Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened. Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain
On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now.
But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.
The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”. He was referring to independent journalists and whistle blowers, the honest mavericks to whom media organisations once gave space, often with pride. The space has been abolished.
The war hysteria that has rolled in like a tidal wave in recent weeks and months is the most striking example. Known by its jargon, “shaping the narrative”, much if not most of it is pure propaganda.
The Russians are coming. Russia is worse than bad. Putin is evil, “a Nazi like Hitler”, salivated the Labour MP Chris Bryant. Ukraine is about to be invaded by Russia – tonight, this week, next week. The sources include an ex CIA propagandist who now speaks for the US State Department and offers no evidence of his claims about Russian actions because “it comes from the US Government”.
The no-evidence rule also applies in London. The British Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who spent £500,000 of public money flying to Australia in a private plane to warn the Canberra government that both Russia and China were about to pounce, offered no evidence. Antipodean heads nodded; the “narrative” is unchallenged there. One rare exception, former prime minister Paul Keating, called Truss’s warmongering “demented”.
Truss has blithely confused the countries of the Baltic and Black Sea. In Moscow, she told the Russian foreign minister that Britain would never accept Russian sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh – until it was pointed out to her that these places were not part of Ukraine but in Russia. Read the Russian press about the buffoonery of this pretender to 10 Downing Street and cringe.
This entire farce, recently starring Boris Johnson in Moscow playing a clownish version of his hero, Churchill, might be enjoyed as satire were it not for its wilful abuse of facts and historical understanding and the real danger of war.
Vladimir Putin refers to the “genocide” in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. Following the coup in Ukraine in 2014 – orchestrated by Barack Obama’s “point person” in Kyiv, Victoria Nuland – the coup regime, infested with neo-Nazis, launched a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbas, which accounts for a third of Ukraine’s population.
Overseen by CIA director John Brennan in Kyiv, “special security units” coordinated savage attacks on the people of Donbas, who opposed the coup. Video and eyewitness reports show bussed fascist thugs burning the trade union headquarters in the city of Odessa, killing 41 people trapped inside. The police are standing by. Obama congratulated the “duly elected” coup regime for its “remarkable restraint”.
In the US media the Odessa atrocity was played down as “murky” and a “tragedy” in which “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) attacked “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”.
Professor Stephen Cohen, acclaimed as America’s leading authority on Russia, wrote, “The pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during world war two. [Today] storm-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other ‘impure’ citizens are widespread throughout Kyiv-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s…
“The police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kyiv has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorialising Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms, renaming streets in their honour, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.”
Today, neo-Nazi Ukraine is seldom mentioned. That the British are training the Ukrainian National Guard, which includes neo-Nazis, is not news. (See Matt Kennard’s Declassified report in Consortium 15 February). The return of violent, endorsed fascism to 21st-century Europe, to quote Harold Pinter, “never happened … even while it was happening”.
On 16 December, the United Nations tabled a resolution that called for “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism”. The only nations to vote against it were the United States and Ukraine.
Almost every Russian knows that it was across the plains of Ukraine’s “borderland” that Hitler’s divisions swept from the west in 1941, bolstered by Ukraine’s Nazi cultists and collaborators. The result was more than 20 million Russian dead.
Setting aside the manoeuvres and cynicism of geopolitics, whomever the players, this historical memory is the driving force behind Russia’s respect-seeking, self-protective security proposals, which were published in Moscow in the week the UN voted 130-2 to outlaw Nazism. They are:
– NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow) – NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia. – Ukraine will not become a member of NATO. – the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact. – the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)
These amount to a comprehensive draft of a peace plan for all of post-war Europe and ought to be welcomed in the West. But who understands their significance in Britain? What they are told is that Putin is a pariah and a threat to Christendom.
Russian-speaking Ukrainians, under economic blockade by Kyiv for seven years, are fighting for their survival. The “massing” army we seldom hear about are the thirteen Ukrainian army brigades laying siege to Donbas: an estimated 150,000 troops. If they attack, the provocation to Russia will almost certainly mean war.
In 2015, brokered by the Germans and French, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France met in Minsk and signed an interim peace deal. Ukraine agreed to offer autonomy to Donbas, now the self declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
The Minsk agreement has never been given a chance. In Britain, the line, amplified by Boris Johnson, is that Ukraine is being “dictated to” by world leaders. For its part, Britain is arming Ukraine and training its army.
