effective, nonviolent means of change.

This information might leave you feeling a bit depressed or hopeless, yet I’d like to leave you with some inspiring information as a balance to the manipulative tactics of the elite. Though those obsessed with power and control will go to great lengths to keep the public from finding out about their corrupt activities, they also do their best to keep highly inspiring movements and organizations from gaining media coverage.

You may never have heard of profoundly transformative global organizations like Challenge Day, MAPS, and IANDS. Yet they are among hundreds of thousands of outstanding organizations out there dedicated to creating a world of greater peace and harmony that rarely get significant media coverage. They are inspiring many millions around the globe to be the change we want to see.

And then there are the amazing, almost superhuman powers that lie innate within all of us which also get surprisingly little media coverage. The CIA spent many millions on training psychic spies who had incredible success through their remote viewing (RV) program, yet they don’t want you to know about this. The RV program, ESP studies, and children with psychic superpowers are only a sampling of intriguing topics which show that physical reality is much more malleable than most would believe, and all of us have incredibly latent powers that can be activated and trained.

For those interested in such matters, I most highly recommend an awesome book by top intelligence author Annie Jacobsen revealing how the elite are quite fascinated with superhuman capabilities, yet keep this tightly under wraps. Don’t miss her landmark book Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis.

There are always reasons for hope, especially when each one of us chooses not to buy into the doom and gloom scenarios propagated by many members of the power elite. We can choose to spread hope and be the change in building a more loving, harmonious world. So don’t forget in your research into deep corruption to balance this with research into the profound powers that lie hidden within and spread the hope and inspiration that is always available when we tap into the infinite well of wisdom available deep inside of every one of us.

By focusing on changing the world at the grass roots level and linking up with the many organizations and communities around the globe already working to transform our world, we are building a cohesive net around the world which can catch the pieces of the old empire as it falls apart. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Remember the quote by Buckminster Fuller:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

With best wishes for a transformed world,
Fred Burks for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Former White House interpreter and whistleblower

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Insouciant Americans Didn’t Notice the Revolution that Stole their Country

Insouciant Americans Didn’t Notice the Revolution that Stole their Country  By Paul Craig Roberts, 2 January 2023

Florida Governor DeSantis, seeing that Florida’s universities are suppressing free expression with speech control and normalizing sexual perversity while demonizing normality succeeded in having laws passed against the substitution of indoctrination for education.  But the Woke left rule Florida’s Universities, Not Florida Law.

Florida Universities Ignore State Law Against Indoctrinating White Students with the Beliefs they Are Racists and the Constitution Is a Tool of White Oppression of Blacks.

Universities have developed what Cornell Law School Professor William Jacobson calls “systemic repression.”  By hiring Woke activists as professors and mandating Woke policies, administrators  have created a culture that allows no room for dissent against the demonization of white ethnicities as racists and the denunciation of Western civilization as a monument to white supremacy.  In most American universities it is no longer possible for students to be enculturated into the Western tradition.  A history major learns that history consists of a series of crimes by white people against people of color.  An English major learns African and South American novelists.  The voices that connect Americans to their tradition are not heard.

It is the same everywhere. America’s universities are now knives at America’s throat.  They are centers of anti-American revolution, not centers of learning. Two generations of young have been deracinated.  The break in the transmission of the culture is likely fatal to the continued existence of Western civilization

Read this article — https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/students-speak-out-on-anti-white-anti-christian-anti-american-culture-at-florida-university_4937887.html?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-12-25-2&src_cmp=breaking-2022-12-25-2&utm_medium=email&est=eG6%2FKDx0yYU6H%2BwC6BXzq5D3hPJhWOHb9xryNl3dbnS6FKFDhyRBtw%3D%3D— and you will understand that if the universities are not closed, the United States will be overthrown.

Stanford University has compiled a list of “Harmful Language.”  Among the impermissible words is “American.” https://ijr.com/american-listed-harmful-language-stanford/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=ijr-weekly&utm_campaign=ijr-2&utm_content=firefly  

Laugh. Ha Ha.  It is so silly.  No, it is not silly.  It is deadly serious.  While everyone was asleep a revolution has occurred.  The revolutionists have the government, the FBI, the CIA, the military, the media, the universities, the public schools, the bar associations, the medical profession.  Soon they will have digital money, and then it is all over without a shot fired.

Victor Davis Hanson asks “Are Universities Doomed?” https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/22/are-universities-doomed/

As centers of learning, yes, but they are flourishing as propaganda centers for destroying Western civilization.  A question more to the point is: are we doomed by ceasing to pass  on the Western tradition?

In the universities sexual perversity is normalized and protected, but normal heterosexuals are “toxic masculinity.”  Being a white heterosexual male in an American university today is a horrible dehumanizing experience.  His feminist professor views him as a rapist. His black professor views him as a racist. His homosexual or transgendered professor views him as homophobic or transphobic.  His belief system is attacked from all directions.  He suffers the discrimination that blacks and feminists claim to suffer.  He is graded not on merit but on his acceptance of the indoctrination that has taken the place of education. If he is careless with his speech and doesn’t learn the new pronouns or rolls his eyes at some absurd professorial pronouncement, he is toast.

If he manages to graduate, he is disadvantaged in the job market and in his career should one materialize.  All private and public employers are committed to diversity and proportional representation in the work force. White male employment and promotion is on hold until blacks, women, and other “preferred minorities” have caught up. We now have a caste system in which white males are the lowest caste.

Consequently, Hanson reports “nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year.” White males account for 71 percent of the drop in enrollment. Females now compose 60 percent of university students.  The traditional family based on the male’s income has passed into history.

University budgets and the extremely high tuition are no longer used to hire the best professors to produce the best education.  The money is used to hire Soviet-style commissars to police unacceptable speech, unacceptable pronouns, unacceptable thoughts, to protect feminist from “toxic masculinity,” to protect blacks and “peoples of color” from white racism.  Victor Davis Hanson reports:

“At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150 percent in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10 percent. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative positions—in near one-to-one fashion.

“In the past, such costly praetorian bloat would have sparked a faculty rebellion. Not now. The new six-figure salaried “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars are feared and exempt from criticism.

“Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird ‘reparatory’ admissions. Purported ‘marginalized populations’ have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population.”

Consequently, admission tests and performance grading are damned as biased and antithetical to diversity.

“To accommodate radical diversity reengineering, the only demographic deemed expendable are white males. Their plunging numbers on campus, especially from the working class, are now much less than their percentages in the general population.”

Stanford University’s projected profile of its class of 2025 is a student body that is only 23 percent white, although white people are 60 percent of the US population.

To accommodate the aristocratic elevation of non-whites, admission requirements are being abolished.  To prevent failures and comparison of the  performance of the races, grades are being abolished. Deans’ lists and distinctions such as cum laude are being abolished.

The universities are clearly committed to turning out graduates who are alienated from traditional America and who have no appreciative knowledge of Western civilization.  Only tyranny can result from the deracination of a people who are enmeshed in Identity Politics.

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A CLIMATE OF AUTHORITARIANISM  IN NEW ZEALAND


A CLIMATE OF AUTHORITARIANISM IN NEW ZEALAND  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 21 September 2022

The pandemic traffic light system has gone.

Masks have gone.

Mandates have gone.

Life is going back to normal.

Or so we have been led to believe.

But that’s not the whole truth.

By Government decree, you are still required to isolate for 7 days if you contract Covid-19 – but not if you catch the flu.

Masks must still be worn in some places including medical establishments and rest homes.

And mandates can still be applied under ‘health and safety’ guidelines, so the professional bodies regulating doctors, dentists, and nurses, for example, can still exclude the unvaccinated.

In Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand, if you stood against her Government’s coercion, you may never be able to practice your profession again.

Nor will we ever be free of the threat of authoritarianism. It not only hangs over us as a precedent, but sinister new levels of surveillance are now in place. It’s the norm for the ‘misinformation’ police to monitor what we say, and who we associate with. And anyone daring to challenge Labour’s agenda – by speaking out against co-governance and He Puapua or the mantra that climate change is a man-made crisis – risks public vilification.

If we look back to the Prime Minister’s Speech from the Throne following her 2020 election victory, radical change was signalled: “The scale and pace of the recovery offers an opportunity to reshape the way things are done in New Zealand, to innovate and improve our position and our economy.”

She promised to build back ‘better’: “New Zealand’s response to COVID would be insufficient if it were to simply return us to the way we were before the virus. Recovering and rebuilding entails determined and connected action by government. That action can, and will, be used to reshape the economy to be more productive, more sustainable, and more equitable… We can be better than we were. This government’s mission is to make it so.”

Jacinda Ardern identified the ‘global climate crisis’ as a priority: “The Government is committed to the shift away from fossil fuels in order to build a new low-carbon future.”

Like the pandemic strategy, her Net Zero climate change response is being driven on a global scale – not only by the United Nations, and a myriad of environmental groups, but also powerful lobby groups like the World Economic Forum.

In fact a sophisticated campaign for radical action is being orchestrated by a world-wide ‘army’ of climate activists. Many have been trained by former US Vice President and World Economic Forum Trustee Al Gore – the architect of the alarmist film “An Inconvenient Truth”.

That 2006 masterclass in climate propaganda, claimed that by now there would a 20-foot sea level rise and 100 million climate refugees.

The passage of time has not only confirmed just how absurd Al Gore’s predictions were, but also how wrong all of the alarmist projections over the last 30 years have been.

Jacinda Ardern is, of course, no stranger to the World Economic Forum. In 2014, six years after entering our New Zealand Parliament as the President of the communist movement the International Union of Socialist Youth – a position she continued to hold for a further 15 months after becoming an MP – she was selected as a WEF Young Global Leader.

As she explained to the world’s elite attending the 2019 WEF annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, she’s using her time in office to entrench their agenda into our legislative and regulatory framework in such a way that it will lead to permanent change: “This needs to be something that we embed in our national cycles, in our political cycles, and in our actions and it needs to endure beyond us as individuals.”

One such WEF initiative is the use of “wellbeing” to replace GDP as a measure of economic progress. Another, of course, is the campaign for Net Zero.

Just as fear was used by the Prime Minister to convince the population of the need to comply with unprecedented Covid restrictions, so too she’s using fear of a man-made climate ‘crisis’, to create the urgency and justification for massive government intervention.

