Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

On the Brink of Civil War?

Social unrest in an age of hyper-surveillance and hypersensitivity

The Labour-branded government has announced sweeping cutbacks in social welfare and core public services at a time of rising unemployment and on the cusp of an artificial intelligence revolution. You could hardly choose a worse time to wean the most vulnerable in society off welfare dependence. With hundreds of billions squandered in recent years on lockdowns, military misadventures, hairbrained energy transition schemes and accommodating record levels of net immigration, something had to give. One week the government announces cuts in winter fuel payments with savings of up to £1.5 billion, but the next it announces £3 billion more to help Ukraine’s war effort. After years of championing the disabled, the Labour administration is telling a million incapacity benefit claimants to get a job, inadvertently admitting that the UK’s watered-down definition of disability has hidden the true scale of worklessness. No wonder, many Labour supporters are angry, but the pipe dream of endless state generosity could not go on forever. The old arguments that Keynesian economics can boost growth and equality no longer holds sway when many WEF-endorsed policies aim to fast-track the transition away from the carefree mass consumerism of 1990s and early 2000s to the new virtual economy offering abstract services we never used to need.

On the surface, away from overseas conflict zones and inner-city crime blackspots, all seems quiet in the suburbs and small towns where most British people live. The homicide rate has declined since its postwar peak around the turn of the millennium. People have by and large retreated to their humble abodes, preferring to binge-watch Netflix movies than head out for a night on the town. More people die through substance abuse and personal neglect at home than in pub brawls or street fights. In Scotland alone deaths attributed to alcohol or recreational drugs has hovered around 2500 since 2020, while the total homicide rate for 2023-24 was just 57 with 36 outside the home. The lockdowns of 2020 and 21 only accelerated this trend. Yet emotional insecurity and underlying internecine tensions may have hit an all-time high, at least since records began, due to a breakdown in trust and social cohesion. Low-level crime remains rampant among the Island’s diverse communities. The police have given up trying to stop burglars, drug-dealers, grooming gangs and money-launderers. They also apply very different standards to different parallel communities, but always seem to have time to monitor social media activity and arrest critical thinkers for daring to contradict official narratives. In 2023 over 3,300 UK residents were arrested for social media posts alone and that was before the infamous Online Safety Act had time to kick in.

Just in case you were under the mistaken impression that laws against alleged hate speech and misinformation only affected xenophobes, antivaxxers and transphobes, London’s Metropolitan Police dispatched 20 armed officers to handcuff and arrest six women at a Quaker meeting house in London during a peaceful gathering on the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, because they were planning  non-violent direct action against fossil fuel companies and arms manufacturers. This comes after Hertfordshire Police dispatched 6 officers to arrest a couple for daring to criticise the appointment of a new head teacher at their daughter’s primary school.

Slowly but surely, the post-millennial social contract between the self-styled progressive managerial classes and the atomised consumer classes is coming apart. The sheer hypocrisy of the condescending illiberal intelligentsia has never been more undeniable. The exact details hardly matter, but affluent trendy lefties are now blaming the selfish misbehaviour and perceived ignorance of the settled working classes for all our societal and environmental problems. A toxic mix of woke identity politics and green zealotry has succeeded only in sowing the seeds of distrust and widening the gap between haves and have-nots by creating rival groups of impoverished strivers and welfare dependents.

One week the prime minister affirms his support for Israel’s counter-insurgency operations as it resumes bombing civilian targets in Gaza. The next week the deputy PM, Angela Rayner, joins public celebrations of Ramadan and promises stronger laws against Islamophobia. Come June, woke officialdom will be promoting Pride Month again and yet schools and businesses are busy downgrading Easter for fear of offending non-Christians. Meanwhile much parliamentary time is devoted to Kim Leadbeater’s Assisted Dying Bill, despite the opposition of all traditional religions. The sanctity of life is the one thing Christian, Muslim and Jewish clerics could agree on. Nobody dare mention that these policies conspire mainly to destabilise social cohesion and empower the surveillance state to suppress rational critique, inviting us only to express our emotions.

In a complex world with competing demands, it’s almost impossible to keep everyone happy. One person’s concept of emancipation or self-expression may harm someone else’s privacy, dignity, safety and livelihood. As a victim of teenage bullying myself, I can empathise with confused adolescent boys identifying as girls because they fail to meet classic male stereotypes. I had a different kind of identity crisis, which thankfully did not lead me to believe I may have been born in the body, but I can understand how gullible troubled teenagers can succumb to the trans cult and blame their alienation on reactionary transphobes. But what about shy teenage girls who feels threatened by the presence of a biological male undressing next to them in the changing rooms?

In times of plenty with boundless opportunities for expansion, it may be easy to open your heart to the plight of refugees fleeing extreme poverty or tyranny and welcome them into your land. It’s not so easy when newcomers not only compete with the settled population over access to services, affordable housing and jobs, but transform the cultural landscape limiting everyone’s freedom. Numerous social attitudes surveys across Europe have found a distinct pattern, the more affluent you are, the more relaxed you are about the consequences of rapid demographic change. However, among the lower classes, settled communities tend to be more critical of mass migration and ethnic minorities more socially conservative on family issues.

Fear of Islamic or Zionist Fundamentalism

Two divergent critiques of global imperialism compete to explain the growing powerless of the working classes. One blames radical Islam and the other blames Israel for the destabilisation of viable societies. Nigel Farage’s Reform in the UK and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally) in France are both fiercely pro-Israel. GBNews talking heads, with the honourable exception of Neil Oliver relegated to weekly online videos, regularly conflate the Muslim role in the grooming gang scandal with animated protests featuring Hamas flags against Israeli war crimes with sporadic reports of antisemitic hate crimes. Pro-Israel lobbies have succeeded in winning over much of the European nationalist right, with Netanyahu receiving a warm welcome from Hungarian leader, Viktor Orban, amid calls from other European leaders for his arrest. Yet Israel would never gotten away with such as scale of death and destruction in Gaza without the logistical support of the United States and EU and our collective wilful blindness to a grotesque imbalance of power. In theory, a truly independent European superstate could break ranks with the US and demand an immediate ceasefire, enforced by a naval blockade and trade sanctions. However, they did no such thing. Frightened politicians, wary of the Muslim vote, distanced themselves from the excesses of Israeli military operations, but were powerless to stop the slaughter.

Hundreds of thousands of mainly white working-class girls would not have fallen prey to mainly Pakistani and Bangladeshi grooming gangs if they had grown up in stable two parent families in tight-knit communities able to defend themselves against predators who could easily take advantage of vulnerable and lure gullible girls with flashy cars, drugs and booze. While many victims could recount vile ordeals with unspeakable levels of depravity, it’s easy to fall into the trap of blaming a literal interpretation of ancient Quranic teachings, such as "...who guard their chastity except with their wives or those whom their right hands possess..." (Quran 23:5–6 and 70:29–30) for the behaviour of sexually frustrated men from South Asian communities transposed to the British Isles. Most Islamic scholars condemn concubinage today. More scandalous were the coordinated efforts by the police, social workers and local councils to suppress crimes committed against one atomised group to placate another community, setting the stage for a turf war with one community screaming rape and the other playing the race card, usually in the guise of Islamophobia. In this spat, the morally superior managerial and media classes have tended to downplay the scale of the grooming gang phenomenon either to further their careers or signal their repudiation of xenophobia. Often, they rely on counter-narratives to blame the settled working classes for their own demise. In recent weeks Labour politicians and their allies in the establishment media have been at pains to promote the Netflix series, Adolescence, about a white teenager, Jamie Miller, from a stable family obsessed with incel culture and the Tate brothers, charged with killing his female classmate, Katie Leonard. The only trouble is that it is a complete fiction and was only inspired by a real world of an emotionally disturbed Ugandan-born Hassan Sentamu who killed 15-year-old, Elianne Andam, after his ex-girlfriend had dumped him. Sentamu’s case stems largely from a chaotic upbringing marked by alleged abuse, family breakdown, time in foster care and fatherlessness from an early age. His violent behaviour appears rooted in personal trauma and instability rather than falling prey to online radicalisation or incel culture. If anything, the real-world teenage murder in Croydon, South London, highlights the challenges of cultural integration rather than its success.

Officialdom’s reaction to last July’s Southport stabbing spree followed a similar pattern of deflection. Rather than address people’s very real concerns about societal breakdown amid rapid demographic change and arrest the perpetrators of violence, the establishment doubled down by jailing social media activists and angry protesters. True to form, high-profile self-righteous opinion leaders kept pushing the line that the government needed to take swift and tough action against far-right rioters. Yet objective reality on the ground revealed a very different picture. As rival ethno-religious groups battled it out on the streets over unrelated grievances in Harehills, Leeds and Tower Hamlets, the police adopted a posture of strategic disengagement and stood by and watched, leading to accusations of two-tier policing.

Skewed Moral Compass

A form of subconscious identity-driven bias causes people to minimise or magnify wrongdoing based on the group affiliation of the perpetrators or victims, leading to a skewed moral compass. The antiwar left, often aligned with Jeremy Corbyn in Britain or Jean-Luc Melanchon in France, may have a clear conscience over their opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza, but they downplay the high level of violent and sexual crime committed by immigrant communities. By the same token, working-class nationalists often side with Israel over Palestine, while blaming Islam as a whole for the destruction of Western civilisation. Their conscience may be clear over the victims of grooming gangs, but they choose to ignore the innocent victims of military adventurism in far-off lands.