Since the first Cold War, NATO has effectively marched right up to Russia’s most sensitive border having demonstrated its bloody aggression in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and broken solemn promises to pull back. Having dragged European “allies” into American wars that do not concern them, the great unspoken is that NATO itself is the real threat to European security.
In Britain, a state and media xenophobia is triggered at the very mention of “Russia”. Mark the knee-jerk hostility with which the BBC reports Russia. Why? Is it because the restoration of imperial mythology demands, above all, a permanent enemy? Certainly, we deserve better.
Opposed to vaccine mandates, QR codes and other restrictions on our rights and freedom?
Refusing to wear a mask, have the vaccine and stay locked-down when ordered?
Attended a number of demonstrations protesting the government-imposed restrictions in your country? Involved in or supporting the truckers convoys?
Already celebrating some lifting of restrictions in some countries?
Unfortunately, there is one simple reason why the sorts of actions nominated above cannot win back our rights and our freedom: Our various protests are not integrated parts of a comprehensive strategy designed for the purpose. Moreover, in the case of the truckers convoys, they also complicate one already serious problem: supply chain disruptions that are causing serious food shortages. See ‘The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security’.
And, rest assured, there is nothing to celebrate unless you do not understand what is happening beneath the surface.
Which, uniquely in this case, requires a strategy that recognizes, and addresses, the technological coup d’état that is being carried out against us.
As anyone conversant with the history of peoples’ struggles is well aware, that history is littered with the ‘bodies’ of failed social movements and national liberation struggles, even if some of these ‘bodies’ are still twitching rather than dead.
Ever wondered why the anti-war movement goes around in circles? Or whatever happened to the Occupy Movement? Or why so many environmental and social justice movements go nowhere? Or even why so many national liberation struggles fail, or lose vital gains subsequently to an initial victory.
Well, there are clearcut reasons for their failure and they can be readily identified. I have previously discussed some key reasons in the article ‘Why Activists Fail’.
So let us consider the current freedom movement and analyze why it is on the course to failure at the moment and see if we can turn it around before it is too late. And to do this, we need a sound strategic framework.
Nonviolent Strategy
Sound nonviolent strategy has twelve components – see the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel – and, unfortunately, most social movements and (nonviolent) national liberation struggles are devoid of a comprehensive strategy simply because only the rarest activist has a sense of what strategy really means.
So what is strategy? Very simply, strategy is a planned series of actions (tactics) conducted over an appropriate timeframe that is designed to achieve the two strategic aims that govern the strategy.
For any strategy to be effective, it must be based on a thorough understanding of the conflict in question.
Analysis
Sound strategy in any conflict begins with a deep analysis of what is taking place so that we can identify who is driving it, why they are driving it, how they are driving it, what they intend to implement and what they intend to achieve if successful?
Hence, if we deeply analyze what is taking place around the world at the moment, we can start by observing that we are being told by the World Health Organization, national governments, medical authorities and the corporate media that the human population is at risk of catching a virus (labeled ‘SARS-CoV-2’) that causes a life-threatening disease (labeled ‘Covid-19’) and that we need a long series of restrictions (including lockdowns and QR codes) as well as several injections to protect ourselves from this alleged disease.
So, obviously, any serious analysis must begin with identifying proof that the virus exists, given that it is the supposed cause of everything that follows. Then we can investigate its projected harm.
However, if we seek proof of the isolation of this virus, we quickly discover that there is none.
However, doctors, scientists and researchers who present evidence such as this are all being censored by government and corporate media and social media. In this context, there is very little space for meaningful debate, let alone space for the truth to emerge into wider view.
If there is no virus, of course, there is no need for any of the restrictions that have been imposed and there is no need for any vaccine. So why have all these restrictions and ‘vaccines’ been imposed?
By this point in any serious investigation, research will have exposed the role of the World Economic Forum in promoting the ‘pandemic’ narrative and, under cover of these ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ lies, progressively implementing its ‘Great Reset’program. Any careful reading of this documentation quickly reveals that the ‘Great Reset’ is designed to utterly transform human society and even human life in accord with elite wishes, which is why the rest of us have not been consulted. This is because the detail outlined in the ‘Great Reset’ documentation, which anyone can investigate for themselves, clearly identifies intended changes to some 200 areas of human activity, essentially characterized as part of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.
The point is that democratic governance was subverted long ago: it just has many manifestations. As Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, declared at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2017: ‘What we are very proud of is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our WEF Young Global Leaders… like Justin Trudeau.’ See ‘WEF’s Klaus Schwab Boasts of Young Global Leaders Penetration of Western Cabinets’.