On 2 December 2020 Jacinda Ardern moved a ‘Declaration of Climate Emergency’ motion in Parliament, alleging New Zealand is in the grip of a climate emergency: “In order to avoid a disastrous 1.5 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures and beyond—a rise that would see increased risk to human health and livelihood, civil unrest, mass drought, disease, loss of lands and homes, increased fires, increased tropical storms, mass human displacement, and globally exhausted resources—we must act with urgency to ensure global emissions fall to net zero by 2050.”

Her motion passed by 76 votes to 43, with Labour, the Greens, and the Maori Party voting in support, while National and ACT were opposed.

The Prime Minister’s fearmongering appears to be working.

With the media promoting an endless doomsday narrative, most New Zealanders appear either indifferent or accepting of climate regulations – even those that will undermine our economy and cause living standards to fall.

Nor do they seem concerned that the apocalyptic predictions are fabricated.

Looking back through history, the truth about the climate is plain to see. Planet Earth has been on its current warming path since it emerged from the peak of the Little Ice Age around 1700, when ice pageants were held on the River Thames. Before that, around 1000 AD during the Medieval Warm period, Vikings farmed Greenland. Earlier still were the Dark Ages, a cool period around 500 AD, and before that, the Roman Warm period – and so it goes on.

During its more than 4-billion-year history, the planet has been far warmer and far cooler than it is today. And carbon dioxide, the gas the activists claim is ‘pollution’ and responsible for the planet heating up, has, for much of that time, been present in the atmosphere in far greater concentrations than today.

The reality is that warming and cooling are part of the natural cycle of planet Earth. These cycles are driven by the sun, winds, clouds, ocean currents, and a myriad of other complex factors – but not carbon dioxide, which is known as a ‘trace gas’ because it is present in the atmosphere in such minute quantities.

Yet climate activists have captured the narrative and are scaring the public into thinking the world is going to end – unless the government takes control of the economy and imposes regulations that will cripple our productive sector.

It’s a truly bizarre situation – especially when China, Russia, and India, which are responsible for most of the world’s carbon emissions, are only paying lip service to the West’s obsession with climate change, while continuing to build coal fired power stations at pace to satisfy their energy needs.

By adopting the United Nations’ radical Net Zero goal, Jacinda Ardern plans to make New Zealand ever more reliant on “green energy” – energy that is, in fact, neither ‘green’ nor reliable.

Not only does the construction of wind and solar farms use vast amounts of fossil fuels for mining, transportation, and construction, but some parts of the supply chain – including cobalt mining for solar panels and the batteries that power electric cars – use child labour. Yet the politicians – and the environmental movement – continue to laud such products, conveniently turning a blind eye to the inconvenient truth of their manufacture.

Brushing aside the fearmongering rhetoric, Net Zero is a totalitarian plan to enforce UN mandates onto New Zealand that will destroy the viability of farming – along with many other industries that rely on the fossil fuels.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, former National Party Minister Barry Brill, the Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, has analysed the situation we are in and points out some glaring anomalies:

“The 2022 Budget took more taxes from working New Zealanders than any before in history, and at a time when real wages were plummeting at record rates.

“Why?

“So that Labour Ministers could spend billions of extra dollars on their vanity project – the quest to lead the world in Climate Change spending; so as to realise the advertised ‘nuclear-free moment of the Prime Minister’s generation’.”

Unfortunately for New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern’s climate policy is all about profile – being seen as a world leader in climate change.

And sadly, the huge economic sacrifice she wants New Zealanders to make will achieve nothing – as Barry points out: “Our greenhouse gas emissions are less than one-fifth of 1% of the global total. They are a fraction of a drop in a bucket. They can make no conceivable difference to future global average temperatures.”

He highlights how harsh the PM’s restrictions actually are: “Our current emissions-reduction pledge is FIVE (5) times greater than the global average. The mean 2030 figure for 193 countries is 9%, while New Zealand’s figure is 50%.”

Barry also points out, that if our politicians were honest, they would admit that because New Zealand is a rural country with vast areas of forests and grasslands, all of our so-called ‘human induced’ carbon emissions would be completely absorbed many times over by our plant life, leaving no excess emissions at all: “New Zealand has already over-achieved the Net Zero target. Right now, our country is a net carbon sink, and the vegetation in our National Parks alone absorbs more than four times our annual human-related emissions… Alas, as a result of artificial, poorly-negotiated rules, our pre-1990 native forests are ignored in counting our National Inventory for UN purposes. But the scientific fact remains that, while politics sees us as a net emitter, science sees us as a net sink.”

In his article Barry outlines 20 reasons why New Zealanders should no longer tolerate the PM spending precious taxpayer dollars on her vanity project – “to lead the world in climate policy”.

Isn’t it time we collectively pushed back against this dangerous obsession – one that is wasting precious taxpayer funding that should be invested in health, education, and other policies to build a better future?

In light of the fearmongering that Kiwis are being continually bombarded with, there are two simple facts that need to be understood.

The first is that anyone calling carbon dioxide a “pollutant” is either a climate activist or is totally uninformed about science.

Carbon dioxide is the gas of life. It is essential for photosynthesis, which allows plants to trap the sun’s energy and convert it into the food that all living things need to survive.

And the second fact is that throughout most of the Earth’s history, the planet has had carbon dioxide levels significantly higher than they are today – up to 20 times higher – and since it did not cause catastrophic warming back then, it’s not going to do so now.

The reality is that nature controls the climate, not politicians. The most sensible thing we can do is learn to adapt – as humans have always done throughout history.

In fact, a new paper from the INFN, an Italian national research institute, has analysed extreme weather events from around the world, including floods, droughts, and cyclones. The scientists found that in spite of all the hype and predictions of a climate Armageddon, there has been no appreciable change in the intensity or frequency of extreme weather events: “None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events… On the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”

The reality is that for politicians, like Jacinda Ardern, the ‘climate crisis’ is a convenient vehicle to manipulate the public into accepting revolutionary change towards a more controlled society.

Surely, it’s time for the public and opposition politicians to call out the climate crisis as a political device that’s being used by socialist politicians to exert more control over the lives of others.

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Coup d’etat in all but name: NZ’s descent to ethno-nationalism

Coup d’etat in all but name. NZ’s descent to ethno-nationalism  By Elizabeth Rata, The Australian, 11 August 2022

New Zealand is on a long descent from our remarkable 170-year legacy of democratic governance into a tribal form of ethno-nationalism, aided by our government, our education system and a compliant media.

Unrecognised as such at the time, the descent began nearly 40 years ago, when the 1985 Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act set in motion a radical constitutional agenda, whose aim was to shift the country from democracy to tribalism.

Over the last four decades, a corporate tribal elite has privatised public resources, acquired political power, and attained governance entitlements. Activist judges have created treatyism – a new interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi – as a “governance partnership,” while intellectuals supply the supporting racialised “two world views” ideology which is now permeating society.

Traditional waka crews perform a haka on Waitangi Day. Activist judges have created treatyism – a new interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi – as a ‘governance partnership’.

In his book The Open Society, philosopher Karl Popper identifies those who would take us back to the past, to that closed tribal society from which we are all descended. He describes how throughout history those who “could only make themselves leaders of the perennial revolt against freedom”, those “incapable of leading a new way” will return us to what he called “cultivated tribalism”.

It is this colossal failure of vision for a democratic future that has taken New Zealand to the crossroads. Democracy is one path ahead; ethno-nationalism is the other.

Treatyism’s success can be seen in how comprehensively “partnership”, “decolonisation”, “co-governance” – whatever term is used – is inserted into all NZ’s government institutions, into the universities, and into the law. It is an ideology that tells how we are to understand our country’s history and how we are to envisage its future.

A reconstruction of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi showing Maori chiefT?mati W?ka Nene signing in front of James Busby and Captain William Hobson. Picture: NZ History.

READ MORE:Revolution in NZ education|Ardern’s recipe for privilege by an inherited tribal elite|NZ children face education tragedy|Democracies can die, Ardern warns. She should know

The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was, like all human products, of its time and place. One aim, shared by British and Maori signatories alike, was to establish the rule of law by imposing British sovereignty through British governance. Sovereignty and governance go together as two sides of the same coin, with intertwined meaning. In the decades which followed, the treaty lost relevance in the new colonial society. This is the case with all historical treaties.

Revived in the 1970s as the symbol of a cultural renaissance, the treaty was captured by retribalists in the 1980s to serve as the ideological manifesto for the envisaged order – a reconstituted New Zealand. It was given a “spirit” to take it above and beyond its historical location so that it could mean whatever retribalists say it means.

This treatyist ideology successfully promotes the false claim of partnership between the government and Maori tribes. However there is a deeper, more insidious strategy propelling us to tribal ethno-nationalism – the collapse of the separation between the economic and political spheres.

The separation of the economic from the political is absolutely essential for democracy. When economic interests and political ambitions are merged there is no accountability to the people; consider all those totalitarian leaders whose power gives wealth and whose wealth gives power – a merger broken only when (and if) the people revolt.

A woman waves the New Zealand flag at the Treaty Grounds on Waitangi Day. Picture: Getty Images.

When the combination of reactionary politics and wealth accumulation is justified by “myths of past perfection”, we have what I call the neotribal capitalist version of the wealth-power merger.

The corporate Maori tribes of NZ have already acquired considerable governance entitlements; the next and final step is tribal sovereignty. It’s a coup d’etat in all but name, accomplished not by force but by ideology.

Given the enormous success of retribalism is it too late to reclaim New Zealand from the relentless march to blood and soil ethno-nationalism?

That depends upon our willingness to understand, value, and restore democracy – that remarkable and still uncommon form of government described in Abraham Lincoln’s famous words as “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

Its three pillars are interdependent; the citizen, who has a duty to society but also personal interests arising from kin, cultural and other social loyalties; the state, simultaneously the capitalist state generating economic wealth and inequality and the secular democratic state, guaranteeing political equality and regulating wealth distribution; and, lastly, the nation, unified in facing the future, yet diverse in its past.

Democracy is peaceful battle within and between each of these three pillars. This bloodless conflict is only possible when individuals are partially loyal – that is, they have contradictory loyalties simultaneously. They identify as a family member, a member of an ancestral group, a tribe, a religion, or an identity group defined by sexuality, while at the same time loyal to a diverse society and to its governing system that is not personal.

These two different loyalties – one a deeply personal identity, the other a rational commitment to an idea – is why democracy is so difficult. It is much easier to fall back into loyalties of emotion, not reason.

Prince Charles at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Picture: Getty Images.