Both groups often fail to see how different kinds of evil, whether perpetrated by state actors, manipulated militias or degenerate commoners, may all be side effects of global destabilisation orchestrated by powerful vested interest groups. Yet we are encouraged to discount such a possibility as a wild conspiracy theory, preferring instead the Punch and Judy spectacle of Trump versus Harris or Labour versus Tories or Reform. Many on the cultural left are up in arms about the Trump administration’s expulsion of foreign students who have protested Israeli war crimes because their actions allegedly intimidate Jewish Americans and lend support to Hamas, which the US considers a terrorist organisation. Yet they were dutifully silent about Big Tech’s censorship of social conservative and naturopathic (i.e. critical of Big Pharma) viewpoints. Indeed, many on the left gave the Biden administration a free pass on its unflinching financial, military and diplomatic support for Israeli war crimes, preferring to believe a Harris administration might set a different tone.

In the past the radical wing of the US Democratic Party, embodied by Senators Bernie Sanders (although not technically a party member) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voiced passionate critiques of US foreign policy, but have always stopped short of calling for an end to US military aid to Israel, which averaged $3- to 5 billion in the decade before 2023 and has been estimated $17.9 billio36n since, in addition to other military adventures that serve Israeli interests much more than US priorities focused on national defence, world peace and trading relationships.

As elements within Big Tech, most notably Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, have shifted their support to the Trump team, Sanders and Cortez, both big lockdown cheerleaders, have started a campaign against the oligarchy, which fits the theme of Russian interference in American politics. The growing concentration of wealth in a tiny cabal of tech entrepreneurs and financiers is beyond dispute. Yet the radical corporate left turns a blind eye to the toxic influence of the likes of Bill Gates and Larry Fink of BlackRock, who cleverly steer clear of pronouncements on geopolitical controversies while working in close liaison with the US military industrial complex. At a rally at the Ford Idaho Center on 14 April this year, marshals acted swiftly to expel attendees who unfurled a large banner with the Palestinian flag and the words Free Palestine. Senator Sanders later reiterated his support for Israel’s right to defend itself, despite his critique of its excesses and the verifiable fact that Israel broke the January ceasefire deal.

Narrative Dissonance

Recent news viewership trends reveal a marked shift away from traditional TV news bulletins, often consumed passively, to a wider range of corporate and indie online channels. One way or another a large section of general population has lost all trust in official sources, often completely at odds with their lived experiences. In 2020 the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit, worked alongside broadcasters, newspapers, advertisers and online influencers to change some of the most basic human behaviours and perceptions. Overnight neighbours and strangers alike became bio-hazards and previously low-key scientific functionaries became deities. Big Tech stepped in to suppress counternarratives. While YouTube still tolerated flat earthers and Israel firsters, it censored dissident scientists and medics who contradicted the official WHO line. While possibly only 10-15% of Westerners openly disputed the covid narrative, with most preferring to comply in the hope of getting back to normal, they sowed the seeds of doubt in many more. If the MSM can lie so brazenly over flu variants to drive hidden agendas, goodness knows what other mistruths it has told us over the years.

In periods of stability, media narratives go largely unquestioned by the public. But as lived experience begins to contradict official messaging, a growing number of critical observers, once limited to a small subset of the population, begin to seek out independent or dissenting sources of information. Alas such dissenting sources can be easily manipulated and lead critical thinkers to scapegoat the wrong people or place their trust in controlled opposition.

Millions of Americans voted Trump because they hoped his team would reign in the Deep State behind the Biden administration’s authoritarian overreach and lack of empathy with the plight of settled citizens outside their metropolitan bubbles, as expressed so passionately in Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmond. Early on the Trump team reversed course on covid-era biotech tyranny and gender-bending with the appointment of Robert F Kennedy Junior, heralded the end of US involvement in the Ukrainian quagmire and tightened border controls with some well publicised deportations to win favour with his base. Yet within weeks, his administration threw its full weight behind the resumption of Israeli military operations in Gaza and started bombing Houthi targets directly in Yemen allegedly to defend traffic through the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea, while threatening war with Iran and simultaneously launching a tariff war against the US’s leading trading partners. The Western progressive media, outside the USA itself, is now overwhelmingly hostile to this shift in foreign and domestic policies, while Europeans are losing faith in the core institutions of the post-cold-war settlement. Some call this beginning of the end for globalism as an ideological goal, but others see it either as war by other means or as part of a coordinated implosion of mass consumerism in the next phase of the Great Reset. With high tariffs, China could lose a large chunk of its high-profit-margin exports while Americans would have to adapt to higher retail prices. In all likelihood, the move will only speed up the development of alternative high-tech hubs especially in nanotech and AI, boost bilateral trade relationships between China and other leading geopolitical blocks such as India, Russia, Africa and South America. Until recently, US-based companies had a monopoly on the development of operating systems, but this could end soon with the next generation of microkernel operating systems along the lines of Huawei’s new HarmonyOS. As the Chinese DeepSeek project proved, AI could accelerate the development of new computing ecosystems independent of US tech giants, stripping the American superpower of its last unassailable advantage following the collapse of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Combined with supply-chain disruption from the US-China trade war, this could have catastrophic consequences for the United Kingdom’s service-oriented economy, already suffering from high energy prices and the eclipse of its industrial legacy.

Will we descend into Urban Warfare?

David Betz, Professor of War at King’s College London, argues that the West, including the UK, is increasingly vulnerable to civil conflict due to collapsing social trust, rising economic hardship, extreme political polarisation, and fragmented national identities. He critiques the complacency of Western elites and notes that traditional assumptions, like wealth and democratic stability shielding nations from civil war, may no longer hold. Betz warns that civil strife may resemble past internecine wars, marked by factional violence and systemic decay, as ideologically radicalised groups on all sides exploit digital and societal fault lines in a struggle over identity, survival, and sovereignty.
The country that built its fortune on plentiful coal and gas reserves could soon experience rolling power cuts, as Spain and Portugal witnessed recently. While the chattering classes like to blame Brexit and ageing population for malfunctioning services, the working classes are increasingly blaming the mindboggling incompetence of the wishful thinking chattering classes. Why should commoners struggling to afford utility bills and essential groceries follow the advice of NetZero zealots who wasted countless billions of £ promoting transgenderism in schools? Sooner or later, when the shit hits the proverbial fan, the great unwashed may take the streets.

However, we may not see English skinheads running rampage through Muslim neighbourhoods seeking revenge for the rape of mainly white working-class girls, as a Netflix drama might portray. They are much more likely to target the posh neighbourhoods of the managerial classes only to discover the real decision makers have retreated to their secluded villas in the Mediterranean or Caribbean. While some urban blackspots may see street violence between rival ethnic communities, such as Pakistanis and Indians, a more general trend may be open defiance against incompetent law-enforcers seeking to criminalise dissent.

Categories
Computing Power Dynamics War Crimes

Pawns on the Grand Chessboard 

 Arms manufacturers are the big winners of the tumultuous events in the public-facing citadels of power across the Western world over the last couple of weeks. Just as the new White House administration tried to broker a peace deal with Russia over the three-year old war over Eastern Ukraine, Ursula von der Leyen’s EU and Sir Keir Starmer’s UK have announced the biggest increase in military spending since the fall of the former Soviet Union. Their carefully choreographed pronouncements elicit disturbing levels of self-righteous groupthink that tolerate no dissent from unconditional support for Zelensky’s regime. 

 If you disagree with the transfer of hundreds of billions of € to the Military Industrial Complex, you are, in the closed minds of mainstream groupthinkers, a traitor to their warped vision of liberal democracy, which means compliance with the emerging corporate dictatorship of BlackRock, Vanguard, the ECB and insidious NGOs. Any divergence from the new party line, as promoted indefatigably by all the main media outlets around Europe, is predictably labelled either pro-Putin or far-right. 

 The same nefarious operators who had so successfully persuaded successive US administrations to squander trillions of dollars on disastrous regime-change wars had apparently moved shop to a more bellicose Europe. When it came to Iraq and Afghanistan, the gut feeling of most ordinary Europeans was to steer clear of foreign conflicts and limit any intervention to humanitarian aid and arms embargoes. The French and German governments both distanced themselves from the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq back in 2003. By contrast, Americans were much more receptive to the kind of blanket humanitarian war propaganda pumped out by CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS and MSNBC, especially if the actions of a foreign regime posed a threat to Israel, evoking memories of the Holocaust. 

Since 9/11, the spectre of international terrorism has justified most military adventures. Alas, the Ukraine-Russia war evokes deep-seated emotions among millions of Europeans that stem from the tumult and troubled outcomes of the World Wars and 45 years of Soviet repression of national identities. The peoples of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland have longstanding grudges against Russia for its past invasions of their countries before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, while the citizens of most other former Warsaw Pact countries looked west after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Elsewhere in Europe, while the Cold War shaped feelings toward Russia before 1991, tensions have only recently resurfaced with an intriguing twist. 