These ‘Young Global Leaders’, which means those, including politicians, who represent the Global Elite rather than the people of their countries, include a range of current (or immediate past) national leaders, such as Emmanuel Macron (France), Angela Merkel (Germany), Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand). See ‘World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders’ and ‘World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders”’.
So any careful investigation of what is happening globally reveals four fundamental points:
1. Who? The Global Elite is implementing this technological coup d’état. Hence, what little is left of the sovereignty of governments is being destroyed by the coup, and governments are powerless to restore the fundamental rights and freedom that are stake in this conflict. Of course, governments might be allowed to remove particular mandates in some contexts as the importance of particular mandates is superseded by other components of the Elite agenda. Similarly, legal challenges can bear minimal fruit, and not on the primary program.
2. Why? The Global Elite, using the World Economic Forum as its vehicle, seeks total control of the human population and the Earth’s resources.
4. How? The ‘Great Reset’ is being implemented by using elite agents such as the World Health Organization, national governments, official medical associations, the pharmaceutical industry and the corporate media to promote the Elite’s lies – that the deadly SARS-CoV-2 ‘virus’ exists and that an onerous series of measures ranging from mask-wearing to lockdowns to multiple injections are necessary to address it – while employing heavy-handed censorship to ensure that the truth, and the evidence to explain it, about the deeper elite agenda is suppressed. Meanwhile, unaware people throughout society are playing their part in implementing the ‘Great Reset’ on behalf of the Global Elite.
So what can we do?
If we are to defeat this (fundamentally technological) elite coup against humanity, our strategy must undermine the power of the Global Elite to conduct it. Unfortunately, our protests (whether in person or by blockading with trucks) against particular mandates cannot undermine, in a strategic sense, the foundations that make possible the underlying elite agenda being inflicted upon us. Briefly, this is because they are incorrectly targeted (at governments rather than foundational elements of elite power in this context) and they are the wrong tactics in this circumstance (especially because of their failure to identify and address the technological elements of the coup), among other shortcomings.
So we have two choices: We can keep doing things that don’t work or refocus what we are doing so that it does have strategic impact.
Strangely, this doesn’t mean that we should stop conducting rallies or even cease the convoys. But it does mean that we need to use these events to explain the deeper agenda behind what is happening and to raise awareness of the strategic actions the wider public must take if we are to defeat the elite program.
Otherwise, while they build relationships and even a sense of solidarity, rallies and convoys are, strategically speaking, a waste of time.
So what does ‘strategic impact’ mean in this context?
Once we understand that the Global Elite is driving the ‘Great Reset’ to impose a global order that serves elite interests, we can identify the appropriate set of strategic goals for defending ourselves and then thoughtfully consider what actions we might take to achieve these goals, that is, actions that actually make a difference.
So what does ‘make a difference’ mean in this context? It means designing and taking action that undermines the power of those driving what is happening to achieve what they want. If an action is simply designed to allow us to express our complaint (often expressed as a list of specific demands that particular things be changed) – as the mass rallies and truck convoys are essentially doing – there is no reason for anything to be achieved. Elites have enormous experience of ignoring us and understand how well it works.
As former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig once noted about a massive anti-war demonstration: ‘Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.’ See Alexander Haig. As a four-star general, Haig, not regarded as the most intelligent Secretary of State in US history, certainly understood the importance of tactical choice. Most activists have no idea.
Which is why the history of mass mobilizations in these forms failing to achieve significant change is long. And this list starts with the largest demonstration in human history when, as part of a series of large demonstrations that was occurring, up to 30 million people in 600 cities protested the imminent US invasion of Iraq on 15 February 2003. See ‘The World Says No to War’.
And remember the Occupy Movement in 2011? It was huge, mobilizing people to camp in public places in cities all over the world. It’s focus? The 1% (wealthy individuals who own and control the major corporations and manage the financial system in a way that disproportionately benefits a minority while undermining democracy). Its strategy? Essentially occupying public locations. The movement ended after it had been heavily infiltrated – see ‘FBI Documents Reveal Secret Nationwide Occupy Monitoring’ – and police forcibly removed encampments a few months after it had taken off globally.
So why do these movements fail? It is always the same reason: poor strategy, invariably including inadequate analysis, inaccurate identification of target and wrong tactical choice, and often including failure to deal adequately with infiltrators and provocateurs. Although, it should be emphasized, movements usually make a series of ill-informed decisions so that the details of the poor strategy vary from one movement to the next. The point is that people generally do not understand the concept of strategic resistance; they simply confuse any form of mass mobilization with resisting strategically.