After all, from different, even conflicting interests how do we decide where our loyalty lies – is it to New Zealand? To an identity group? An ancestral group? To those “who look like us”?

It is a question that someone in a tribal society, an autocratic society, a religious society would not have to ask, or be permitted to ask, because the answer is already provided.

Traditional tribal societies allowed one identity, fixed by birth status and kinship ties – not open to individual choice. Loyalty was non-negotiable because total loyalty ensured the group’s survival.

Autocratic regimes impose total loyalty – not for the survival of all, but for the elite, and this loyalty is imposed by might and by ideological indoctrination.

The ease and attraction of such total loyalty favours ethno-nationalism; it is profoundly anti-modern and anti-democratic, yet also profoundly seductive.

And New Zealand is being seduced by it. Already, our education system is indoctrinating children into retribalism via the so-called “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” of the curriculum. But decolonisation will destroy the very means by which each generation acquires reasoned knowledge, and in so doing, the ability to reason – which in turn provides the rationalism to counter the irrationalism of total loyalty.

By undermining the secular academic curriculum – that which creates the reasoning mind – we are destroying the partially loyal individual. Our fate – to be left with those capable only of mindless total loyalty.

When citizens abdicate their democratic duty, when the media abandons its responsibilities, when judges become political activists, when academics are intolerant of open inquiry, and when governments are subverted by an ideology – that is when a corporate tribal elite emerges to encircle the commons, to privatise what belongs to the public, to us the people, and to govern not in our interests but for themselves. In this way wealth and power are merged.

Tribalism and democracy are incompatible. We can’t have both. If we wish to keep New Zealand as a liberal democratic nation then, as we derive our citizen rights from the nation-state, so we have a duty to ensure that the nation-state which awards those rights, remains democratic and able to do so.

Elizabeth Rata is a professor of education at the University of Auckland. This article is an edited version of a speech entitled ‘In Defence of Democracy’ given at the New Zealand ACT Party Annual Conference.

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This is how people are deceived

 

This is how people are deceived  By Dustin Broadbery, 12 May 2022

 

CIA Director, William Casey is reputed to have said to Ronald Reagan ‘We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the American public believes is false.’

Fast forward thirty years, and there’s no piece of fiction the masses will not swallow.

From Woke to COVID to the war in Ukraine, people no longer make their own ideological pilgrimages to the truth – the truth is served oven-ready by their political betters.

Nowadays, there’s little distinction between the two hemispheres: reality and illusion. It’s not so much that people have been robbed of their ability to decipher between these two, it’s that facts have been reoriented into fiction and fiction into facts. It’s a degradation of epistemology so momentous, that people don’t even know that they don’t know that they don’t know what’s happening.   To quote one former anarchist.

In the grand scheme of things, humanity has perjured themselves and life as we know it has morphed into a sort of science-fiction, soap-opera with few common ancestors to reality. Even right-thinking folks require the equivalent of a cerebral chainsaw to hollow out the slew of implausible narratives into something remotely resembling reality. It goes beyond fiction to predictive programming. They’re not just deceiving you; they’re showing you that they’re deceiving you.

What is neither here nor there to the deceived is the track record of their deceivers. Before the ink dried on the newsprint proclaiming the crisis in-waiting, the falsifications of COVID were buried under the falsehoods of war, Zelensky’s standing ovation at Westminster knocked Pfizer data’s release off the rostrum and those formerly joined at the hip to COVID got hitched to their Ukrainian brides.

This entire fiasco holds water because what people think they know for sure, that just ain’t so, is a consensus. A preponderance of fabrications, falsehoods and false prophets governs the spiritual milieu. People worship the prosaic and glorify artifice. Our moral choices are guided by platitude and not virtue, anecdote and not evidence.

To complicate matters, what was formerly held sacred has become profane and what was formerly profane has become sacred, to quote Robert Sepehr. 

There’s a war raging, alright, but you will find its theatre of operations inside the human psyche. It is a war on consciousness, an atrophy of culture and its stark consequences is the spiritual malaise of humanity.

Freemasons, for one, understood that information was power. Concealing beyond the prying eyes of the lower orders, the esoteric mysteries of the universe.

Then as now, it’s not enough for these people to hold a monopoly over knowledge, they must deprive everyone else of its illumination, or go one further and spread ignorance. It goes beyond censoring counterarguments to fomenting falsehoods, It’s not so much societal breakdown but self-immolation. People are being misinformed and stupefied and sent out as agents of disinformation to further deconstruct what’s left of an already deconstructed reality.

To make matters worse, precisely zero lessons have been learned these past two years. People flounder from one crisis to the next. Walk aimlessly from quarantine camp to air-raid shelter into whichever direction their political higher-ups point them, to deride whoever is nominated as the scourge of society, de jour. The great national pastime is to gather at the pillories and hurl cabbages at anti-vaxxers, Russians, (insert your antihero: here).

THE INFOWAR

If all this sounds remarkably like an info-war, then it probably is.

The battle for hearts and minds has moved online. Our divine spark of life is being overhauled to data. Something of divine proportions compels us to the internet, to data – our daily bread (and circuses), our digital avatars living richer, more meaningful lives than their truant owners.

What ceases to be worth the candle is the epistemology of our data.

It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you’re on – a card carrying member of the great awakening or useful idiot on the lockdown left, you’re still part of the same problem. You have been taken hostage by a series of narratives laid on with a shovel by the predator class and designed for the sole purpose of keeping you rapt and not informed, sedentary and not spirited. In the world of algorithms everyone is created equal, and data is just data, there’s no morality to it.

These events play out as a nail-biting whodunnit, but the reality is, they’re not supposed to be solved. There’s no answers nor restitution, it’s your awareness and not your belief systems which is being harvested.

What these hellhounds want is for you to pick your side, choose your battle, but make sure your battlelines are social media, and that you’re not throwing Molotov cocktails at the Tower of Babel.

Everyone has a dog in the fight. Particularly, those baying for the blood of the unvaccinated or calling for violence against Russians, who do so, according to Voltaire, because those who can make you believe in absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

It’s quite simple really. If a person’s psyche is under siege and they don’t designate an enemy to scapegoat, they might get wise to who’s really attacking them, and that simply wouldn’t do.

In this theatre of the absurd people acclimatise to fiction because it’s easier than confronting uncomfortable truths. But under these fertile conditions any version of reality, no matter how precarious, will wash. That’s where the Great Reset enters the fray.

Once you desecrate a person’s moralistic and cultural maps of the world, their place in it becomes increasingly untenable. People lose touch with reality and what it means to be human. The ensuing crisis of identity leaves them susceptible to hostile takeover. Amongst other things that could possibly go wrong is the eventual microchipping of the population and brain machine interfaces.

PREDICTIVE PROGRAMMING

But there are even stranger things brewing. Predictive Programming is the theory of a hidden hand operating the levers of reality. A sort of reality adjustment bureau obfuscating real world events through film, literature, and media manipulation. The fundamental principle here is psychological conditioning that reduces people’s resistance to the acceptance of planned future events and encourages them to swap concrete reality structures for static constructs, until eventually, our inherited world view is replaced by mythos and archetypes.

That we are living through the objectification of the predator class is no moot point. That’s their messiah complex imprinted onto the collective consciousness and projected back onto the real world. By their own volition, the masses are breathing life into these grotesqueries and blotting the social fabric.

REVELATION OF THE METHOD

But it runs even deeper than predictive programming. Some call this Revelation of the Method.

According to Michael Hoffman: first they suppress the counterargument, and when the most opportune time arrives, they reveal aspects of what’s really happened, but in a limited hangout sort of way.

We were told the vaccines were harmless, until Pfizer debased their own safety claims, but not before the entire world had been vaccinated. Lockdown Apologists across the corporate media are now almost unanimous that lockdowns do more harm than good. This is no arbitrary volte-face, but rather a carefully planned sequence of disclosures when the time is ripe.

Michael Hoffman suggests that the ruling elite are giving notice of their supremacy. Declaring themselves virtuoso criminal masterminds, above the law and beyond reproach. But most of all, they are telling you, in no uncertain terms, that you are without recourse, these events are beyond your control, as is your own destiny for that matter. Eventually a sense of apathy and abulia engulfs humanity, demoralising us to the point of conceding defeat to a system we are powerless to change.

Not that you would ever have restitution. The house is not designed to do its own housekeeping. Buried deep within their rule of law, is a hidden constitution that states: nothing happens without your consent. In this version of contract law, once the truth is hidden in plain sight, you have agreed to it. There exists someplace an unsigned contract with your unsworn oath on it.

In the end, we’re all victims of the same masterstroke, whether keyboard evangelist or state-apologist, everyone is being royally screwed, and it’s not so much that they’re laughing at you, it’s that you’re laughing at yourself.

Dustin Broadbery is a writer and researcher from London trying to make sense of the New Normal these past two years. Particularly the ethical and legal issues around lockdowns and mandates, the history and roadmap to today’s biosecurity state, and the key players and institutions involved in the globalised takeover of our commons. You can find his work at www.thecogent.org, or follow him on twitter @TheCogent1

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The Codex, Fluoride, Auschwitz, Monsanto Connection

The Codex^J Fluoride^J Auschwitz^J Monsanto Connection  By Barbara H. Peterson, August 2010. Article added 27 April 2022

Editor’s note: click on link above to view PDF copy that includes several graphics.  Note too the following article ‘Were we lied to about water fluoridation?’

Farm Wars

What do Codex Alimentarius with its official food standards, the fluoridation of our water and food supply, genocide at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and Monsanto, the company responsible for genetically altering the world’s food supply all have in common? Is there a connection that binds these seemingly diverse organizations together? Yes, there is. In fact, they are so inextricably bound that separating them is all but impossible.

Let’s start at the beginning with Auschwitz and connect the dots.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz was known for its “network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German concentration camps (Wikipedia).”