 For the best part of two decades in the absence of ideological clashes, it seemed Russia would eventually fully integrate with the rest of Europe, but rather than follow the West’s newfound love of postmodern woke ideology, Russia became a bastion of social conservatism. Back in the 1960s and 70s, left-wing radicals were much more likely to sympathise with the USSR than socially conservative Christians and the patriotic working classes. When the Labour Party under Michael Foot advocated unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1983 general election, its vote plummeted to a post-war low, despite industrial decline, high unemployment and shoddy public services. 

Yet today’s most outspoken opponents of resurgent Russia under Vladimir Putin are affluent trendy lefties, including Germany’s outgoing Green foreign minister, Analena Baerbock, who's party campaigned in the 1980s against Pershing nuclear missiles on German soil, even at the expense of preventing their country’s reunification, which still seemed a distant prospect before the Peaceful Revolution (Friedliche Revolution) against Erich Honecker’s stubborn refusal to follow Gorbachev’s liberalisation process of greater openness and transparency known as Glasnost. 

This was in stark contrast to neighbouring Poland, where in 1981 around a million workers in the Solidarity movement went on strike, forcing General Wojciech Jaruzelski to declare martial law and send in tanks to suppress protests. Future historians will try to explain how an environmentalist organisation that opposed both mass consumerism and militarism in the 1980's could become one of the most fervent proponents of European rearmament and the Fourth Industrial Revolution in unison with the big banking cartels. 

 The only common thread that links the old Greens of the 1980's to the new global governance enthusiasts is their opposition to nuclear power, but that may well perfectly align with the World Economic Forum’s plans to shift manufacturing away from cars, household appliances and disposable gadgets to AI-enhanced drones, digital services and genetic engineering, leading us to a near future with well-paid jobs only for the best and brightest and everyone else on Universal Basic Income. 

Is the West at war with itself? 

The United States has been the guiding force behind the Western alliance since its inception in the aftermath of World War Two, accounting for 68-70% of NATO’s combined military expenditure. Its other member states would literally have to triple their defence budgets to make up in its absence. 

 Yet NATO lost on the battle ground despite a much larger military outlay as measured in euros. Russia’s military spending may have doubled, but it’s still lower in dollar terms than French and British defence budgets combined. They’re clearly getting much better value for their money and invested in the right technologies, such as drones and hypersonic missiles, to neutralise their opponents. 

 As long as Russia can defend its control of its vast mineral and fossil fuel resources, it holds all the trump cards with a growing market in India and China. Since the disastrous Yeltsin years of gangster capitalism opening up Siberia’s vast resources to Western multinationals enriching only a handful of oligarchs, the Russian government strategy has been to regain and retain control of its natural assets. The linguistic and religious rights of the inhabitants of the disputed territories is a sideshow and could have been easily accommodated within a neutral but independent Ukraine with regional autonomy. 

There are significant Russian-speaking minorities in Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Latvia and Lithuania. Indeed, in Kazakhstan and Belarus, Russian is, de facto, the dominant lingua franca. Western sanctions ended up hurting the West more than Russia. They succeeded only in driving up energy prices in Europe, stemming Russia’s brain drain, boosting its domestic manufacturing capabilities and strengthening its economic ties with China. 

Meanwhile, Atlanticist Europeans like Guy Verhofstadt, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron appear to be at loggerheads with the Trump administration over Ukraine, while also strategically distancing themselves from the US State Department’s steadfast support for Israeli bombing raids over Gaza, the West Bank, Syria and Yemen. 

 Why is Ukraine so important for European elites, while the White House now seems much more concerned with Israeli security? How could senior advisors let the President suggest the annexation of Canada and Greenland, both allegedly close allies, while Canada’s new banker Prime Minister, Mark Carney, pivots to the European axis? May I suggest this is all a big charade to get the European wing of the Global Empire to rearm on a massive scale, while the much-maligned Trump/Musk/Netanyahu axis diverts all available military resources to fight Israel’s dirty wars. 

 The Ukraine quagmire may end with BlackRock controlling much of its prime farmland and copious mineral deposits, while Russia keeps Crimea and the breakaway Eastern regions. However, in a weird inversion of objective reality, more and more young Europeans will look east rather than west for the promise of personal freedom and democracy built around strong families and social cohesion. 

 It’s now becoming painfully obvious to all but the most dim-witted or intellectually dishonest observers, that the European elites personified by Starmer, Merz and Macron, hate their own people. Both the ideological left and the socially conservative right hate Starmer, but the rot started much earlier. 

As if squandering £450 billion on the covid psyop was not enough, Starmer has doubled down spending tens of billions more on military adventurism and global grandstanding. Millions placed their trust in Labour to save the welfare state, invest in education, cut the NHS waiting list and care for the most vulnerable in society, yet with rising unemployment and long-term worklessness, the government is about to slash disability benefits calling on over 1 million working age adults, mainly with ill-defined mental health issues, to get off their backbones and work. Successive administrations got people hooked on welfare and now they’re pulling the plug just as they fast-track the assisted dying bill with relaxed safeguards for sufferers of emotional distress. 

 With the government still spending upwards of £6 billion on temporary accommodation for undocumented immigrants, the stage is set for social unrest bordering on civil war. 

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

The End of the Pseudo-American Dream 

All we are saying .. is give war a chance.

All we are saying is ... Give war just one more chance 

Last weekend, a crowd of avid Guardian readers, former Trotskyists and BBC journalists took to the streets of London to demand continued Western military support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine. Their attire wouldn't have looked out of place at a 1980s student demo for nuclear disarmament and against American imperialism. Alas, their main disagreement with the current US administration is not that it is disengaging from the Eastern European theatre of war and scaling down its regime-change operations, but that it has allegedly surrendered to a power-hungry dictator hellbent on reversing the last three decades of woke progressivism, as advertised on TV. 

Over the last few days, we’ve witnessed the biggest outcry of collective cognitive dissonance in a kind of coordinated mass formation since the tumultuous fall of the former Soviet Union that disenfranchised millions of nachalniks or supervisors. Who would have guessed that by early 2025, the biggest cheerleaders for NATO expansion at all costs would be the European elites? Yet mainstream politicians and opinion leaders around Europe have acted almost in lockstep to oppose any peace deal between the US and Russia that would involve territorial concessions, whatever the cost may be in terms of human lives and higher energy prices. The war was never about Ukraine’s eastern borders, but NATO’s. Without the USA on board, European states would have to triple military expenditure to stand a chance of winning on the battlefield. The NeoCon lobbyists that once dominated the corridors of power in Washington DC have retreated to Brussels, Berlin, Paris and London 

Germany’s new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, now in a coalition of the losers to keep out the allegedly pro-Putin AfD, announced a massive boost to military spending from 2% to 3% of GDP over the next five years in a period of economic stagnation and rising unemployment. In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer followed suit. More disturbingly, the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives doubled down on their unremitting support for Saint Zelensky. For once, the Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mail were united in their fierce condemnation of President Trump and Vice President Vance for daring to question the Ukrainian gravy train that, at huge expense to American and European taxpayers, prolonged a war that has killed around a million young men and women. 

 Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first to condemn Trump’s plans to help Netanyahu complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and suggest annexing Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal. However, in their noisy exchange at the White House, it was Donald Trump and not Volodymyr Zelensky who wanted to avoid World War Three at all costs and file for peace before an escalation of the conflict plunges us into a new Dark Age. Zelensky’s acolytes, loyal to the former Biden administration, seem to think a nuclear showdown is a small price to pay for their concept of woke freedom. 

The reality on the ground is that the US can no longer afford to bankroll NATO expansion. Behind the scenes, Deep State operatives have reached the conclusion that they can no longer counter the Russia-China axis by military means. Indeed, that may be why corporate lobbyists let Donald Trump win the presidency again. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t take long to cosy up to the new White House resident, with Mark even apologising publicly for Biden-era censorship. The America-First rhetoric was always a metaphor for a move to a multipolar world and an end to the New American Century. Economic sanctions have only strengthened Russia’s ties with its Asian neighbours. The US had to cut its losses and divert its attention to the defence of Israel, another battle they may lose. 

 USAID and international NGOs raised the hopes of millions of young Ukrainians that they could aspire to Western European living standards through the stage-managed EuroMaidan protests against Yanukovych’s policy of neutrality. The deposed leader had failed to sign an association agreement with the EU in favour of a free trade pact with Belarus, the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan, the fledgling Eurasian Economic Union as part of a larger realignment with China’s Belt-and-Road initiative. In the intervening decade, the BRICS bloc has grown stronger and the G7 weaker. Now, the collective West, as the Russians call it, is at war with itself as the technological innovation moves east. One Western faction wants to pivot to macro-regional protectionism, which in the American context means putting the USA and Israel first and another wants to pursue woke globalism at all costs, even if that means destroying their countries. 

 The downfall of the US Empire was never going to be pretty because various lobbies behind the Global Deep State, allied with multinationals with little interest in the parochial concerns of ordinary citizens, have long compromised its politicians to pursue their grand chessboard strategy that would ultimately bring the whole world under the same surveillance grid. 