Identifying What We Must Resist
Once we identify who is driving the conflict – in this case, the Global Elite, not governments – as well as why and how they are doing it and what they intend, we can identify those foundational components that make possible what the Elite wants to achieve.
So, as noted above, a careful reading of the key documentation soon exposes that the Global Elite intends to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population (using a variety of measures including the ‘injectables’) and enslave those left alive in a technological prison. And this is now happening.
How, exactly, is the Elite doing this?
In relation to its eugenics program, it is using four primary measures: the injections, the massive redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, the destruction of global supply chains (including those in relation to food) and the deployment of 5G. For explanations of these measures, see ‘The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security’.
But even those who resist the injection will be enslaved. Using drones, smart phones, GPS devices, smart TVs, social media, smart meters, surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, online banking, license plate readers and driverless cars, you will live under constant surveillance and be readily controlled whether in your home, car or out in the community. And you will be photographed many times each day. As John and Nisha Whitehead have noted: ‘We’re on the losing end of a technological revolution that has already taken hostage our computers, our phones, our finances, our entertainment, our shopping, our appliances, and now, our cars.’ See ‘The Government’s Kill Switch for Your Car, Your Freedoms and Your Life’.
Moreover, as Whitney Webb has explained, plans are well advanced to ‘require a digital ID to access and use the internet as well as eliminate the ability to conduct anonymous financial transactions. Both policies would advance the overarching goal of both the WEF and many corporations and governments to usher in a new age of unprecedented surveillance of ordinary citizens.’ See ‘Ending Anonymity: Why the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens the Future of Privacy’. Obviously, this would also dramatically advance elite control.
In addition, using a combination of technologies largely dependent on 5G, the intention is to digitize our identity and connect it with our bank, health, legal and other records, and create a social credit score that will determine what we can and cannot do and where we can do it. In short, we will be locked in a technological prison, whether it is our own home, our car or our local community, in a ‘smart city’. Physical prisons won’t matter because everywhere will be the prison. Human volition will be unknowingly surrendered by those unaware of the degree of technological control they accepted each time they purchased the latest gadget.
A vital part of this control is explained by Catherine Austin Fitts in this short video on the ‘financial transaction control grid’ being created. See ‘Digital Concentration Camps’.
Welcome to your imminent technocratic dystopia. Human freedom? Gone. Human rights? Gone. Human identity? Gone. Privacy? Gone. Free will? Gone. Anything else that makes life worth living? Gone.
So with this briefest of summaries, hopefully you can see why these rallies and convoys, in themselves, cannot achieve anything significant. Powerlessly begging governments to remove certain vaccine mandates and even other now-familiar restrictions, while ignoring the ongoing technological measures being implemented ‘behind the scenes’, is not impeding, in any way, the elite program to entrap you in a technological prison, assuming you survive the death needle.
Hence, if we wish to resist this elite program effectively, we must identify its foundational components; that is, those components that make what the Elite wants to achieve possible. And then resist these components.
Resisting Strategically So what are the components that give the Global Elite the power to inflict its agenda upon us?
These include the injections; deployment of 5G; the technologies that enable comprehensive (not just mass) surveillance, digitization (of our identity, banking, health, legal and other records to generate our personal social credit score) and robotization of the workforce; measures to restructure the global economy in favour of the mega-corporations and consolidation of ownership and control of agricultural land as well as the production, distribution and even nature of the world’s food supply. It also includes the power to control the narrative by using government and corporate media and social media to promote Elite propaganda while censoring the truth.
Hence, we must resist these if we are to undermine the power of the Global Elite to control us.
As noted above, rallies and convoys are only useful if we use them to educate people about the true nature and full extent of the threat and inform those involved how to effectively resist this threat. To reiterate, while we are focusing on governments, the various lockdown restrictions and ‘vaccine’ mandates, and employing the wrong tactics, people will be mobilized to no avail. This is because there are plenty of tactical options – see ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’ – but understanding what has strategic impact in any context is crucial.
Why? Because the nonviolent actions and the numbers participating, in themselves, are not determinative. It is the strategy that determines the outcome.
In short, we must give people the range of actions that will make a critical strategic difference; that is, the precise actions that will undermine the power of the Global Elite to inflict their overall program on us. Unless we do this, our rallies and convoys (and those people who speak at these events) are simply failing to inform their audiences of the vital information that is necessary for us to be successful.