Auschwitz also had a factory called I. G. Auschwitz:

I.G. Auschwitz, founded in Kattowitz on April 7, 1941, was intended to be the largest chemical factory in Eastern Europe and at the same time a building block in the process of “Germanizing” the region. According to the plan, the production facilities were to supply the Eastern European market with plastics in peacetime, following their use for wartime production. In addition to German skilled workers and forced laborers from all over Europe, increasing numbers of prisoners from the Auschwitz concentration camp were deployed at the gigantic construction site in Auschwitz. In 1942 I.G. Auschwitz built its own corporate concentration camp, Buna/Monowitz. (Wollheim Memorial)

In fact, I.G. Auschwitz was designed from the very first to be an extremely complex chemical factory, producing, besides Buna, high-performance fuels (including aviation gasoline and fuel oil for naval use), various plastics, synthetic fibers, stabilizing agents, resins, methanol, nitrogen, and pharmaceuticals. (Wollheim Memorial)

I.G. Farben, which consisted of BASF, Bayer, and Hoechst (now known as Aventis), owned I.G. Auschwitz. A man called Frits ter Meer was on the I.G. Farben Managing Board from its foundation, and was responsible for I.G. Auschwitz. I. G. Auschwitz had a cozy relationship with the Auschwitz concentration camp, in that it used forced labor of the prisoners to work in its factory, and also used them as guinea pigs.

Under Frits ter Meers direction, I.G. Farben used a fluoridation program to control the population at the Auschwitz concentration camp in any given area through the mass medication of drinking water supplies.“By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication (fluoride) that would produce sterility in women, and so on.” (ShopUSI)

Frits ter Meer was ultimately convicted at Nuremberg of plundering and slavery, but his sentence was commuted due to friends in high places. Fritz then went on to become one of the architects of the Codex Alimentarius Commission in 1962/3.

Codex Alimentarius

Codex was created by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) of the United Nations (UN). According to the Codex official site:

The Codex Alimentarius Commission was created in 1963 by FAO and WHO to develop food standards, guidelines and related texts such as codes of practice under the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Programme. The main purposes of this Programme are protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and non-governmental organizations.(Codex Alimentarius)

The Codex Alimentarius Commission implements the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Program, the purpose of which is to protect the health of consumers and to ensure fair practices in the food trade.(Organic Consumers)

In other words, under the auspices of “protecting the public health and ensuring fair trade practices,” the Joint FAO/WHO Food Standards Program is implemented by the Codex Alimentarius Commission. The FAO and WHO set the standards, and the Codex Commission implements them. All members of the UN are obligated to comply with these standards.

So, what does Codex have to do with fluoridation, and just how could a mass fluoridation program be implemented without our knowledge or consent under Codex guidelines?

The answer is – WHO has already determined that fluoride should be included in our food and water supply because it is “necessary for public health:”

Many countries that are currently undergoing nutrition transition do not have adequate exposure to fluoride. There should be promotion of adequate fluoride exposure via appropriate vehicles, for example, affordable toothpaste, water, salt and milk. It is the responsibility of national health authorities to ensure implementation of feasible fluoride programmes for their country. Research into the outcome of alternative community fluoride programmes should be encouraged.

Here is the reference document:

Diet, Nutrition, and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases PDF

A 1994 World Health Organization expert committee suggested a level of fluoride from 0.5 to 1.0 mg/L (milligrams per litre) (Wikipedia)

Currently, compliance with WHO’s directive of the fluoridation of water, salt, and milk varies from country to country. Water fluoridation has been introduced by varying degrees in many countries. View each country HERE. An interesting fact to note is that drinking water is not fluoridated in any part of Germany. Is it mere coincidence that one of the founders of the Codex Alimentarius Commission just happened to be in charge of the fluoridation program at Auschwitz, and that Germany is somehow exempt from fluoridation? Or, maybe they know something that we don’t.

The Public Fluoridation Deception

Most are aware of the water fluoridation program that has been foisted upon us as a “treatment for dental disease” and cure for cavities. This is proven propaganda and has been disputed in the EPA’s own documents, which list fluoride as a contaminant, as well as in countless other professional publications. Yet, the mass water fluoridation program continues, causing food and liquids that use this contaminated water to contain fluoride also.

According to our own CDC Department of Health and Human Services:

“fluoridated water is diffused throughout the population as residents of non-fluoridated communities increasingly consume foods and beverages processed and bottled in fluoridated communities. Thus, many individuals residing in non-fluoridated communities have benefited from fluoridation policies.”

This is called “Building Capacity to Fluoridate.” (CDC)

So you see, our country is complying with the UN/WHO/FAO/Codex fluoridation policy and we the people don’t even know it. Just like the prisoners at Auschwitz most likely didn’t know that they were being subjected to a fluoridation program and being poisoned with their water until it was too late. If food is produced using fluoridated water, then it contains fluoride. All you have to do is contaminate the water, and the food issue takes care of itself.

The following chart shows just how “in compliance” the U.S. is: Percent of U.S. Population Receiving Fluoride

And if some of you are still wondering if we are really following Codex mandates, wonder no more. Many do not know this, but ‘Codex’ already consists of around 300 official food standards, some of which have been in ‘global effect’ since as long ago as 1966 (Rath Foundation). So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise to find out that fluoridation is just another facet of this program.

The Monsanto Connection

Monsanto, Cargill, BASF, Bayer, and Aventis (or I.G. Farben) are all in partnership under the banner of Crop Science. They are partnered in various ways, such as:

BASF Plant Science and Monsanto to expand their collaboration in maximizing crop yield.

Monsanto, Bayer team up on herbicide tolerance

Mergers and acquisitions

Monsanto and Cargill team up

Monsanto and Cargill are in a 50/50 joint venture partnership. Monsanto makes the seeds, which make the crops, and Cargill makes the fertilizer. Cargill also just happens to be responsible for 70-75% of the hazardous waste hydrofluosilicic acid used in fluoridation programs. (Fluoride Action Network)

The U.S. government considers the basic chemical composition of hydrofluosilicic acid, a toxic waste, and fluoride to be the same when dumped in the water supply:

Due to the obviously intriguing aspect of this “waste disposal policy”, there has naturally been quite a bit of curiosity concerning the safety of this public health practice. Apparently, however, there are no government safety studies currently available on fluosilicic acid. This is because the government is basing their fluoridation policy on the assumption that there is no chemical difference, after dilution into the water supply, between pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride and the industrial grade hydrofluosilicic acid.(Fluoride Action Network)

Oregon, which is very low on the compliance list with only 19.4% fluoridation, is attempting to increase that level considerably. In 2007,HB 3099, the Oregon water fluoridation bill, would have required community water suppliers serving more than 10,000 people to “optimally fluoridate.” Fortunately, it was not passed. If passed, it would have increased the fluoride levels in Oregon to 68%. Good for Cargill and Monsanto, bad for us.

Reasons Not to Fluoridate

The following partial list is compiled from Fluoride Alert:

Fluoride is a cumulative poison.

Chromosome damage

Kidneys

Brain

Alzheimers

Rats dosed prenatally demonstrated hyperactive behavior. Those dosed postnatally demonstrated hypoactivity (i.e. under activity or “couch potato” syndrome)

Lowering of IQ

Early onset of puberty

Affects thyroid gland

Arthritis

Cancer

Infertility

Harms bones – brittle

It is up to us to stand up and say no to mass water fluoridation. If someone wants fluoride, then let him/her take it. I have no problem with that. But to forcibly administer this poison to an unsuspecting and unwilling populace without prior knowledge or consent is criminal. We are not Auschwitz prisoners….yet.

© 2010 Barbara H. Peterson

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Were We Lied To About Water Fluoridation?

Were We Lied To About Water Fluoridation  By The Daily Skeptic, 10 April 2022

The addition of a fluoride, such as hexafluorosilicic acid or disodium hexafluorosilicate, to public water supplies has been recommended in a joint statement by the four Chief Medical Officers of the U.K. The Government’s Health and Care Bill, which has reached its final stages in Parliament, includes a small section to facilitate water fluoridation, which is now expected to be spread throughout the U.K.

Although water is already fluoridated in a few parts of the U.K. (mainly Birmingham), for nearly forty years no new schemes have been implemented since local opposition has managed to defeat them all. The Government is now determined to impose its wishes.

A recent press release said that “higher levels of fluoride are associated with improved dental health outcomes”, and that the “Health and Care Bill will cut bureaucracy and make it simpler to expand water fluoridation schemes”. The Bill’s explanatory notes state: “Research shows that water fluoridation is an effective public health intervention to improve oral health for both children and adults and reduces oral health inequalities.”

For about 70 years it has been claimed that fluoridation reduces dental decay, and that it is safe. Although there is abundant evidence showing that in fact it is neither effective nor safe, the proponents of fluoridation have long had the advantage of far greater funding than that available to sceptics.

Trials of fluoridation started in 1945 in the U.S. and Canada but, before any had been completed, and without any comprehensive health studies, fluoridation was endorsed as safe and effective by the U.S. Public Health Service. The American Dental and Medical Associations soon added their approval, as later did their equivalents in the U.K.

The original trials were studied by Dr. Philip Sutton in Australia who graduated with honours in Dental Science. Asked to examine them, he found they were of low quality, full of errors and omissions.

In Austria, Rudolf Ziegelbecker also studied the original fluoridation trials and found they did not show what had been claimed. Professor Erich Naumann, Director of the German Federal Health Office, said of him:

“Your results have been accepted everywhere in Germany with the greatest interest and have increased the grave doubts against drinking water fluoridation.” Prof. Naumann added: “It is regrettable that the existing data on water fluoridation had not been examined earlier using mathematical-statistical methods. Otherwise the myth of drinking water fluoridation would have already dissolved into air long ago.”

In the U.K., pilot schemes started in the mid-1950s in four areas, all of which sooner or later abandoned the practice: Andover (1955-58), part of Anglesey (1955-92), Kilmarnock (1956-62), and Watford (1956-89). In 1957, Dr. Geoffrey Dobbs wrote in New Scientist that they “are now officially described as demonstrations of the benefits of fluoridation, not experiments, so the results are a foregone conclusion” and their purpose quite openly “promotional”.

He added that the studies would gain enormously in value if those responsible were willing to submit them to impartial scientific assessment.

When the UK pilot studies started, it was officially stated that they should include “full medical and dental examinations at all ages”, but no medical examinations were done, and neither short-term nor long-term possible harms were explored. This lack of concern continues, with a general failure in fluoridated countries to monitor fluoride exposure or side effects.

In 2000, a major report by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York concluded that, despite many studies over 50 years, “We were unable to discover any reliable good-quality evidence in the fluoridation literature world-wide”. Even among the 26 better studies on fluoridation and tooth decay, not one was evaluated as “high quality, with bias unlikely”.

In 2015, a Cochrane review added: “There is very little contemporary evidence, meeting the review’s inclusion criteria, that has evaluated the effectiveness of water fluoridation for the prevention of caries.”