 There have always been at least two American dreams. For generations of Americans, this meant being the master of your own destiny in a land of boundless opportunities. Alas, with slavery and debt servitude, such opportunities have not always been available to all citizens in equal measure. The original American dream was not built on welfare largesse or entitlement but on self-reliance and open competition, rewarding both hard workers with a can-do attitude and devious entrepreneurs. It had losers as well as winners. Long gone are the days when Emma Lazarus could proclaim: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” 

The advent of AI-enhanced smart automation may soon see most citizens on UBI, at the mercy of tech giants. 

For the rest of the world, the American Dream has been a frenzy of consumer indulgence and commercialised entertainment in the era of carefree mass motoring and Hollywood movies projected onto TV screens everywhere electric power could reach. Many critics have accused the USA of spreading cultural decadence and depravity, but they mistake Hollywood for the real America, which is now, outside a few metropolitan bubbles, much more socially conservative than Western Europe with much higher church attendance across denominations My travels through the backwaters of West Virginia and Tennessee took me to a bygone era of god-fearing rednecks, oblivious to the machinations of US-based multinationals around the globe. On the outside, we had the America of Britney Spears, McDonald's, Walmart and Richard Gere. On the inside, we had the America of the first and second amendments granting free speech and gun rights. Millions of Europeans fled to North America to escape religious persecution, censorship and corruption. Yet today’s large corporations are enforcing a new kind of woke dogma intolerant of traditional family values. 

 Whose Freedom and Democracy? 

The fallout over the US exit from the Ukrainian quagmire has once again pitted the based working classes against the vocal woke professional classes. The latter consider themselves the bastions of liberal democracy and fierce opponents of xenophobia and autocracy. This is a classic clash between us and them, i.e. the people vs the managerial classes. In 2020, we learned what they (the managerial classes) really meant by freedom of movement. They meant the freedom of NGOs and large corporations to move human resources around the globe and to re-engineer once cohesive communities with deep cultural roots into mere themed human habitation zones. They did not mean your freedom to walk the streets safely at night or even your freedom to visit your local park, pub, or gym without a special permit, proving compliance with their latest edicts. If you feel insecure about your gender identity, you may now have the freedom to use facilities once reserved for members of the other biological sex, but if you want to pray silently within a few hundred yards from an abortion centre, you could be arrested. While I’ve traditionally supported a woman’s right to choose in the first 12 weeks of gestation, i.e. before a foetus becomes sentient, I’ve always respected pro-lifers and welcomed the provision of alternatives to abortion for women unable to care for their unborn babies. The last 30 years have seen two significant developments. First, neonatal care has enabled premature babies to survive as early as the 21st week of pregnancy. Second, fertility rates have plummeted with more and more women delaying motherhood into their 30s or even 40s. In the same period, we’ve also seen a decline in stable two-parent households and a significant rise in old people with dementia confined to care homes, paving the way for the proposed Assisted Dying Bill. The same legislation that bans praying near abortion clinics could soon prevent vigils outside assisted dying centres. Is that the freedom we are fighting for? 

As for democracy, the self-styled liberal elites are quite happy to rig or annul elections if people fail to vote for one of their preferred options. Only last week, at the behest of the EU Commission, the Romanian authorities arrested former presidential candidate Călin Georgescu, allegedly because he had accepted funds from foreign oligarchs. Millions of Romanians no longer buy the official narrative. They remember all too well Ceaușescu-era machinations. Meanwhile, the outcome of the German general elections saw the pro-NATO CDU/CSU gain the most votes in the former West and the Eurosceptic AfD sweeping the board in the former East outside Berlin (averaging around 35 to 38% of the vote). The establishment parties could only appeal to social conformity and war guilt, but are delivering the exact opposite, more destabilisation and more war. 

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Endless Moral Dilemmas in the age of Confusion?  

Who stands to gain from never-ending destabilisation and dysfunctional societies? 

In early December ‘24, the Western media welcomed the swift overthrow of Bashar Al Assad’s Baath government. Western leaders are suddenly wining and dining former terrorists, including the leader of newly rebranded HTS (Hayat Tahir Al-Sham or Organisation for the Liberation of Syria), Mohammed al-Julani, associated with Al Nusra, Al Qaeda and ISIS. After over 13 years of crippling sanctions against Syria, the West is promising billions in aid to help the construction of a new gas pipeline from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to bypass Europe’s reliance on Russian gas or expensive LNG tankers. Within days, it became clear Israel welcomed the coup d’état too as it proceeded to expand its occupation of the Golan Height to Mount Hernon and bomb the remnants of the former Syrian regime’s air defences. Meanwhile Turkey continued to occupy the North-western Idlib region and the US still controls the country’s oil-rich east. The reality on the ground stands in stark contrast to the stage-managed scenes of jubilation. Many political analysts, including those critical of US and Israeli meddling in the region, marked the ousting of the Assad Dynasty as a strategic defeat both for Russia, engaged in the war over Eastern Ukraine, and its BRICS ally, Iran. Meanwhile the Israeli Defence Forces continue their onslaught on the peoples of Gaza and the West Bank without respite. 

Back in Europe, five days before Yuletide, a psychiatrist from Saudi Arabia, reportedly belonging to the Shia minority, drove a rental SUV into a busy Christmas market in the Saxony-Anhalt city of Magdeburg. It had all the hallmarks of similar terrorist attacks attributed to Islamic fundamentalists. Yet the politically correct German media could not decide if the perpetrator, 50-year-old Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen, was a militant leftwing atheist, a far-right AFD sympathiser, a Hamas supporter or an Israel-Firster. Indeed, his social media pronouncements were all over the place, but he did appear in a BBC documentary showcasing his website intended to help asylum-seeking apostates from Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf region. For a couple of days social media commentators on the tribal left and right blamed each other for at least 5 deaths and over 200 casualties, but does the guy’s political allegiance really matter? I can’t help but notice the lull in terror incidents across Western Europe in the covid-scam years. Nothing stacks up if we take mainstream media accounts at face value. Why would a supporter of a political party critical of mass immigration from Muslim countries target a Christmas market rather than a mosque?  

The timing could not have been worse for Germany’s ruling traffic light coalition (Ampelkoalition) struggling to deal with rising energy prices, industrial decline and economic stagnation. It’s become increasingly obvious to most astute observers that rather than pay taxes to help deal with an ageing native population, newcomers to most European countries are now a net drain on public finances, not least in terms of additional infrastructure and, dare I say, policing. Therein lies the technocratic endgame. Out of engineered chaos our overlords hope to rebuild law and order. 

On the eastern fringes of European Union, the Romanian constitutional court annulled the first round the country’s presidential elections for fear that independent candidate, Câlin Georgescu, might win the second round. The establishment rallied behind the other candidate, Elena Lasconi. Inevitably, they accused Russia of indirectly bankrolling Georgescu’s social media campaign. Over on the other side of the Black Sea, in Georgia, the Western Mafia has refused to recognise Irakli Kobakhidze’s new government, despite his Party, Georgian Dream, getting over 53% of the vote. To cap it all, EU Commissioner, Thierry Breton, has suggested that Elon Musk’s endorsement of Alice Weidel’s AFD Party threatens European liberal democracy. What he meant was growing sections of the electorate no longer align with the goals of the neoliberal elite behind superstate projects like the EU. 

Back in the UK, six months after the government clamped down hard on protests against the consequences of rapid ethnocultural shifts, the suppressed truth emerged about the tragic case of Axel Rudakabana in the aftermath of his cold-blooded murder of 3 young girls and attempt to hack to death everyone else in the dance class. Although born in South Wales, his parents hailed from Rwanda and had fought alongside the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front favoured by the US/UK Deep State. He was totally obsessed with genocide, which given Rwanda's recent history should surprise nobody, but with a sinister black-supremacist twist. His purported allegiance to Al Qaeda may well have been a red herring. Indeed in his isolation, he may well have been drawn to any organisation, whether genuine or contrived, that endorses his deep-seated urge for revenge. What's certain is that social and psychiatric services had long known about Axel's violent tendencies and emotional disturbance. Over his lifetime, the authorities had spent hundreds of thousands of £ on Axel's and his family's rehabilitation and inclusion in British society. Yet we are still supposed to believe the current levels of mass migration are both economically necessary and environmentally sustainable.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media has kept shtum about ongoing mass protests in Romania against the EU-backed cancellation of their elections. When the elites can no longer deliver the goods and can only offer managed decline with coordinated attacks against nostalgia for better times, we know the game is up. If the elites can no longer trust us to endorse their solutions or believe their narratives, then why on earth should we trust them? In the end, Western leaders rely on technology they ill-understand to control the masses. The subversion of that technology may well be their downfall. 

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Battle of the Billionaires

And the Eclipse of American Exceptionalism

It’s time to ask if the surprise outcome of the 2024 US Presidential Election reflects a growing rift between different factions within the technocratic elite or if it’s only a psyop to engineer a low-level civil war between rednecks and cosmopolitan Americans. Many still believe Trump, with Robert F Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard in his team, will rein in the Deep State and put the interests of ordinary Americans first before the grandiose nation-destroying plans of the woke illiberal intelligentsia. Others, especially on this side of the big pond, believe Elon Musk bought the election and will use the second Trump Presidency to abolish democracy. This is odd because both Elon Musk and RFK claimed that if the Harris / Walz ticket won, this could be the end of American democracy as we knew it. Authoritarians have a habit of always accusing their adversaries of the same crimes they commit themselves. Senior figures behind Kamala’s ill-fated campaign, from John Kerry to Bill Gates himself, talked openly about overturning the first amendment to ward off the omnipresent danger of malinformation. What we are witnessing are the death throes of the American Dream of freedom and democracy, with both concepts reduced to little more than commodities.