So mass gatherings of resistance (such as protest demonstrations, truck convoys, religious services…), in whatever variation they take, can be useful because they mobilize people with a shared perspective but they only have strategic impact if these people are then ‘deployed’ to take action that undermines the elite’s power to inflict this coup upon us.
To illustrate this point: What is the value of mobilizing an ‘army’ in war? So that you can send it out to fight a strategically-chosen series of battles. What activists do not understand is that we need to mobilize our activist ‘army’ – which is the primary value of the mass mobilizations – but we need to use these mobilizations to inform activists what tactics we need them to undertake subsequently.
Otherwise we have simply mobilized rally participants to be told to go home again and do nothing or, in the case of the convoys, to remain until a very limited set of demands, which do not address the fundamental technological agenda, are granted (which is one option the Elite might consider as the simplest means of dissipating the dissent in this instance).
If you are interested in strategically resisting the Global Elite’s technological agenda and other measures associated with the ‘Great Reset’, you can read how to do so on the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ website which offers further analysis, resources and a list of 29 strategic goals for doing so.
This includes campaigning to cause civilian and military scientists and technologists to refuse to do any research or undertake any work associated with the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism, to cause workers to refuse to do any work (by producing, distributing or installing any technology) associated with the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism, and to cause consumers to refuse to buy or otherwise acquire any product associated with the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism.
That is, to campaign to cause all sectors of society to refuse to develop and make available, or to purchase/use, technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution and transhumanism (including 5G and 6G, military weapons, artificial intelligence [AI], big data, nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things [IoT], and quantum computing) because these technologies will subvert human identity, human freedom, human dignity, human volition and/or human privacy. See ‘Strategic Goals related to resisting the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism’.
In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 15 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish & Slovak) with more in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.
Notably, these latter actions avoid certain problems. Because they involve actions by people dispersed throughout the population, rather than people concentrated in one location (as with rallies), they are extremely difficult to interrupt. Hence, they virtually eliminate the risk of violent repression.
For the first time in history, all of humanity is threatened by a coup d’état that is killing vast numbers of people through a complex series of measures while destroying human liberty and human rights for those not killed outright.
Moreover, for the first time in history, this coup is being implemented by a series of technological measures that promise to imprison those left alive in a hi-tech prison from which there will be no escape.
Hence, given that several foundational elements of this coup are not yet quite fully in place, 2022 will be the most critical year in human history to date.
But to defeat this hi-tech coup we need to be strategically savvy and mobilize enough people to participate. You are welcome to join us.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”— George Orwell
The U.S. government, which speaks in a language of force, is afraid of its citizenry.
What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.
All of us are in danger.
In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s latest terrorism bulletin, “These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.”
You see, the government doesn’t care if what you’re sharing is fact or fiction or something in between. What it cares about is whether what you’re sharing has the potential to make people think for themselves and, in the process, question the government’s propaganda.
Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers.
For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.
This latest government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative.
There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State.
Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.
Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.
In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.
As The Interceptreported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.
Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
And then at the other end of the spectrum there are those such as Julian Assange, for example, who blow the whistle on government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.
Included among the leaked Manning material were the Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo files (April 2011).
The Collateral Murder leak included gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.
In true Orwellian fashion, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.
This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.
This is why the government fears a citizenry that thinks for itself. Because a citizenry that thinks for itself is a citizenry that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law, which translates to government transparency and accountability.
After all, we’re citizens, not subjects. For those who don’t fully understand the distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy constitutional government, Manning explains it well:
This is why the First Amendment is so critical. It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.
The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.
A little over 50 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of national security to prevent The Washington Post and The New York Times from publishing secret Pentagon papers on how America went to war in Vietnam.
As Justice William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling, “The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”
Fast forward to the present day, and we’re witnessing yet another showdown, this time between Assange and the Deep State, which pits the people’s right to know about government misconduct against the might of the military industrial complex.
Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.
Following the current trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, watched all the time, and rounded up when the government deems it necessary.
We’re almost at that point now.
Eventually, we will all be potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.
Partisan politics have no place in this debate: Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.
We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.
Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.
What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.
The right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.
In Orwell’s dystopian vision of the future, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”
Much like today’s social media censors and pre-crime police departments, Orwell’s Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the other government agencies peddle in economic affairs (rationing and starvation), law and order (torture and brainwashing), and news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda).
Orwell’s Big Brother relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
Propaganda isn’t just about manufacturing consent for wars and ridiculous governmental measures we’d never normally accept. That’s what most people think of when they hear that word, but there’s so very, very much more to it than that.