When Israel ended fluoridation in 2014-15, partly because of health concerns, its Ministry of Health pointed out that WHO data indicated no significant difference in the level of tooth decay between countries that fluoridate and those that do not fluoridate.

A trial in Hastings in New Zealand was apparently so successful that it was widely reported as a classic case of the benefit of fluoridation, with tooth decay reduced by at least half.

However, when New Zealand passed freedom-of-information legislation, two university researchers were able to access the original records, which revealed that the published results were fraudulent.

One of those involved in running the trials was asked for an explanation but he did not even try to justify the published results.

Not only is there a great absence of good quality evidence that fluoridation significantly reduces tooth decay, there has, especially in recent years, been growing evidence that it is harmful.

In 2006, a major report by the U.S. National Research Council said that fluoride exposure is plausibly associated with neurotoxicity, gastrointestinal problems, endocrine problems and other ailments. It was also unable to rule out an increased risk of cancer and of Down’s syndrome in children.

In 2017, a team of experts in Chile, supported by the Medical College of Chile, concluded that fluoridation is ineffectual and harmful.

Fluoride occurs naturally in a few water supplies, but so does arsenic. A recent study from Sweden shows an increased prevalence of hip fracture in post-menopausal women associated with long-term exposure to natural fluoride at levels in water in the same range as used in some parts of the U.K. for artificial fluoridation.

About half a century passed before the declassification of hundreds of U.S. Government documents provided clues to the real reason for fluoridation. Much meticulous research by an award-winning investigative journalist, Christopher Bryson, resulted in his thoroughly documented book, The Fluoride Deception, showing beyond doubt the extensive fraud involved.

Bryson’s research revealed the strong connection between fluoridation and the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bombs. Huge amounts of fluorine were used to extract the isotope of uranium needed. Workers suffered hundreds of chemical injuries, mostly from the gas uranium hexafluoride.

In 1943 and 1944, farmers reported workers made ill, crops blighted and livestock injured, with some cows so crippled they could not stand. When the war was over, farmers in New Jersey sued DuPont and the Manhattan Project for fluoride damage. In response the Government mobilised officials and scientists to defeat the farmers.

In 1946, the United States had begun full-scale production of atomic bombs, and the New Jersey farmers’ legal action was seen as a threat, because of the potential for enormous damages and a public relations problem, with more trouble likely if they won. The farmers’ legal action was blocked by the Government’s refusal to reveal how much hydrogen fluoride DuPont had vented into the atmosphere.

Dr. Harold Hodge defended the nuclear programme against the legal threat from farmers. He had the idea of calming the public’s fears by talking about the usefulness of fluorine in tooth health. In January 1944, a secret conference on fluoride metabolism took place in New York. Organised by President Roosevelt’s science adviser, James Conant, documents from it are among the first that connect the atomic bomb programme to water fluoridation and to the Public Health Service.

Manhattan Project scientists were ordered to help the contractors. They also played a prominent role in the fluoridation of the public water supply in Newburgh, New York, an experiment that began in May 1945. In 1947 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission took over from the Manhattan Project.

Dr. Harold Hodge, the Project’s senior wartime toxicologist, became the leading promoter of fluoridation. He announced it was so safe that it would take a massive dose of fluoride to cause harm. (Some 25 years later, in 1979, he quietly admitted in an obscure paper that he had been wrong.)

A Committee to Protect Our Children’s Teeth was formed, with powerful links to U.S. military-industrial interests and their determined effort to escape liability for fluoride pollution. The aim was to transform the public image of fluoride from that of a dangerous pollutant to a beneficial prophylactic medicine.

This aim was achieved with the help of Edward Bernays, an expert in the use of psychological techniques to achieve “manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses” and “the engineering of consent”. Bernays advised the avoidance of debate: fluoridation was to be presented as indisputably beneficial; only the ignorant could object to it.

Reviews of Bryson’s book included one in the scientific journal Nature, noting that he “raises the stakes by reporting a great deal of relevant and often alarming research”, and describing the book as “thought-provoking and worthwhile”.

Publishers Weekly wrote: “Bryson marshals an impressive amount of research to demonstrate fluoride’s harmfulness, the ties between leading fluoride researchers and the corporations who funded and benefited from their research, and what he says is the duplicity with which fluoridation was sold to the people.”

Chemical & Engineering News stated: “We are left with compelling evidence that powerful interests with high financial stakes have colluded to prematurely close honest discussion and investigation into fluoride toxicity.”

Bryson found that, while the American Dental Association had previously opposed fluoridation, it changed its tune after receiving a large donation from an industrialist with a stake in the commercial use of fluoride.

A study of workers at a chemical company in Cleveland was used to promote the idea that fluoride reduces tooth decay. It said workers exposed to fluoride had fewer cavities than those not exposed to it. The report helped to shift public opinion. The secret version of the report, discovered decades later, stated that most of the men had few or no teeth, and that corrosion affected such teeth as they had.

As early as 1951 a confidential gathering of State Dental Directors in the U.S. was advised by Dr. Frank Bull, “We have told the public it works, so we can’t go back on that”. If it was difficult then, it must be very difficult now for prestigious dental and medical organisations to admit that the assurances of effectiveness and safety they have given for so long were at best mistaken and at worst fraudulent.

Among the various methods used to suppress adverse evidence and dissent have been mocking, silencing, sacking and denigration of scientists who threatened the official story. One of the earliest to suffer was Dr. George Waldbott, an eminent U.S. physician who was viciously maligned after reporting fifty cases of people made ill by fluoridated water, as established by double-blind tests.

Dr. John Colquhoun, a former supporter of fluoridation in New Zealand, was Chief Dental Officer for Auckland when he discovered and reported that fluoride was damaging children’s teeth. This was not what the authorities wanted to hear and he was sacked.

Dr. William Marcus was Senior Science Adviser in the Office of Drinking Water in the Environmental Protection Agency. He was sacked when he warned that research by the famous Battelle Institute showed that some forms of cancer could be caused by fluoride.

Dr. Phyllis Mullenix was the Chief Toxicologist at the prestigious Forsyth Dental Center, who discovered that fluoride is a neurotoxin that can adversely affect the brain. Following publication of her peer-reviewed study, U.S. Government pressure resulted in her being sacked and the institute’s toxicology department closed.

Often those whose research gave results unfavourable to fluoridation found that medical journals were hostile. Dr. Albert Schatz was a co-discoverer of streptomycin, the first effective drug for tuberculosis. When he found that infants in Chile had much higher death rates in fluoridated areas he sent a report in 1965 to the editor of the Journal of the American Dental Association who returned it unread.

The reluctance of many medical journals to publish adverse findings on fluoride resulted in the foundation of the International Society for Fluoride Research and its quarterly journal Fluoride. However, MEDLINE, the bibliographic database published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, declined to index the peer-reviewed journal’s contents.

Dr. Richard Foulkes chaired a committee that recommended fluoridation in British Columbia. Later, a friend urged him to do his own research, after which he changed his mind and said: “My initial belief was based on information given to me by those in authority rather than on the basis of my examination of the facts.”

Dr. Hardy Limeback was Head of Preventive Dentistry at the University of Toronto when in 1999 he apologised for having promoted fluoridation. “I did not realise the toxicity of fluoride,” he said. “I had taken the word of the public health dentists, the public health physicians, the USPHS, the USCDC, the ADA, the CDA that fluoride was safe and effective without actually investigating it myself”.

It used to be claimed that fluoride works on the teeth from within and therefore that pregnant mothers should take fluoride for the sake of unborn children’s teeth. Now it is said that fluoride’s main effect is from the outside (topical, not systemic). Therefore, there is no need to imbibe it.

Water fluoridation is a blunderbuss that hits far more than the intended target. About a third to a half of fluoride that is ingested remains in the body where it accumulates, not only in the teeth and bones but also in the kidneys, pineal gland and the cardiovascular system. Kidney patients are particularly at risk from fluoridation.

The dose of fluoride a person gets in water is haphazard since people consume widely differing amounts. Bottle-fed babies get very much more fluoride than breast-fed ones, and the American Dental Association conceded in 2006, with little publicity, that “using water that has no or low levels of fluoride” should be considered when preparing formula milk for infants. However, neither an ordinary water filter nor boiling can remove fluoride.

Recent research also finds that fluoride damages children’s brains. For example, studies show a loss of IQ and increased symptoms of ADHD in offspring when pregnant women are exposed to fluoride at doses commonly experienced in fluoridated communities in Canada.

Leading scientists concerned about fluoride’s toxicity, and willing to speak out, include Dr. Philippe Grandjean (Harvard University: “Fluoride is causing a greater overall loss of IQ points today than lead, arsenic or mercury”); Dr. Kathleen Thiessen (“The principal hazard at issue from exposure to fluoridation chemicals is IQ loss”); Professor David Bellinger (Harvard Medical School: “It’s actually very similar to the effect size that’s seen with childhood exposure to lead”); Professor Bruce Lanphear (“Fluoride exposure during early brain development diminishes the intellectual abilities in young children”); and Dr. Howard Hu (“Fluoride is a developmental neurotoxicant at levels of exposure seen in the general population in water-fluoridated communities”).

No less important is the fact that fluoridation is treatment without consent. People without the resources needed to obtain alternative supplies of water for drinking and cooking are chemically treated, in effect compulsorily.

See more here: dailysceptic.org

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NZ Prime Minister leading NZ to extreme socialism

NZ Prime Minister leading NZ to extreme socialism  By Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 23 December 2021

Without a doubt, 2021 has been a very disturbing year as we faced the reality that our Prime Minister is leading New Zealand down a pathway of extreme socialism.

Many people are now realising that Jacinda Ardern is not the benevolent caring soul she portrays, but instead is heavily influenced by the extreme socialist thinking of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.

We now know she is introducing the UN’s Agenda 2030 into our everyday lives – not because she told us she was doing so, but because she revealed her plans to an elite audience overseas.

Particularly troubling is her implementation of He Puapua, the agenda of her Maori caucus for iwi control of the country. It was not disclosed during the 2020 general election campaign and Jacinda Ardern has no mandate to impose this radical plan to replace one of the world’s oldest democracies with tribal rule by 2040. Exposing He Puapua has been a turning point and we are pleased the NZCPR was able to play such a pivotal role.