I once believed electoral outcomes could change the balance of power. Alas we witness a mere pantomime of engineered outcomes. In 1979 many disgruntled leftwingers wondered how Maggie Thatcher could appeal to the aspiring working classes. The next year Ronald Reagan captured the imagination of the American middle classes. By the time the pendulum swung the other way and Tony Blair entered 10 Downing Street with a whopping majority, it became obvious to me he only did so because he had big business on his side. Indeed, since 1974 Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has backed the winning horse. After backing the Tories from 2010 to 2019, the Sun newspaper flipped again to back the uncharismatic Sir Keir Starmer.

Before the results of the recent 2024 US Presidential race rolled in, one thing was certain in my mind. The multi-trillion-dollar Military-Biotech Industrial Complex would not relinquish power without a fight. If the winner posed a threat to the big banks and corporations, the Deep State would move heaven and earth to prevent him or her from entering office. With Queen Kamala, they had their perfect puppet, who judging by her performance over the last four years, would do nothing to hold her string-pullers to account.

Yet despite his rhetoric about draining the swamp and his promises to clamp down on corruption in the 3-letter agencies, Donald Trump appointed Susie Wiles, a longstanding political lobbyist whose former clients included Pfizer and Big Tobacco. The self-obsessed orange man may have cold-shouldered his former neocon Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and UN ambassador, Nicki Haley, but judging by his choice of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, and Christian Zionist, Mike Huckabee, as US Ambassador to Israel, the US Deep State looks set to pivot away from direct confrontation with Russia over Ukraine and to support Israel in an all-out war with Iran. Will this make World War Three more likely as most key Middle East countries, such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt too, are now aligning in the BRICs bloc. We may well be witnessing a rift in the Western Military Industrial Complex between the neoconservative Israel-First faction and the neoliberal anti-Russian faction. Just as the US manoeuvres its way out of the Ukrainian quagmire and Vice President elect, JD Vance, threatens to stop subsidising the defence of its European NATO allies because they fail to uphold American values of free speech. Meanwhile former Dutch PM and new NATO Secretary, Mark Rutte, has threatened to expel the US from NATO if they agree a compromise with Russia to end the war over Eastern Ukraine. This may mark a shift from a US-centred world to a multipolar world with European elites now more belligerent than their American counterparts, but with only 7 weeks of his tenure to go, Biden authorised airstrikes over Russia with the UK ready to deploy its Storm Shadow missiles in an escalation that could further drain NATO’s resources.

Some pinned their hopes on Matt Gaetz, an outspoken social conservative able to speak truth to power over Mossad’s potential involvement in the mysterious death of Jeffrey Epstein, but had to stand down amid sexual misconduct allegations.

Another sign of the times is the hysterical reaction to the appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jnr as Secretary of Health and Human Services. This seemed to annoy some faux-progressive commentators much more than Trump’s electoral success. Carole Cadwalladr took to X (formerly Twitter) to call RFK not only a vaccine-denier, but a fluoride-denier (rather ironic as fluoridation is not common in continental Europe). By the Guardian journalist’s warped logic, if you demand transparency, accountability and above all, liability from multibillion-dollar corporations, you are somehow denying people the benefits of the last century of scientific advances. It turns out RFK has never opposed vaccination if it has passed the strictest safety trials. Every debate about the safety and effectiveness of the coercively administered covid shots with Fauci fans always ends with references to the polio outbreak of the mid 20th century and the dramatic decline since the late 1950s. Yet by far the biggest factor is rapid decline in infant mortality over the last 70 years has been better sanitation. Children born in the 1960s and 70s were among the healthiest in history. Lifelong disabilities or chronic illnesses reached historic lows after post-war slum clearances and urban renewal, until a curious reversal of fortunes since the late 1980s when the incidence of neurological disorders and allergies started to increase. This happened to coincide with a massive expansion in the childhood vaccine schedule, most notably for MMR, and legislation to give vaccine manufacturers blanket immunity for any injuries or deaths that can be attributed to vaccines. In most Western nations, it is up to governments to pay damages. Of course, there are many other potential causes of rising health conditions such as processed foods, additives and, possibly, exposure to electronic gadgets and radiation. While people are living longer, most adults over 30 are now on one form of regular medication or another (that’s most over 50s on statins, beta blockers and/or diabetes drugs and a growing number of middle-aged adults on psychoactive meds). However, RFK would not only have to contend with the combined might of BigTech and BigPharma, but also with Trump’s choice of Surgeon General, Dr Janette Nesheiwat, a covid vaccine evangelist. I fear other global events or manufactured scandals may prevent RFK from having much influence.

The next administration may well have to deal the collapse of the US Dollar as the world’s reserve currency. All it takes is for China and Saudi Arabia to sell off US T-Bonds (treasury bonds) if the US continues to support Israeli aggression or bombs Iran on its behalf. The US Deep State can then blame the ensuing economic meltdown on Trump and let vulture funds asset-strip the nation.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

The Free Movement Pivot 

Cognitive dissonance in an era of high-tech surveillance 

In the ongoing debate on the sustainability of high levels of rapid migration in terms of infrastructure and social cohesion, one trend just caught my eye. All of a sudden and from some quite unexpected quarters, we hear talk of deportation, something almost unthinkable outside the fringe ethno-nationalist right until recently. In a radical departure from the old consensus that immigration has to be managed and, when economic and environmental circumstances allow, openly welcomed, mainstream opinion leaders have now started to publicly advocate reversing the last twenty odd years of rapid de-acculturation by sending home unassimilated newcomers in their midst. Bastions of social democracy and global convergence like Sweden and Denmark have changed their tune and begun to deport criminals and long-term welfare claimants with an immigrant background. My main concern has always been with destabilisation or any policy that can undermine the hard-won freedoms and way of life of settled communities to advance agendas that mainly benefit global corporations to the detriment of the little people

By and large the concept of free movement is a good thing, but like all good things has its limitations. Should the homeless be free to set up camp in your garden or squat in your house while you’re away? Should holidaymakers be free to park their caravans in wildlife reserves or on cultivated fields? Should grown men be free to wander into women’s changing rooms? Should property developers be free to build on parks or green spaces for profit or to accommodate growing demand for affordable housing? There are obvious limits in complex societies on the extent to which we can encroach on other people’s spaces and undermine their self-determination and traditions. Most disputes over land affect less than 1% of the Earth’s total landmass where over half of the global population dwell and most of the other half live in the approximately 12.5% of land considered arable with only a tiny fraction inhabiting remote settlements scattered around the next 30% of resource-exploitable land. That leaves around 56% of the remaining terrain mostly uninhabitable or unused due to extreme conditions such as deserts, tundra or high mountains. Yet that 1% assigned to the urbanosphere is nearly as large as the combined area of France, Germany, Poland and Italy.  

The same progressive opinion leaders who hailed the wonders of our interconnected humanosphere, made possible by automotive, aeronautical and cybernetic technology, now want us to scale back to a more sustainable lifestyle, but sustainable for whom? How can they simultaneously promote mass migration to the most highly developed regions of the world and greater restrictions of our freedom to travel around our own neck of the woods? The same big businesses that sold us the dream of carefree motoring, suburban houses and regular holidays abroad, are now selling us smart green technology as millions of middle-class Westerners adapt to a minimalist lifestyle. Historically people have emigrated to find a better quality of life, but with the civilisational decline of the once affluent West that may no longer be the case. Sooner or later, something has to give in the clash between autochthons and international commuters. The mercantile classes behind the 18th and 19th century expansion of European empires have evolved into a network of global technocrats who owe no allegiance to their home countries. They have already pivoted from favouring the Western middle classes in the era of mass consumption to exploiting a vast pool of aspirational migrant labour in the shift from a mixed high-wage and high-skill economy to controlled subsistence micromanaged by tech multinationals. However, if they can pivot once for strategic reasons, they can pivot again and abandon new groups of commoners. 

Just as the business elites have betrayed the Western working classes, they can easily ditch their army of globetrotting contingent workers to favour only a much smaller coterie of top-tier engineers and social governance analysts. However, at the dawn of the AI revolution with the transfer of power to a handful of tech giants, we are also witnessing the demise of the global superpower that has dominated the world’s cultural landscape for the best part of a century and reached its pinnacle in the early 1990s after the fall of the former Soviet Union. 

The recent Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine marked a turning point in the balance power between G7-centred international community and the now expanded BRICS bloc, which is in the process of setting up a rival international banking system. Before 2020 the world seemed set on a trajectory of convergence with Africa, China, India and South America all falling within orbit of US-founded tech giants and banking cartels. While the Western middle classes would lose their relative privileges, the emerging technocracy would remain unipolar. Indeed, many critics of a one-world government saw the tech censorship of the lockdown years as a shift towards a more Chinese style of global governance. While the big nations of the Global East and South may have many authoritarian traits, they have not succumbed to woke ideology. The transgender craze with its assault on natural procreation has failed to make inroads in most of Asia, the Middle East and Africa. White guilt has only infected countries with a recent history of colonialism or racial segregation. On current trends, we may soon wonder how long Africans will want to move to Europe or North America. 