The lion’s share of propaganda goes not toward convincing us to accept new agendas of the powerful, but toward keeping us entranced in the status quo dream world which enables the powerful to have power in the first place. Toward normalizing status quo systems and training us to shape ourselves to fit into them like neat little cogs in a well-oiled machine.
And it’s not even a grand, monolithic conspiracy in most cases. The giant corporations who indoctrinate us with their advertisements, their Hollywood movies and shows, their apps, their websites and their news media are all naturally incentivized to point us further and further into delusion by the fact that they benefit from the status quo systems which have elevated them to wealth.
So day in and day out we are presented with media which train us what to value, where to place our interest and attention, what success looks like, and how a normal human behaves on this planet. And it always aligns perfectly with the interests of the rich and powerful.
They don’t just teach us what to believe. They teach us who we are. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded.
These artificial constructs take up such vast portions of our personal psychology that people will live their entire lives completely enslaved to them, making them their entire focus. This enslavement is so pervasive that people will often even take their own lives based on what those made-up constructs tell them about who they are and what they’re worth.
And it’s all a lie. A dream world, made entirely of narrative, constructed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful. Things as intimate as the thoughts in our heads and the movement of our interest and attention are controlled and dominated with iron-fisted force, all for the benefit of some stupid made-up games about imaginary money and fictional authority.
So most of us sleepwalk through life chasing make believe goals and fleeing artificially constructed demons. Too preoccupied with the illusion to look up and notice the thunderous majesty of life as it really is, and usually too confused to truly perceive it even on those rare occasions when we snap out of the trance for a moment to make an effort.
Untangling yourself from this dream world isn’t easy. It takes time. It takes work. It takes a deep, sustained curiosity about what’s really going on underneath all the muddled mental chatter, about what life truly is underneath all the stories we’ve been told about what life is, about who we truly are underneath all the stories we’ve been told about who we are.
The difference between what we’ve been told and what we find over the course of this investigation is the difference between dream and waking life. The real world is as different from the status quo narrative about the world as it is from any other work of fiction. The two things really could not be any more different.
And the good news is that just as your false view of yourself and your world shaped your human expression in the service of the powerful, the rolling back of that mind fog shapes your human expression into something else entirely. Something grounded in reality. Something authentic. Something primal. Something that exists not for the benefit of some faceless oligarchic empire, but for the same reason the grass grows and the galaxies spin in the cosmos.
And that’s what humanity looks like on the other side of this awkward transition phase that our species is going through at this adolescent point in its development. Free from illusion. In harmony with the real. Enslaved to nobody. Striding clear-eyed into the mystery of what’s to come.
A prominent theme in Asian religious traditions such as the Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism is that our everyday human experience is like a dream. The dream is that you are merely a person – a thing in the world bounded by your skin, a self that is separate from things and other people. But you are not separate from things and other people. And when you see through the illusion of separation, you become ‘awakened’.
In Chinese Zen Buddhism (Ch’an), a significant form of awakening experience is known as ‘Kensho’. This literally translates as ‘seeing one’s true nature’. In Zen, one’s true nature is often described as ‘empty’ – and at the same time identical with the given world. Kensho isn’t the end point of practice. It isn’t some supreme final state such as ‘enlightenment’ or ‘nirvana’ (if these states are even possible). Rather, it is the beginning, for awakening is in fact a life-long practice, never truly completed. This is the type of awakening experience that I am interested in here.
Hui Hai, an 8th-century Zen Master renowned for establishing a monastery and insisting on the importance of manual work, said that your true nature should not be sought externally. He described your true nature as follows:
Mind has no colour, such as green or yellow, red or white; it is not long or short; it does not vanish or appear; it is free from purity and impurity alike; and its duration is eternal. It is utter stillness. Such then is the form and shape of our original mind, which is also our original body.
Our true nature, then, is like a void. It lacks all objective qualities. It is shapeless, colourless, limitless, motionless. So how exactly does one see one’s own true nature, if it is so shorn of discernible features? The traditional method is to sit for many years in an intense meditation practice under the guidance of an experienced teacher. Unfortunately, most practitioners never experience ‘the void’. There is however a tradition in Zen of spontaneous awakening even in the absence of any meditation practice. This suggests that there is a far quicker and more direct means of awakening.
Early Chinese Zen masters referred to the need to ‘chop off one’s head’
Let’s look at a method of self-enquiry called ‘the headless way’, which provides a modern method of approaching awakening. These first-person experiments were developed by the English philosopher and mystic Douglas Harding in his influential book On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious (1961). Harding grew up in a fundamentalist Christian sect in which he wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema and the only book he was permitted to read was the Bible. When he left the sect at 21, he was determined to seek the truth for himself and to be his own authority. The approach he developed was unconventional and can be considered a form of radical empiricism.