Under the guise of implementing the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Prime Minister is orchestrating a massive transfer of power – an effective takeover of New Zealand’s democratic system of government by iwi leaders. Using the façade of “co-governance” a powerful tribal minority is being given 50 percent control and veto rights over all other New Zealanders. The ultimate goal is to establish an elite tribal aristocracy, that bestows privilege on those of Maori descent, relegating everyone else to second-class status.

While the PM deliberately kept He Puapua hidden throughout 2020, once she realised she had the power to govern alone, the agenda for Maori supremacy is being fast-tracked.

Nothing is safe. Our language is being corrupted with Maori words and phrases replacing English in communications, place names, and even the name of the country. History is being re-written and school children are being indoctrinated with a Maori World View. Tribal custom (tikanga) is replacing the common law in the legal system. Our democratic right to oppose Maori wards on councils has been abolished opening the door for the tribal control of local government. Under the Pae Ora Bill, our community-based District Health Boards are being replaced with new centralised agencies controlled by Maori which will prioritise race over clinical need. And now under Three Waters, billions of dollars of ratepayer funded council infrastructure and assets will be confiscated and transferred to agencies controlled by the tribal elite.

Iwi are attempting to take over policing – through roadblocks and other public access bans, they want control of child protection services to prevent abused Maori children from being cared for by non-Maori families, they want ownership of the Conservation Estate, and influence over Resource Management Act decision-making.

The rationale for this extraordinary takeover is that Maori are Treaty partners with the Crown and so should have 50 percent of control of the country. But even though it is constitutionally impossible for the Crown to enter into a partnership with her subjects, the PM not only continues to promote this fiction as the truth, but she has prevented the media from investigating it, by making the promotion of the Treaty ‘partnership’ a condition of access to her $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund.

This fund is a shocking pay-off that has turned the mainstream media into a mouthpiece for government propaganda – a situation that is completely unacceptable in a modern democracy which relies on the media to hold the government to account.

Jacinda Ardern is proud of ‘capturing’ the media, as she explained to an international audience of world leaders at a virtual Summit for Democracy hosted by US President Joe Biden on December 10: “In New Zealand we saw that Covid-19 was affecting traditional media models, already under pressure. We’ve also seen the spread of misinformation on Covid-19 particularly through social media. We had to act, so we made it a priority to establish a Public Interest Journalism Fund to help our media to continue to produce stories that keep New Zealanders informed. Underpinning this action is a recognition that a vibrant and trusted media sector is a vital component of a healthy democracy especially during times of crisis.”

The PM does not seem to realise that through her actions, she has almost single-handedly destroyed the credibility of New Zealand’s once great Fourth Estate, by offering government handouts that require the promotion of propaganda as a condition of acceptance. In some countries, what is going on here would be regarded as corruption and those orchestrating it would be indicted.

In fact, never in the history of New Zealand have once-popular media outlets become so despised by the public as they are now.

The key themes of President Biden’s summit included strengthening democracy against authoritarianism, and promoting respect for human rights.

Anyone listening to Jacinda Ardern telling world leaders that “democracy underpinned by human rights is essential to our identity as a nation”, would imagine her to be a true champion of democracy and human rights.

But her actions tell a different story.

The Prime Minister is attempting to replace democracy with authoritarian tribal rule, as she delivers control of our country to the unelected and unaccountable representatives of multi-million dollar private sector iwi corporations, one co-governance deal at a time.

Not only that, but her management of Covid-19 has crushed human rights in an unprecedented manner never experienced in New Zealand before. Her harsh lockdowns have cost lives and livelihoods, and her vaccine mandates – coming on top of an election promise not to make vaccination compulsory – has had a devastating impact on families and businesses, and all for no good reason, since testing and the use of protective equipment could have been required instead.

That Jacinda Ardern can ignore the devastation caused by her decisions, and gloat on the world stage about how great her achievements are, demonstrates the essential truth of the saying, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

Fortunately, New Zealanders collectively are fighting back, and thank you so much to all of our NZCPR readers for your wonderful efforts in joining in the campaigns and helping to spread the message. In just one year support for Labour has fallen in the polls from 50 percent on election night to around 36 percent. Opposition parties are now within striking distance of gaining a majority, and it seems highly unlikely that Labour would ever again be able to govern alone.

Looking ahead, there is a lot of water to go under the bridge before the next election, and we will face massive challenges as Labour presses ahead with its extremist agenda and makes the most of having majority rule.

One such challenge will be an implementation plan for He Puapua, developed by iwi leaders at the behest of the Government.

To achieve Maori sovereignty by 2040, He Puapua not only requires the recognition of Treaty partnerships, but two other major constitutional changes are also needed: the first is to introduce ‘tikanga’ into our law, and the second is to include the Treaty of Waitangi in a new written constitution.

Through one of our campaigns, the NZCPR is challenging a High Court ruling that tikanga trumps the common law to the Court of Appeal, and while the case relates to the coastal claims process, it has wider implications for the Rule of Law.

Furthermore, in 2011, the NZCPR led a successful campaign against the Maori Party’s attempt to introduce a new Treaty-based constitution for New Zealand. It was a battle that we could not afford to lose, since such a new written constitution would put Judges in charge of law-making and entrench and prioritise Maori rights above all others, with any challenge to that status deemed unconstitutional and ruled out.

Since a working group of iwi leaders has already developed a draft Treaty-based constitution for New Zealand, it is possible that they may try to use He Puapua and Labour’s majority rule to force it through. If that is indeed their plan for next year, then another major campaign will be needed!

It is in this climate of increasing oppression, that the NZCPR enters our sixteenth year of operation, driven by a philosophy so eloquently expressed by former US President Thomas Jefferson: “An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy”.

As you know, to retain our independence, the NZCPR is funded solely by donations from readers and Christmas is a make-or-break time for us – it’s when we find out whether our readers will back us for another year so we can continue producing our weekly newsletters and running our important campaigns. With no other sources of funding, our future is in your hands.

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Another example of the Western system of justice: The execution of Julian Assange

Another example of the Western system of justice. The execution of Julian Assange  By Chris Hedges, RT, 14 December 2021

 Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and host of RT’s On Contact, a weekly interview series on US foreign policy, economic realities and civil liberties in American society. He’s the author of 14 books, including several New York Times best-sellers.

He exposed empire as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, its callous disregard for human life, its rampant corruption, and its innumerable war crimes. But, as history shows, empires kill those who inflict deep wounds.

Let us name Julian Assange’s executioners. Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Scott Morrison. Theresa May. Lenin Moreno. Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Mike Pompeo. Hillary Clinton. Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett and Lord Justice Timothy Victor Holroyde. Crown Prosecutors James Lewis QC, Clair Dobbin QC and Joel Smith. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia Gordon Kromberg. William Burns, the director of the CIA. Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5.

Let us acknowledge that the goal of these executioners, who discussed kidnapping and assassinating Assange, has always been his annihilation. That Assange, who is in precarious physical and psychological health, and who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, has been condemned to death should not come as a surprise. The 10 years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly three in the high-security Belmarsh prison, were accompanied by a lack of sunlight and exercise, and unrelenting threats, pressure, anxiety and stress. “His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry,” his fiancée Stella Moris said of the stroke.

His steady deterioration has led to hallucinations and depression. He takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been observed pacing his cell until he collapses, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall. He has spent weeks in the medical wing of Belmarsh. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he has thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.” The executioners have not yet completed their grim work.

Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner, locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis.

Assange committed empire’s greatest sin. He exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption and innumerable war crimes. Republican or Democrat. Conservative or Labour. Trump or Biden. It does not matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same Satanic songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds.

Rome’s long persecution of the Carthaginian general Hannibal, forcing him in the end to commit suicide, and the razing of Carthage repeats itself in epic after epic. Crazy Horse. Patrice Lumumba. Malcolm X. Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Sukarno. Ngo Dinh Diem. Fred Hampton. Salvador Allende. If you cannot be bought off, if you will not be intimidated into silence, you will be killed.

The obsessive CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, which, because none succeeded, have a Keystone Cop incompetence to them, included contracting Sam Giancana, Al Capone’s successor in Chicago, along with Miami mobster Santo Trafficante Jr., to kill the Cuban leader, attempting to poison Castro’s cigars with a botulinum toxin, providing Castro with a tubercle bacilli-infected scuba-diving suit, booby-trapping a conch shell on the sea floor where he often dived, slipping botulism-toxin pills in one of his drinks, and using a pen outfitted with a hypodermic needle to poison him.

The current cabal of assassins hides behind a judicial burlesque overseen in London by portly judges in gowns and white horse-hair wigs mouthing legal Alice-in-Wonderland absurdities. It is a dark reprise of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado’, with the Lord High Executioner drawing up lists of people “who would not be missed.”

I watched the latest instalment of the Assange show trial via video link on Friday. I listened to the reading of the ruling granting the appeal by the United States to extradite him. Assange’s lawyers have two weeks to appeal to the Supreme Court, which they are expected to do. I am not optimistic.

Friday’s ruling was devoid of legal analysis. It fully accepted the conclusions of the lower-court judge about increased risk of suicide and inhumane prison conditions in the United States. But the ruling argued that US Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court on February 5, 2021, which offered “assurances” that Assange would be well treated, overrode the lower court’s conclusions. It was a remarkable legal non sequitur. The ruling would not have gotten a passing grade in a first-semester law school course. But legal erudition is not the point. The judicial railroading of Assange, which has eviscerated one legal norm after another, has, as Franz Kafka wrote, turned “lying into a universal principle.”

 Chris Hedges: The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time

The decision to grant the extradition was based on four “assurances” given to the court by the US government. The two-judge appellate panel ruled that the “assurances” “entirely answer the concerns which caused the judge [in the lower court] to discharge Mr. Assange.” The “assurances” promise that Assange will not be subject to special administrative measures (SAMs), which keep prisoners in extreme isolation and allow the government to monitor conversations with lawyers, overruling attorney-client privilege; can, if the government in his native Australia agrees, serve out his sentence there; will receive adequate clinical and psychological care; and, pre-trial and post trial, will not be held in the administrative maximum facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

“There is no reason why this court should not accept the assurances as meaning what they say,” the judges wrote. “There is no basis for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good faith.” And, with these rhetorical feints, the judges signed Assange’s death warrant.

None of the “assurances” offered by Biden’s Department of Justice (DoJ) are worth the paper they’re written on. All come with escape clauses. None are legally binding. Should Assange do “something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX,” he will be subject to these coercive measures. And you can be assured that any incident, no matter how trivial, will be used, if Assange is extradited, as an excuse to toss him into the mouth of the dragon.