The whole progressive rationale for mass migration hinged on the challenges of an ageing population with a low birth rate as a means to increase the tax base and allegedly to pay for our pensions. Alas with net migration running at 750,000 a year, the establishment has stopped pretending most newcomers are high-income professionals. The cost of accommodating asylum seekers alone amounted to a staggering 5.4 billion in 2023, while new projections show the average newcomer to the UK will cost the treasury much more in their lifetime than they pay in taxes. If the AI revolution displaces most lower and medium-skilled workers leaving only core competency workers (an upper crust of well-remunerated engineers, scientists, doctors, policy consultants and administrators) as essential workers outside the UBI control grid, there will no longer be any need to import cheap labour or boost the economy artificially through greater aggregate consumer demand. 

As we shift from a skills-based consumer economy, affording ordinary workers greater personal freedoms, to a more eco-compliance-driven economy, local governance teams will want to restrict people’s freedom of movement by limiting access to cars, long-distance trains and aeroplanes as we saw in the covid-scare years. The trick is to get everyone within the same control grid, which is much more pervasive in the more developed regions of the world.  

We are at a critical juncture in human civilisation. A major geopolitical shift away from the US-centred world order is coinciding with the growing concentration of power in billionaire technotarians who advocate high-tech eugenics and view the masses as little more than zoo animals. Alas I see a split in our technocratic masters. Some are still hedging their bets on the survival of American exceptionalism and mass consumerism. Others are content to adopt the Chinese model of epistocracy with a vanguard group of social scientists manufacturing consent among a pacified populace. Both groups exploit our conflicting desires for free movement and social cohesion to continue to divide and rule. They can pose on the left or on the right. They can advocate open borders or mass deportations, but the end game is still total surveillance. 

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

Parallel Narratives

In an age of high-tech deceit

On almost the same day as Israeli military forces attacked Lebanon and destroyed the 14th century Great Mosque of Khan Younis in Gaza, a knifeman attacked 14 young revellers, killing at least 3, at a Christian festival, celebrating ethnic diversity, in the West German town of Solingen. Within 24 hours it emerged the perpetrator was a 17-year-old asylum seeker who pledged allegiance to ISIS and sought revenge for the German government’s complicity in Israeli war crimes.

The total civilian death toll since 7th October 2023 now exceeds 40,000 and some estimates show that collateral damage to essential infrastructure may have caused 160,000 more deaths. In a parallel timeline, Hamas fighters broke through Israeli defences and killed 1139 military personnel and civilians and took over 100 hostages. Ever since there have been regular protests across the Western world against Israeli war crimes, with reports of attacks against Jewish communities such as the recent firebombing of a synagogue in the Southern French seaside town of La Grande Motte.

This comes only three weeks after riots following the stabbing of 11 young girls, with 3 fatalities, in Southport. Online rumours, labelled misinformation, circulated that the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker, leading some angry local residents to protest outside the nearest mosque. It turns out the perpetrator grew up in Cardiff with Rwandan parents. The official narrative suggests he suffered from a mental illness. Sir Keir Starmer’s administration reacted by clamping down on the alleged far-right with a special focus on social media posts that may incite hatred. It turns out rumours about the Southport killer being a Muslim asylum seeker that spread from the Channel3Now network did not emanate, as initially reported on the BBC and Sky TV, from Russian sources or far-right organisations. The claim actually came from a Pakistani Web developer, Farhan Asi, whose motives may well have been to trigger revenge attacks in the full knowledge that the police would blame anti-Islam protesters. It’s not inconceivable that said operative could have been working for the British secret services, as I doubt normal Pakistanis, many with relatives in the UK, would want to see internecine warfare or more police repression. Western governments are quite happy to play a game of bait and switch between rival ethno-religious groups. The German government has recently arrested the publisher of the right-leaning Compact magazine for publishing official crime statistics as it may incite hatred against new ethnic minorities, while also apprehending leftwing activists, with many from new immigrant communities, for protesting peacefully against Israeli war crimes, under the pretext of antisemitism.

We now have four parallel narratives to explain the breakdown in peaceful coexistence:

  • Extreme right-wingers are spreading misinformation to destabilise society.
  • Radical Islamists want to eradicate infidels and destroy Judeo-Christianity.
  • Israel, along with the Western ruling elites, wants to eradicate Palestinians and subjugate Muslims worldwide.
  • We have an urgent mental health crisis among young males.

All narratives lead us in the same direction, towards a more tightly controlled and militarised society with more advanced surveillance, social engineering and censorship. Of course, the mainstream media is the prime source of fake news and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is much more nuanced than just a straight battle between good and evil and must be viewed in the wider context of the growing concentration of power in Big Tech.

The last narrative may often seem a convenient cover for more sinister motives, but may also empower the state to expand its surveillance grid to every aspect of your private life. We could soon be required to carry a digital health app on our mobile device. Such a device may be as small as wristwatch or even just an embedded microchip. It could contain data not only of genuine medical conditions or vaccines, but also of any mental health conditions and required treatment. Ingestible sensor technology already exists to track your compliance with medication regimes. The spectre of kitchen-knife-wielding maniacs approaching children’s playgrounds could justify the installation of embedded microchip access control (EMAC) systems around all public spaces, either denying access to non-compliant individuals or immediately alerting the police of their presence. While many may welcome such measures to protect children against predators, administrations can abuse such innovations not only to limit medical freedom and privacy, but to track dissidents. Imagine not being allowed to enter your local pub or café because you have not taken your neuroleptic meds to suppress politically incorrect thoughts. This is no longer science fiction.

It hardly matters if some groups fear far-right racists, while others fear Muslim fundamentalists, Zionists, rabid antisemites or psychiatric patients on the loose. Whichever version of reality you choose to believe, more technocracy will be the solution. Once you’re trapped in the digital surveillance grid, your personal worldview is inconsequential to the powers-that-be, a mere character trait that may need medical attention.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Open Season on the Plebs

LS Lowry. Matchstick men, football match.

Could the spectre of the elusive far-right be the new covid?

These days left and right-wing refer more to your cultural outlook than your class allegiance. If anything, the richer you are in Western Europe, the more likely you are to identify with the progressive left and the poorer you are the more likely you are to harbour politically incorrect views.

By any fair historical standards, the indigenous inhabitants of the British Isles have never been more tolerant of racial and sexual diversity, if these are the new metrics of progress, and probably more tolerant than the peoples of most other countries. Millions of native Britons of all political persuasions have close friends or relatives who are black, Asian, mixed-race and/or gay. Many leading figures in the so-called alternative right, such as David Kurten or Ben Habib, are non-white and many others, like David Starkey or Peter Whittle, are openly gay. Yet we’re supposed to believe gay-bashing Neo-Nazis have whipped up racial tensions by spreading fake news. Countless polls have shown that while most voters want to live peacefully with their neighbours from different ethnic backgrounds, most believe current levels of net immigration are too high. Many other common concerns such as unaffordable housing, overburdened public services and social cohesion are all linked to migratory pressures. Very few would advocate mass deportations of anyone but hardened criminals, but millions, including many Labour voters, would like to see net annual immigration levels brought down to under 100,000 a year. Even with zero-net-migration (e.g. 200,000 in either direction), we would still need to build more houses and infrastructure as well as invest in better community relations, ensuring that the much-maligned white working classes are not left behind. White working class boys are now the least likely to graduate from university, falling behind their British-Afro-Caribbean peers.

As I write, rising food prices have reignited sectarian violence in Bangladesh with mobsters burning down the homes of the country’s Hindu minority. As bad as recent riots in English towns may have appeared, they led to relatively few casualties, if we exclude the murders of three young girls that triggered angry protests in the first place.

Controlled Opposition

So why is the mainstream media obsessed with the mythical far-right, personified by Tommy Robinson also known as Stephen Yaxley Lennon? It turns out Tommy’s main beef is not with people of other races or sexual orientations at all, but with Islam. His hometown of Luton has experienced a rapid demographic shift from mostly white British in the 1970s to a white-minority town today as confirmed by the 2021 census. The growing Muslim community, mainly of Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent, dominate the town’s inner and western districts. Anyone growing up there since the 1980s would have had a hard time at school as a white supremacist. My mother taught in a primary school in the Bury Park district that went from around 50% Muslim in 1980 to 95% Muslim by the end of the 1980s. Over the next three decades this trend spread to other schools, prompting an exodus of other Lutonians to the outer suburbs and surrounding market towns.