The key to his method is noticing that you cannot see your own head. Rather than looking out of a head, visually speaking, there is just a gap here. Indeed, early Chinese Zen masters referred to the need to ‘chop off one’s head’. Hui Hai claimed that he could teach nothing as he had no tongue to teach with. The heart sutra, which distils the essence of Zen teaching, states that ‘in emptiness there is no form, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind.’ Zen masters also urge practitioners to recognise their ‘original face’ – another name for one’s true nature.
How does one see their true nature according to Zen? One of the best places to start is with the mysterious figure Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch of Zen, who reputedly brought Buddhism to China from India around the 5th century. A legend about him tells us that he attained enlightenment after sitting for nine years facing a cave wall, and also that he cut off his own eyelids to stop himself from falling asleep. Bodhidharma is attributed with the following verse, which is often thought to express the core of Zen teaching:
A special transmission outside the scriptures, Not founded upon words and letters; By pointing directly to one’s mind It lets one see into one’s own true nature and thus attain Buddhahood.
How exactly does one directly point to one’s mind or true nature? Harding’s ‘pointing experiment’ assists in turning one’s attention within, starting with the exercise of pointing a finger literally to the spot from which you are looking. Note that if these exercises are not carried out, or if they are merely thought about, this article will make no sense. So please do the following:
Point at a distant thing, such as a wall. Notice its shape and colour. It is a thing that is extended in space. It is also opaque. You cannot see through it. Point to the floor. Again, notice the coloured expanse and its textures. Point to your foot. Again, it is a shaped and coloured thing. Point to your chest and notice its colours and shape and the movement from your breathing. Now point to where you are looking from. In your present experience, is there any colour here? Any shape? Any texture? Any movement? Are there any eyes, mouth or cheeks here? Are there any features of a person? Notice that this spot is totally lacking in any personally identifying characteristics. Is there anything at all here? Or is it just a transparent opening?
When I look within, when I turn my attention 180 degrees from objects over there to where I am, I find that I am not a coloured, limited thing in the world, but rather a colourless, unchanging capacity for the world, exactly as described by Zen. Is this the much sought-after ‘void’ that is referred to by contemplative traditions across times and cultures?
When you were an infant, you did not recognise that face in the mirror as your own. It was just a baby behind some glass
A well-known story in Zen is of Tung-Shan’s awakening, in the 9th century, which also shows intriguing parallels with Harding’s observations. Once, as a child, Tung-Shan was reading the heart sutra with his tutor when he came upon the passage ‘no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind’. He was confused. He used his hands to feel his face and then asked his tutor why the sutra said they didn’t exist. His tutor told Tung-Shan that he could not help him, so Tung-Shan spent many years searching for a worthy master to explain this and other mysteries of the Dharma to him. One day he was crossing a river and saw his face reflected in the water. He saw where his face was in his lived experience, and he instantly had a great awakening.
Zen goes beyond words and letters, so merely thinking about this story would be against the spirit of Zen. To test this out directly in your own experience, please carry out the ‘mirror experiment’:
Look into a mirror. You can now see your human face. Notice where it is. In my experience, it is over there, a couple of feet away, not on my shoulders. Is this true for you? It is also facing the wrong way. It is looking in, rather than outwards. How many faces do you see? Two, or just one? Notice the shapes, textures and colours of that little face trapped behind the glass. By contrast, notice the lack of shapes, textures, colours and indeed boundaries to the spot you are looking from.
That face over there is your acquired face. When you were an infant, you did not recognise it as your own. It was just a baby behind some glass. It took many months to learn to identify with that face. You learnt to marry that visual thing over there with the ‘facial’ sensations you feel here, and hence you became boxed in (at least apparently so). Isn’t how you are for yourself – that is, your ‘original face’ – in total contrast to that little face in the mirror? In fact, as lacking any characteristics of its own, isn’t this ‘gap’ seamlessly united with the world? Couldn’t you equally say that your ‘original face’ is the given world itself?