Should Australia, which has marched in lockstep with the US in the persecution of their citizen, not agree to his transfer, he will remain for the rest of his life in a US prison. But so what? If Australia does not request a transfer it “cannot be a cause for criticism of the USA, or a reason for regarding the assurances as inadequate to meet the judge’s concerns,” the ruling read. And even if that were not the case, it would take Assange 10 to 15 years to appeal his sentence all the way up to the Supreme Court, which would be more than enough time for the state assassins to finish him off.

I’m not sure how to respond to assurance number four, stating that Assange will not be held pre-trial in ADX Florence. No one is held pre-trial in ADX Florence. But it sounds reassuring, so I guess those in the Biden DoJ who crafted the diplomatic note added it.

ADX Florence is not the only supermax prison in the United States that might house Assange, of course. He could be shipped out to one of our other Guantanamo-like facilities. Daniel Hale, the former US Air Force intelligence analyst currently imprisoned for releasing top-secret documents that exposed widespread civilian casualties caused by US drone strikes, has been held since October in a communications management unit (CMU) at USP Marion, a federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. CMUs are highly restrictive cells that replicate the near-total isolation imposed by SAMs.

READ MORE: Assange suffered stroke in UK prison – fiancee

Ironically, the High Court ruling came as Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced at the virtual Summit for Democracy that the Biden administration would provide new funding to protect reporters targeted because of their work and support independent international journalism. Blinken’s “assurances” that the Biden administration would defend a free press, at the very moment the administration was demanding Assange’s extradition, is a glaring example of the rank hypocrisy and mendacity that makes the Democrats, as journalist Glen Ford used to say, “not the lesser evil, but the more effective evil.”

Assange is charged in the US under 17 counts of the Espionage Act and one count of hacking into a government computer. The charges could see him sentenced to 175 years in prison, even though he is not a US citizen and WikiLeaks is not a US-based publication. If he is found guilty, it will effectively criminalize the investigative work of all journalists and publishers, anywhere in the world and of any nationality, who possess classified documents to shine a light on the inner workings of power. This mortal assault on the press will have been orchestrated, we must not forget, by a Democratic administration. It will set a legal precedent that will delight other totalitarian regimes and autocrats who, emboldened by the United States, will gleefully seize journalists and publishers, no matter where they are located, who publish inconvenient truths.

There is no legal basis to hold Assange in prison. There is no legal basis to try him, a foreign national, under the Espionage Act. The CIA spied on him while he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers. This fact alone invalidates any future trial.

After seven years in a cramped room without sunlight in the embassy, Assange has been held for nearly three years in a high-security prison in London. As UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer has testified, that’s so the state can continue the relentless abuse and torture it knows will lead to his psychological and physical disintegration. The persecution of Assange is designed to send a message to anyone who might consider exposing the corruption, dishonesty and depravity that defines the black heart of our global elites.

Dean Yates can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. He was the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad on the morning of July 12, 2007 when his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed, along with nine other men, by US Army Apache gunships. Two children were seriously wounded. The US government spent three years lying to Yates, Reuters, and the rest of the world about the killings, although the army had video evidence of the massacre taken by the Apaches during the attack. The video, known as the Collateral Murder video, was leaked in 2010 by Chelsea Manning to Assange. For the first time, here was proof that those killed were not, as the army had repeatedly insisted, engaged in a firefight. It exposed the lies spun by the US that it could not locate the video footage and had never attempted to cover up the killings.

Watch my full interview with Yates here:

The Spanish courts can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. Spain was given an assurance that its citizen David Mendoza Herrarte, if extradited to the US to face trial on drug trafficking charges, could serve his prison sentence in his homeland. But, for six years, the DoJ repeatedly refused Spanish transfer requests, relenting only when the Spanish Supreme Court intervened.

The people in Afghanistan can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. US military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials knew for 18 years that the war in Afghanistan was a quagmire, yet they publicly stated, over and over, that the military intervention was making steady progress.

The people in Iraq can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. They were invaded and subject to a brutal war based on fabricated evidence about weapons of mass destruction.

The people of Iran can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. The United States, in the 1981 Algiers Accords, promised not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs and then funded and backed the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, a terrorist group based in Iraq and dedicated to overthrowing the Iranian regime.

The thousands of people tortured in US global black sites can tell you what US “assurances” are worth. CIA officers, when questioned by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the widespread use of torture, secretly destroyed video tapes of interrogations while insisting there had been no “destruction of evidence.”

The numbers of treaties, agreements, deals, promises, and “assurances” made by the US around the globe and subsequently violated are too numerous to list. Hundreds of treaties signed with Native American tribes, alone, have been ignored by the US government.

Assange, at tremendous personal cost, warned us. He gave us the truth. Now the ruling class is crucifying him for this truth. And with his crucifixion, the dim lights of our democracy go dark.

This article was first published on Scheerpost

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The UN’s COP26 is a grotesque and decadent spectacle

The UN COP26 is a grotesque and decadent spectacle  By Barry Brill, 18 November 2021

Editor’s note: Click on link above to view graphics in the original article.

We are witnessing Versailles levels of extravagance and hypocrisy. From every corner of the globe, the super-rich, the powerful and the full of puffed-up virtue are gathered in Glasgow to pontificate to the rest of us about how much we are harming the planet with all our waste and hubris.

They’ve arrived in their fleets of private jets to bemoan the scourge of air-industry emissions. They are tucking in to five-star meals in between wondering out loud if the little people should eat less meat. They’ll rest their weary, virtuous heads on plump, silk pillows after long days of discussing how to rein in the material aspirations of the masses.

It is perhaps the most nauseating display of oligarchical conceit of recent times.

The foregoing is unapologetically uplifted from a recent thundering editorial in Spiked. Brendan O’Neill captures the odious dishonesty of the world’s privileged and powerful as they strut their virtue in a groupthink orgy of piety. I recommend that you read it all.

One by one these elitists are competing to heighten the hysteria … “one minute to midnight” … “code red for the planet”… “an existential threat to humanity”… “greatest moral challenge of our time” … “last best hope for the world” … and on … and on … and on.

Hundreds of highly-paid PR flacks in dozens of countries have sweated out these histrionic phrases. The world’s billionaires and high potentates have then humbly volunteered to deliver the gold-plated words personally to Glasgow by private jet and chauffeured limousine.  And to be seen there.

But why are 400 private jets parked at airports serving Glasgow? Honestly? Why not deliver the words by email – or even by video if the media need visuals?  What do they achieve by their swaggering  physical presence? After all, everybody knows that this entire convention is a pretentious charade.

Nobody at the convention hall in Glasgow really needs to be convinced that climate action is a good thing. The hall is an echo-chamber of like-minded enthusiasts.

A committee of 25,000 is never going to make any worthwhile decision that was not pre-approved long before the convention began.

It is all theatre. But it is a very expensive performance, and – with Scotland reporting 400 new infections each day – it is a potentially dangerous performance for over 100 countries. All attendees are exempted from Scotland’s vaccine passport scheme. (“All animals are equal but some are more equal than others” – Orwell).

The private jets alone will blast 13,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, and their ostentatious presence has  been branded “rank climate hypocrisy” and the “nadir of carbon inequality”. But they are no more than the visible tip of an iceberg. Many of their mega-rich owners – Bloomberg, Bejos, Fink, Gates, Soros, Schwab, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds – are pouring many more billions into lobbying governments everywhere for their favoured climate policies.

There are literally tens of thousands of professional climate activists working on a full-time basis and drawing wages funded by these “philanthropists”. They make up the bulk of the non-delegates at the Glasgow convention. What hope does common sense or moderation have in the face of such an army of propagandists?

Francis Menton believes that, on balance, it’s a good thing we have these annual COPs, saying:

“I can think of no other comparable activities that put on such dramatic and widely-viewed display the immeasurable foolishness and hubris of our political overlords.“

Menton points out that no less than 25 COPs have previously ordered the world to reduce its omissions. They succeeded in delivering the dismal track record shown in this graph:

While every smug and sanctimonious member of the climate elite can readily churn out 10,000 words about the benefits of “net zero carbon by 2050”, none ever seem to mention the costs. Or who is to pay those costs. [Clue: it’s not them.]

Both New Zealand and UK governments have released modelling as to the likely costs. While admitting that “nobody knows”, the models suggest a figure of about US$11,000 per household per year. Contrast this with the 68% of Americans who tell opinion surveyors that they are not prepared to pay more than $10 per month to ameliorate climate change.

Where is the self-awareness of elites who instruct us to “do what we say not what we do”:

  • Al Gore, who predicts 20-foot rises in sea levels has bought a 9-bathroom beach front villa in Montecito, California;
  • Barack Obama, who declared “the moment when the rise of the oceans beganto slow” has acquired a waterfront mansion on Martha’s Vineyard;
  • When John Kerry recently flew in his family’s private jetto Obama’s 60th birthday party, it was the 16th private-jet jaunt his family has taken this year
  • The Prime Minister of the Maldives, who mimed an underwater cabinet meeting, built an international airport less than 2 metres above mean sea level;
  • In the knowledge that limiting population is a key tenet of climate alarmists, Boris Johnson is about to have his seventh child;
  • Jeff Bezos flew into Glasgow in his Gulfstream jet after attending Bill Gates 66th birthday party in the Mediterranean. At the party50 guests were choppered from private yachts to a beach;
  • The Cop26climate summit president Alok Sharma drives a diesel car. His spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton said she did not “fancy” an electric car “just yet”;

Closer to home, the New Zealand Green Party MPs fly more kilometres than the MPs of any other party. Minister James Shaw flew no less than 14 bureaucrats to Glasgow (in business class) for no known benefits to taxpayers – shouldering aside hapless MIQ applicants who have been queueing for months to return to their homeland.

I conclude as I began with Spiked:

This is a movement that allows the descendants of incredibly wealthy banking families to tell the rest of us to wear a cardie rather than turn on the central heating and which invites literal princes to make sad faces about all the flying and meat-eating the oiks are engaging in.

I said it was a modern version of Versailles, but actually it’s worse than that. At least daft bint Marie Antoinette wanted the lower orders to eat cake (she just didn’t realise they didn’t have any). This new lot actively campaigns against the consumption of the 21st-century equivalent of cake – meat, heat, easy travel. ‘Don’t let them eat cake’ is the cry of the eco-aristocrat.