In his infinite wisdom, Mr Yaxley Lennon chose to collaborate with the well-funded Israel lobby via the deceptively labelled and allegedly socially conservative Canadian outfit, Rebel Media. They’ve bankrolled many of Tommy’s court cases over allegations of grievous bodily harm or contempt of court. Mr Yaxley Lennon started the now disbanded English Defence League as a reaction to local protesters shouting “burn in hell” during a home-coming parade for soldiers who had served in Iraq around 2009. Does that mean he supported the invasion of Iraq and failed to understand the close ties between the Military Industrial Complex, the Israel lobby and proponents of mass migration? As much as the establishment media vilify him, I think the Tommy Robinson ™️ brand is controlled opposition, a safety valve for the pent-up anger of the settled working classes, yearning for a bygone interlude of post-imperial Cool Britannia with its iconic mix of rock and reggae bands superimposed on a landscape of industrial decline, creeping Americanisation, half-hearted urban renewal and quirky insular customs.

On the sidelines, genuine ethnonationalists and racial segregationists do exist. Their positions vary from those who advocate monoculturalism within stable nation states to those who want to restore monoracial societies in Western Europe. Britain First, which is not exclusively white, may come close to the first tendency, while only fringe outfits like Patriotic Alternative support the latter. Both tendencies may advocate some form of repatriation or population exchange, although historically such exchanges have seldom been peaceful. However, none of the fringe right-wing groups openly supported the riots or urged their followers to burn asylum seeker hotels. Those calls came from hasty social media posts. In the recent past, many virtue-signallers have wished death on the unjabbed and a journalist by the name of David Aaronovitch called for the murder of Donald Trump, two weeks before an attempted assassination on the former President. This is the same towering intellect who not only supported all of Tony Blair’s wars, calling opponents pro-Saddam fascists, but also wrote a book attacking conspiracy theorists, Voodoo Histories.  If you scour social media sites, you’ll see plenty of death wishes directed at undesirables or the perceived enemies of progress. Any violence attributed to the far-right came from feral gangs of disillusioned and largely apolitical youngsters as well as a few agitators who egged on small groups of hotheads on the margins of otherwise peaceful protests. The only examples of online incitement to mindless violence came from some unexpected sources, such as the wife of a Tory councillor, Lucy Connelly, who wrote on X/Twitter “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******* for all I care... If that makes me racist, so be it” in the immediate aftermath of the Southport stabbings. These are not the musings of a hard-headed activist of any political persuasion, but outpourings of anger and emotional turmoil. Of the over one thousand people arrested and fast-tracked for sentencing, are many with long-term psychological traumas. A 69-year-old alcoholic was condemned to 32 months in jail for violent disorder and possessing a truncheon, while a 22-year-old young man with learning difficulties got a 26 months jail sentence for smashing windows of nearby residential properties. Meanwhile rapists, muggers and murderers have been released early after only 6 or 12 months in jail for much more serious crimes.

Intellectual Diversity

In the not-too-distant past, we could more easily respect a wider diversity of opinions on the key ethical, scientific and economic issues of the day, as long as we adhered to common social etiquette. I know for a fact many of my Church-going neighbours in the 1970s considered homosexuality a sin, opposed abortion and had not yet embraced colour-blind multi-racialism, largely because most people were, outside of London and a few other urban districts, still boringly pale-skinned, especially in leafy suburbs and small market towns.

I grew up in a staunch Labour household. My father believed he stood up for ordinary working people of all creeds and colours. He campaigned against Britain’s membership of the European Economic Union and supported greater public ownership. We would discuss politics at the dinner table. For a while my elder brother would try to outdo my father’s newfound radicalism. He joined the Young Socialists, supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, opposed US imperialism and took a stand against the racism of the anti-immigration National Front, which had started to pick up protest votes from the disillusioned working classes, although seldom more than 5%. A large map of Palestine showing the expansion of Israel into the occupied territories bedecked his bedroom wall. Apart from occasionally trying to point out their hypocrisy on some matters, I didn’t really engage in meaningful political debate until the age of fourteen when my brother dragged me along to the large Rock against Racism concerts in London and later introduced me to the National Union of School Students with its campaigns for school councils, getting rid of school uniform, banning corporal punishment, ending religious education and providing more explicit sex education. Two of my brother’s comrades persuaded me to attend the union’s small conference. One belonged to the tiny Communist Party (of Great Britain) and the other hung out with the trendier Socialist Workers’ crowd. I may have been the youngest attendee. Indeed, most were either radical organisers in their 20s or sixth-formers (aged 16 to 18) eager to enjoy the free gig and disco laid on that evening. Later in 1978, I would get expelled from high school for distributing NUSS magazines with articles on the joys of masturbation and homoeroticism, both taboo subjects among many Catholic families. I still recall my head teacher’s words: “You’re not mature enough to understand the consequences of this propaganda. You’re being used. You’ll have your say when you’re older.”.

Anti-racism was one of many rebellious causes that sought to break ranks with Britain’s imperial past and its new role as junior partner of US imperialism, with its covert support for racially segregated South Africa and its proxy wars in Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere. The establishment had not yet fully rebranded itself. Then in 1979, the Southern English working classes rejected Labour as Maggie Thatcher wrapped herself in the Union Jack and promised council house tenants could buy their homes. The new government let failing industries go bust, privatised many state-owned businesses and presided over soaring unemployment. To this day, millions in Scotland, Wales and Northern England hate Thatcher for destroying the country’s industrial heartlands. Labour took a turn to the old radical left, calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament and leaving the EU. For a short while, Labour was ahead in the polls. Then in April 1982, Argentina, under General Leopoldo Galtieri’s military junta, invaded the Falkland Islands. Within a week, Margaret Thatcher’s government sent a task force to recapture the sparsely populated islands 300 miles east of Patagonia. The mass media cheered on the war effort, with dissent confined to a few columns in the Guardian or radical leftwing press. Although Michael Foot supported the war effort, because it highlighted the importance of a strong navy and conventional weapons, the Tories rose in the polls and won a landslide victory in 1983 on the back of jingoism. The suppressed truth is that successive British governments had neglected the Falkland Islands, with only 1600 permanent inhabitants in 1982. In the late 1970s, amid IMF-imposed budgetary constraints, British diplomats had considered transferring sovereignty to Argentina and leasing the islands back to keep alive their outpost around Port Stanley. The Falklands war represented the last gasp of Rule Britannia just as most of British industry came under multinational control. While the UK government spent countless billions to defend the self-determination and customs of a couple of thousand Islanders, it neglected the plight of once proud working-class communities back home unable to adapt to the fast-paced gig economy and often trapped in a vicious cycle of welfare dependence and family breakdowns with a steady brain drain of the best and brightest. Whole neighbourhoods lay mainly empty with boarded-up terraced houses, only to be resettled by new culturally diverse communities, sowing the seeds of future internecine conflict in the event of economic meltdown on a comparable scale to that seen before the breakup of Yugoslavia.

End goal of Surveillance

Some may rejoice at the new government’s focus on far-right thugs as retribution for past colonial crimes, but once the precedent has been set to police private communications for hints of racism that may, in theory, incite violence, it can be applied to any type of dissent. Lincolnshire Police gave the game away by charging 40 year-old Wayne O’Rourke with “anti-establishment rhetoric” in the wake of anti-mass-migration protests. Everyone from the Prince of Wales to the Archbishop of Canterbury has joined a chorus of condemnation not only against reactionary plebs, but against the one tech billionaire, Elon Musk, who still allows free speech on his X/Twitter platform. When the likes of Alastair Campbell, whose dodgy dossier on WMDs persuaded MPs to back UK involvement in the invasion of Iraq, join forces with woke broadcaster, Carol Vorderman, to call on the government to censor social media, you know something is wrong. By now, it must be crystal clear the establishment no longer hides behind the garb of Britishness, except when commemorating the world wars of the last century or celebrating sporting achievements. It has fully embraced global technocracy and sees angry free-thinking plebs as obstacles in their plans to reengineer society.

As recent experience with the demonisation of covid sceptics and anti-Gaza-genocide protesters has shown, it will not stop there. Public health, antisemitism, women’s rights and/or transphobia can be easily invoked to silence critics of mandatory vaccination, Israeli war crimes, abortion, puberty blockers or gender self-identification. All these positions are essentially anti-establishment. The establishment wants medical mandates, an expansion of the war machine (and not just in support of Israel), easier abortion and moves towards transhumanism without natural procreation. However, different cultural groups may stand against these policies. Opposition to abortion and LGBTQ education comes both from devout Christians and Muslims. On current trends, opposition to assisted dying services may also be deemed far-right, a new synonym for heretical.

Just like covid, the symptoms of far-right thinking keep changing and the bug itself is almost impossible to detect without magnifying its strands. It may mean anything from football hooliganism and drunken thuggery to social conservatism or principled opposition to a one-world government. You could test positive for far-rightness by criticising any of the establishment's 2030 Agenda goals for sustainable development.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics

Order out of Chaos

How the managerial classes exploit social tensions to expand surveillance and censorship

In just four weeks, Sir Keir Starmer’s new administration has revealed, in case there was any doubt, its true authoritarian intents as it seizes the opportunities provided by a series of angry protests and riots to clamp down on what it likes to call the far right. If you get your news from the likes of BBC, ITV, or Sky News, you may be forgiven for thinking that the violence only kicked off among feral white youths and hard-right activists exploiting internet rumours about the origin of a 17-year-old accused of stabbing 11 girls, leading to the tragic deaths of three girls. Yet only two weeks ago, the same progressive opinion leaders failed to criticise the police force’s lack of action regarding arson, looting, and rioting among non-indigenous ethnic communities in Harehills, Leeds, and Whitechapel, London. The police stood back from both outbreaks of communal violence, only arresting a few suspected troublemakers after the events. In Leeds, the trigger for civil unrest was the removal of a child from a Roma family accused of neglect. The other disturbance occurred within Tower Hamlets’ Bangladeshi community over ongoing civil unrest between pro- and anti-government factions in Bangladesh. Yet millions of ordinary people on social media have noticed the application of two-tier policing.

