How yesteryear's colonialists morphed into today's trendsetters
I’ve often struggled to find a concise and generally understood term for the ruling cabal that transcends national borders and nominally democratic institutions. Henceforth I will settle for the Sicilian word, Mafia. With all due respect to modern Italians, the mafiosi were mere amateurs compared to the extended Biotech Military Industrial Complex allied closely with banking cartels, mass media outlets, NGOs and colleges as well as being deeply embedded in almost any administration, major political party or charity. Postmodern Mafia bosses are responsible for much bigger crimes against humanity. These dark forces combine to suppress our free will and mould us into malleable team players. We need a succinct collective noun to avoid listing all the organisations these control freaks have infiltrated. The Global Mafia or just the Mafia pretty much encapsulates the state of play in the early 21st century.
Over the years I’ve read Marxists who blame capitalism for all our woes, libertarians who blame the state, anarchists who blame both, anti-imperialists who blame colonialists, nationalists who blame globalists, one-world-love idealists who blame both, free thinkers who blame psychiatry, naturopaths who blame big pharma, technology enthusiasts who blame luddites and environmentalists who blame overconsumption. I’ve learned a good deal from critical thinkers from all schools of thought.
Only the law differentiates organised crime syndicates from the unholy alliance of governments and large corporations. Just as we pay tax to avoid hefty penalties or jail, people in Mafia-controlled areas of Sicily pay il pizzo or protection money. If you cooperate with your local Mafia bosses and turn a blind eye to their immoral deeds, you may be granted some personal freedoms and lead a relatively untroubled life, as long as you don’t rock the boat and know your place. Historically, most modern states emerged from fiefdoms whose rulers won power through a mix of warcraft and leadership skills. All modern states and large corporations operate as legalised mafias with slick marketing operations. Now if you dare speak out against your captors, they tarnish your reputation and deny you access to social media or any other public platforms.
Only once the forebears of today’s ruling classes had consolidated power through various tiers of administration could they begin to win the trust and loyalty of their subjects through public consultations. However, before the commonfolk could vote in parliamentary elections, we had to be educated to identify with the socio-political system that had been imposed on us. While the British establishment may have prided itself on democracy at home, although universal franchise was only achieved in the 1920s (for most men over 21 in 1918 and most women in 1929), in Africa and Asia they considered most natives too unworldly to vote and preferred to consult tribal leaders instead. We may consider former Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, who delayed the former British colony ‘s transition to majority rule, an outmoded racialist, but his attitude to black Zimbabweans differed little from that of enlightened liberal thinkers of the late 19th century. They believed the natives had to be tamed before the managerial classes could extend public consultations to them. By the early 1990s universal suffrage with multi-party elections had reached countries as diverse as South Africa, Russia and Brazil. Liberal democracy had seemingly won the day, while transnational corporations were busy expanding their empires and corrupting governments.
The last two years of pandemic madness should have at least taught us that our nominally elected politicians are just following orders. At best they can negotiate with our real rulers on how best to roll out policies that unaccountable remote entities have already decided. They act as mere intermediaries between us and our colonial masters, who project their power via their tight grip on all aspects of our socio-economic infrastructure. A handful of investment firms, such as Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street Corporation and Berkshire Hathaway, own most shares not only in IT giants but also in the world’s leading biotechnology companies, food processors, major retailers and arms manufacturers. Household names as diverse as Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple, Amazon, Tesco, Walmart (Asda in the UK), Carrefour, Aldi, Pfizer, Biontech, Johnson & Johnson, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, BA Systems and Capgemini are all joined at the hip. They’re all different incarnations of the same monster.
It’s a tangled web of super-billionaires working in tandem with the big banks and the World Economic Forum to set the policy agendas that governments roll out. Some like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Michael Bloomberg may be high-profile but other wheelers and dealers, especially in hedge funds and asset management, remain much more elusive. Whichever way, big decisions float from the top down. Consent is only ever manufactured.
Before the covid scare hardly anyone would have supported the concept of digital health passports to gain access to public venues. Eighteen months of relentless fearmongering led millions of wishful thinkers to support medical apartheid. Formerly tolerant progressives began to support total surveillance and censorship for the common good. Their new enemies were not the banksters whose wealth has skyrocketed since the first lockdowns, but the spectre of free-thinking human beings making rational choices about what to do with their own bodies, namely nonconformists who fail to comply with woke officialdom. In the past, such people often fled to freer lands, but now many of the world’s wealthiest countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany and Italy, have some of the strictest biomedical security regimes.
For every member of the Davos Set, there are millions of privileged hangers-on in middle management and awareness raising. In the UK we may call this breed of affluent self-righteous fake do-gooders Guardian readers. They're on a mission to educate the great unwashed about the evils of climate change, transphobia, white supremacy, Putin and antivaxxers. Yet few see the bigger picture. They would rather blame the politically incorrect working classes than admit today's woke billionaires favour eugenics.
Today’s colonial masters have rebranded themselves as one-world-love idealists who care deeply about the planet and its diverse peoples. The truth is they consider most people alive today useless eaters. They are the true heirs of 18th and 19th century imperialists who treated the natives as exotic wildlife. Today they treat 99% of humanity as zoo animals. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Never has so much power been concentrated in so few people.