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Climate Derangement Syndrome At COP26

Climate Derangement Syndrome At COP26  By spiked-online.com, 12  November 2021

It’s not any change in our climate that poses the greatest threat to humanity, it is the hysteria surrounding it that does.

Climate change is going to be worse than the Holocaust. It will give rise to a global epidemic of gang rape. There’ll be murder, war, slaughter. Your friends will die. Your children, too. The carbon-fuelled heating of the planet will bring ‘human life as we know it’ crashing to a violent, fiery end. It will be nothing less than doomsday.

These are just some of the hysterical claims that have been made in the discussion around COP26. As world leaders private-jetted their way to Glasgow for the latest UN gabfest on how to save the planet from mankind’s dirt, hubris and avarice, there was a severe outbreak of Climate Derangement Syndrome.

Prime ministers, bishops, princes and noisy greens all tried to outdo each other with their apocalyptic warnings. It has been a grim competition of catastrophes, an orgy of hyperbolic prophecies that wouldn’t look out of place in the Book of Revelation.

It all kicked off months before COP26 opened. When the IPCC published its latest report in August, delirious scribes across the Western world were reaching for their thesauruses in order that they might drive home to dim readers just how nightmarish the future promises to be. It’s ‘code red!’ for humanity, they all insisted, uniformly.

If we don’t get a handle on carbon emissions soon, ‘our future climate could well become some kind of hell on Earth’, said Tim Palmer of Oxford University. The planet is on fire and it’s our fault – we’re ‘guilty as hell’, declared the Guardian, coming off like a crackpot millenarian preacher.

Every unpleasant weather event was laid at the feet of dastardly mankind. ‘With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, said one writer.

This feverish holding-up of the IPCC report as some kind of God-like indictment of mankind set the stage for the derangement we have seen around COP26. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the supposed moral anchor of the nation, set the tone with his perverse insistence that the consequences of climate change will overshadow even the greatest crime in history – the Holocaust.

It will be a genocide ‘on an infinitely greater scale’, he said. He has since apologised for this shameful marshalling of the horrors of the Holocaust to the moany middle-class cause of going green.

Boris Johnson, who just a few years ago was writing newspaper columns slamming eco-hysteria, says climate change is a doomsday clock counting down to a ‘detonation that will end human life as we know it’. If we don’t cut carbon emissions, it will soon be ‘too late for our children’, he said, the clear implication being that climate change will gift the next generation a Mad Max-style wasteland in which life will barely be worth living.

‘It’s one minute to midnight’, said Boris. Actually, chirped the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘the clock has run out’. Make your minds up – is it apocalypse now or apocalypse very soon?

Time has ‘quite literally run out’, said Prince Charles. He says we need to take a ‘war-like footing’ on climate change. Climate change is ‘another form of wartime’ and we may soon have to ration things like air travel, said famed globe-trotter Joanna Lumley. If COP26 fails, it will be a ‘death sentence’ for humankind, said UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres. ‘We’re digging our own graves’, he warned.

Of course it fell to the middle-class death cult Extinction Rebellion to spell out what the globalist elites largely only hint at. Cameron Ford, the viral spokesperson for XR-offshoot Insulate Britain, said in an interview with Owen Jones that climate change will mean running out of food and ‘societal collapse’.

And then? ‘You’ll see slaughter. You’ll see rape. You’ll see murder.’ It gets worse, believe it or not. ‘[Our] friends and our siblings and our children – we will lose everything we love.’ Shorter version: everyone will die.

Owen Jones made no pushback whatsoever against these lunatic, utterly unscientific claims.

Then it was revealed that XR’s very own Nostradamus – its famously batty co-founder Roger Hallam – has been feverishly predicting the descent of humanity into a barbarous living hell. An unearthed document he wrote last year while he was in jail on suspicion of conspiracy to commit criminal damage, cheerily titled ‘Advice to Young People, as you Face Annihilation’, painted a picture of the future that would give John the Elder a run for his money.

We will see ‘the collapse of our society’, says Hallam. And like all the best mad prophets, he knows exactly what will happen next. ‘A gang of boys will break into your house demanding food. They will see your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, and they will gang rape her on the kitchen table. They will force you to watch, laughing at you. At the end, they will accuse you of enjoying it. They’ll take a cigarette and burn out your eyes with it. You will not be able to see anything again. This is the reality of climate change.’

You have been warned. You’d better start recycling.

It might feel tempting to write off Hallam’s demented prophesising as just another outburst from a man so odd that even the eco-loons of XR have distanced themselves from him.

But in truth he is only adding flesh to the bones of the elites’ own Climate Derangement Syndrome. When people like Hallam and Ford foretell slaughter and rape and the burning out of eyes in a future world ravaged to dust by carbon emissions, they’re merely putting pornographic colour to the elite consensus that climate change will be a Holocaust-level event in which millions will die.

There isn’t a cigarette paper’s difference between the Archbishop of Canterbury’s prophecy of a climate calamity worse than the Holocaust and Cameron Ford’s millenarian intonements about slaughter, rape and murder. Show me a meaningful distinction between Professor Tim Palmer’s prediction of ‘hell on Earth’ and Roger Hallam’s prison visions of hell on Earth.

We need to talk about this. We need to talk about Climate Derangement Syndrome and how frankly batshit crazy it has become. More to the point, we need to talk about how dangerous this way of thinking is to reason, freedom and the future prosperity of humankind.

Indeed, it isn’t climate change that threatens to undo the great gains of human civilisation – it’s the hysteria about climate change.

The first thing to note about Climate Derangement Syndrome, whether it’s coming from the posh road-blockers of Insulate Britain, Clarence House or the Church of England, is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with science.

This eco-hysteria single-handedly shatters the myth that contemporary environmentalism is a science-driven movement, merely concerned with acting upon the warnings contained in graphs and models drawn up by climatologists.

Show me the piece of scientific research that says a gang of boys will rape your mother if we don’t achieve Net Zero by 2030. Where’s the peer-reviewed study that pinpoints the moment when slaughter, rape and genocide will occur if our governments fail to cut back on fossil fuels?

Of course no such studies exist.

These malarial visions of future horrors spring from the realm of fantasy, not science.

They are the misanthropic prejudices of the depressed middle classes, not scientific projections. They emerge from the well of existential dread in which the contemporary elites wallow, not from cool, calm modelling. And the truth is that this has long been the case with climate-change alarmism.

‘Science’ is the garb thrown on what in reality is the End Times foreboding of this new millennium’s morally at-sea elites. ‘Climate change’ is the all-encompassing idea of doom through which the Western bourgeoisie expresses its sense of moral, political and economic exhaustion.

All the recent talk of doomsday and genocide captures the extent to which the issue of climate change has been catastrophised to an extraordinary degree, how it has been transformed from a perfectly manageable problem into an apocalypse modernity brought upon itself; from a scientific theory about mankind’s impact on the planet into certain, unquestionable proof of the folly of the industrial era; from one challenge among many facing humankind in the 21st century into an indictment of the entire human species.

In short, from a technical conundrum into a God-like revelation of the wickedness of greedy, industrious mankind.

Climate Derangement Syndrome is at root a revolt against modernity.

It is a reactionary, romantic, nostalgic cry of angst against the incredible world of production and consumption mankind has created over the past 200 years.

This is why some at COP26 openly denounced the Industrial Revolution. First came Greta Thunberg, the prophetess of doom of contemporary environmentalism.

She angrily denounced the British government as ‘climate villains’. The UK, she said, is largely responsible for the horrors of climate change – this ‘more or less… started in the UK since that’s where the Industrial Revolution started, [where] we started to burn coal’.

Shamefully, Boris Johnson echoed Greta’s regressive brickbats against the Industrial Revolution. In his COP speech he pointed out that Glasgow was the place where the steam engine, ‘produced by burning coal’, was born. That, he said, was ‘the doomsday machine’ that led us to the dire predicament we find ourselves in now.

This sneering at the Industrial Revolution is without question the most offensive and ridiculous thing Boris has ever said.

To hear the elected leader of the UK describe the UK’s extraordinary contributions to industrialisation as the first stirrings of ‘doomsday’ feels genuinely depressing.

Brits should not feel ashamed of the Industrial Revolution, as Boris and Greta and eco-hairshirts suggest we should.

We should feel immense pride at this radical overhaul of the processes of production and transportation.

The Industrial Revolution was arguably the most important event in human history.

Its positive impact on life expectancy, knowledge, liberty and equality, not only in the UK but also around the world, is almost incalculable.

It was the Industrial Revolution that dragged the populace away from the brutal, back-breaking serfdom of the land into the mad, teeming cities of London, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow. It revolutionised how we worked, how we lived, how we conceived of ourselves.

It was the cradle of solidarity and struggle and demands for voting rights, employment rights, educational rights. It is not a coincidence that life expectancy was depressingly short for all of human history until the Industrial Revolution, when it started its stunning and steady rise.

Without this revolution, most of us would still be tied to the land, never venturing further than the farm fence, unable to read, dead by 35.

That’s the idyll eco-regressives fantasise about? These people are as historically illiterate as they are pseudo-scientific.

The COP26 mockery of the Industrial Revolution – more than that, the depiction of that revolution as the starting pistol of the coming climatic genocide – shines a harsh light on what is motoring today’s green hysteria. Not steam or coal, that’s for sure. No, it’s the elites’ loss of faith in modernity and in the human project more broadly.

This is why climate-change hysteria is a far larger problem for humankind than climate change itself. As Bjorn Lomborg recently explained on spiked, climate change is a ‘middling problem’. It is the derangement over climate change, the painting of it as an End Times event we probably deserve, that truly disrupts and undermines our civilisation.

With its misanthropic disdain for human behaviour and aspirations, with its revisionist treatment of the birth of modernity as essentially a crime against Mother Earth, with its incessant demands for reining in economic growth, and with its censorious branding of anyone who questions any part of the regressive green agenda as a ‘climate-change denier’, climate-change alarmism is an express menace to growth, democracy, freedom of speech and the right to dream of an even more prosperous future for all.

Prince Charles is right that we need to get on a ‘war footing’. Not against climate change, though.

Rather, against this ceaseless diminishment of humanity’s achievements and the baleful, untrue claim that modern man is a plague on the planet.

This manmade apocalypticism threatens to upend the remarkable civilisation we have created far more than a bit of carbon does.

See more here: spiked-online.com

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