Establishment politicians, whether they play for the red, blue, yellow, or green teams, want to blame rogue elements within the settled working classes for the adverse effects of their own social engineering policies. Intriguingly, they also target social media outlets for allowing the open dissemination of video footage, often taken with pervasive smartphones, or rumours based on conflicting reports from citizen journalists. They want to regain tight control of the flow of information, just like they did during the 2020 virus scare. In some ways, the far right is the new covid; any measures are justified to stop the spread. Technocrats will redefine politically incorrect opinions as mind viruses that should be treated in the same way as pathogens that target other body parts.

Yet we’d be wrong to conclude that our rulers have sided with any of the rival ethno-religious communities or care more about refugees than they do about older age pensioners struggling to keep warm in winter. They do not. They may temporarily appease an identity group to achieve a medium-term goal, but once that group has outlived its usefulness, they will happily scapegoat any of its uncooperative members who are unhappy with the next phase of social engineering.

Over the weekend, we saw many rival protests across UK towns and cities. In Belfast, Irish republicans and British Unionists united to express their opposition to rapid mass migration. The infantile left, often manipulated by the SWP (Socialist Workers’ Party) and various Soros-funded open-borders organizations, were also out, chanting "refugees welcome" while waving both Palestinian and LGBTQ++ flags. Oddly, I can sympathise with both sides, who share the same enemies. Paradoxically, many of the same forces that support the US-centred Military-Industrial Complex’s collusion with Israeli war crimes also support mass migration as well as the endless promotion of transgenderism. Alas, we also saw marches by the newly formed Muslim Defence League, allegedly defending Muslim communities from the so-called far right, who protested outside mosques after the fatal stabbing of three young girls in Southport, based on rumors that the assailant was a Muslim asylum seeker. It turns out he grew up in Cardiff with Rwandan parents. Some black-clad masked MDL marchers carried weapons, which the police asked them to deposit in the nearby mosque. They resembled brownshirts from the 1930s in everything but median skin tone and symbology. While some MDL marchers may have protested against Israeli attacks on Gaza, none would share the Western progressive position on LGBTQ++ rights, and many would gladly roll back women’s rights. Nuance is something the infantile left of my youth struggles to understand. They categorise people into oppressors and the oppressed. If you are female, gay, transgender, black, a refugee, and/or Muslim, then you are oppressed. If you oppose radical feminism, access to puberty blockers, mass migration, or the building of more mosques, then you must be an oppressor. It doesn’t occur to them that most Africans and Middle Easterners hold traditional family values and have greater in-group loyalty than most of the British patriots they label as far right. Neither does it occur to them that members within their beloved victim groups may hold different opinions. Why should all black people succumb to the same kind of groupthink that often afflicts affluent white progressives? Why should all lesbians embrace Islam or want to sleep with trans-identifying biological males? The regressive left hates the likes of Candace Owens or Dominique Samuels, both proud Christians more in tune with traditional African-American or Caribbean values than your average BLM activist.

I fear things could soon turn nastier as the government is forced to impose unpopular tax rises and cutbacks in core services in order not only to pay off the spiralling £2.7 trillion debt, including over £400 billion for the covid lockdowns alone, to fund ongoing wars with Russia and in the Middle East. The settled working classes will not take kindly to the spectre of brand-new subsidised homes built in their neighbourhoods to facilitate the ongoing process of ethnic erasure through mass migration, making everyone more dependent on the technocratic master class. We must have the common sense to understand the trap that has been set for us. Our enemies are not the pawns of a global chess game, but those who manipulate us. They want to see Muslim Defence League ruffians fight it out with Britain First crusaders to justify more censorship and surveillance that will, perversely, empower global technocrats to commit unspeakable crimes against humanity with impunity.

Categories
Power Dynamics

The Establishment wins again

What a big surprise. The blob has engineered another colour revolution. Nominally the leader of the blue team, Rishi Sunak, conceded defeat to the leader of the Red Team, the charmless Sir Keir Starmer of Davos. If you only watched the BBC, ITV or Sky News you might be forgiven for thinking Starmer had been swept into 10 Downing Street by a whirlwind of popular discontent with fourteen years of Tory mismanagement. Now at long last, we’d have a caring government in power that would reverse the austerity the nasty Tories imposed on us. Once again Britain would welcome newcomers from around the globe with open arms, as the country realigns itself with the European Union, builds a high-tech green utopia and joins NATO’s progressive forces in their battle to spread the joys of drag queen story time to Eastern Ukraine. No sooner had Sir Keir settled into his prime-ministerial home than he elevated lockdown king and former head of research at GlaxoSmithKline, Sir Patrick Vallance, to the House of Lords and then gave him a cabinet post as Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology. By sheer coincidence, last year Sir Paddy Vallance had accepted a role with the Tony Blair Institute.

Yet despite favourable media coverage and a massive online advertising campaign, Labour failed to win over many hearts and minds, except as fallout from widespread disillusionment with the SNP in Scotland and with the Tories in England. Only a couple of months ago, Sir Keir Starmer’s Party was riding as high as 46% in the opinion polls. Yet in the event, only 59.9% could be bothered to vote, including postal votes, and only 33.7% of those supported an official Labour candidate. Indeed under Sir Keir Starmer, Labour got fewer votes than it did in 2019 under Corbyn and yet it won more than twice as many seats owing to the distortions of the First Past the Post system.

YearPopular votes% of voters% turnout% of electorsSeats
199713,518,16743.271.330.8418
200110,724,95340.759.424.2412
20059,552,37635.261.421.6355
20108,609,51729.065.118.9258
20159,347,32430.466.420.2232
201712,877,91840.068.827.5262
201910,269,05132.167.321.6202
20249,704,65533.759.920.2411

If we drill down, a different picture emerges. Labour only gained in two areas. In Scotland as former Labour voters returned to the fold after lending their votes to the SNP over the last decade. Central belt voters have distrusted the Tories ever since the Thatcher era, but much of the Scottish protest vote went largely to Reform despite its association with British Unionism. The SNP got only 9 seats with 30% of the vote, while Labour won 37 out of 57 seats with only 35.3% of the vote. In the southern English shires Labour’s share increased marginally helping it to unseat many Tory MPs with as little as 26.48% of the vote as the remainder was so evenly split among the Conservatives, Reform and independents. Labour only regained its traditional Red Wall seats because many who lent their votes temporarily to the Tories to get Brexit done either stayed at home or voted Reform. Indeed, Reform did best in some of the most economically deprived areas of Eastern and Northern England.

One of the biggest surprises came from the cosmopolitan urban constituencies with large Muslim populations. This is where Labour did best under Jeremy Corbyn. Although George Galloway lost in Rochdale, five independent candidates won on a Pro-Palestine ticket. In Luton South, Labour’s share declined from 51.8% to 35.4% shedding votes to an independent and a Workers’ Party candidate with 14 and 8.1% respectively and both standing on a pro-Palestine ticket. Sir Keir Starmer himself lost around 18.9% to Andrew Feinstein and the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, won as an independent.

If we had proportional representation or even a French-style two round contest, the outcome would have been very different. Labour won with 40% or less in 122 constituencies and in 175 constituencies the combined Conservative and Reform vote share would have beaten the winner, but to be fair we may have to add the LibDem votes to Labour’s.

However, this assumes the traditional left-right paradigm that places Reform on right and the Worker’s Party on the left. A more honest appraisal would be rank parties by the social class of their supporters. The Conservatives may still have a bedrock of support from affluent boomers in their 60s and Labour still do better in urban areas among the managerial classes, but the Greens and LibDems did best either in posh neighbourhoods or places with large student or post-graduate populations. A top-to-bottom spectrum might look more like this:

LibDems and GreensTrendy upper middle classes, students and business leaders
LabourBillionaire bankers, media moguls, conformist managerial classes, social workers and some welfare-dependents often via postal votes
ConservativesConformist suburban, rural middle classes and property traders
Workers’ Party & IndependentsRebellious working classes and some small business owners
ReformRebellious working classes and some maverick business leaders

When it comes to transferring more power to remote technocrats at the World Health Organisation, rejoining the EU, transgenderism in primary schools, clamping down on free speech, raising green taxes on the lower middle classes or going to war with Russia, another pattern emerges. Upper middle-class Labour,  LibDem and Green supporters are much more likely to support these policies, while Reform and Workers’ Party supporters are more likely to oppose them. Only on Israel and mass migration do we see distinctive tribal loyalties come to the fore among Britain’s disparate lower classes and only on Israeli war crimes do the Greens still take a firm stance against the Military Industrial Complex.

By now it should be crystal clear that there is no grassroots support for extreme centralisers who have embedded themselves in the UK government with the full blessing of the Tony Blair Institute.