All this might sound a little esoteric, so let’s look at one potential practical benefit of the ‘headless’ practice in the case of personal relationships. We think that we meet each other face-to-face, thing-to-thing. Of course, this is how it looks to others from the outside. But you relate to others from your first-person perspective, not from over there. The lived experience of being with others isn’t in fact of being face-to-face, but rather face-to-no-face. My face never gets in the way of the faces of others – including those you dislike. The ‘space’ you are looking out of has no preferences. It takes on everyone completely, no matter who they are, without judgement. Noticing this is a rather simple and concrete way to see that you are not, in fact, separate from others. In theory, this could provide a basis for true compassion towards others.
One can meditate for many years without seeing their own true nature. Most never do. The precision and apparent reliability of these experiments open up a form of Zen-like awakening to empirical investigation. Yet these techniques have so far received little attention from philosophers and scientists. (I describe these experiments and discuss their relation to Zen more fully in my recent article ‘The Technology of Awakening’.) The results of the experiments suggest that it doesn’t require a lifetime or many lifetimes to see your true nature. You can do so right now. It is simply to see who or what you are at this very moment – that which is seeing these very words.
“He’s a rewarder of those who seek him. Some say God is a punisher, but do you know what we do with child abusers today? We put child abusers in prison if we find out about ‘em. God is not a child abuser! God is a good god. Why don’t you just say that out loud with me right no? God is a good god, you always remember that! God is not gonna do you harm… (pause) There is a judgement coming someday…”
—“Mrs. Hook” from The Christian Pirates cable access show.
History will note that for a short period at the end of the 20th century, there was this “format” called “VHS” (“Video Home System” is what it stood for) that allowed people to do something called “videotaping” “off” their television sets (it didn’t work exactly like that, but it’s, you know, close enough). But what history might neglect to record is that certain things got passed around from hand to hand on this format samizdat style in what was then called the “VHS tape trading underground.” During the mid-1980s to the late 90s, traders and flea market dealers were making pirated copies of things like the banned Rolling Stones movie Cocksucker Blues, Heavy Metal Parking Lot, “Screaming Boy” (lunatic Dallas public access preacher Jonathan Bell, later made famous by The Daily Show), a tape of a groupie blowing out a candle with her pussy for guitarist Steve Vai and “The Great Satan At Large,” a satanic talk show, among hundreds of other things.
One of the most heavily circulated items during the “VHS tape trading underground” days was a synapse-frying excursion straight into the dark heart of the most deeply disturbed, bat-shit crazy 80s TV evangelism titled “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks.” When the tape began making the rounds in the early 90s, the jaw-dropping selection of low IQ buffoonery, superstitious insanity and wildly inappropriate kiddie shows made by people who should NEVER BE LEFT ALONE UNSUPERVISED WITH YOUNG CHILDREN was the centerpiece of many a weed and alcohol-fuelled viewing fest.
An unnamed Internet reviewer said this of “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks”:
Americans: See why the rest of the world thinks we’re a bunch of blithering idiots!
Rest of the world: See why Americans are a bunch of blithering idiots!
That pretty much sums it up in a nutshell.
One of the more perplexing things on exhibit in “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” is the clips from the no budget “Christian Pirates” cable access show where godless children are forced to “walk the plank” by one-legged Captain Hook and they sing songs about hoping that Satan gets paralyzed and has to use a wheelchair. There’s Jimmy Swaggart’s tearful confession of whore mongering (a masterclass in fleecing the faithful with the “I have sinned” ploy). A Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker press conference. There’s a lot of asking for money, natch, some racist Bible prophecy, preaching against something one of them calls “Marxism” and a “joyous” man with hands growing from his shoulders who, er, counts his blessings. It’s not just Christianity that takes a beating here. New Age beliefs are lampooned and there’s even an appearance by Queen Uriel from the nutty Unarius Academy of Science.
“Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” was produced by a Boston-based zine called Zontar. It came with an attached pamphlet that you can see reproduced here. Aside from being a masterpiece of video folk art (YES, this should preserved and elevated to museum status) it’s one of the single best things ever to get stoned and watch. I guarantee you’ll be blown away by “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” (and if you’re not, you’ll be issued a full refund…)
BONUS VIDEO: Disgraced—but still currently raking it in like a gangsta on BET—TV evangelist Robert Tilton in the infamous “Pastor Gas” video that has made the rounds on the Internet since the first days of MySpace. My VHS copy of “Perverse Preachers, Fascist Fundamentalists and Kristian Kiddie Kooks” included this:
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”—Frank Zappa
We are no longer free.
We are living in a world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy, but it’s an illusion.
We think we have the freedom to elect our leaders, but we’re only allowed to participate in the reassurance ritual of voting. There can be no true electoral choice or real representation when we’re limited in our options to one of two candidates culled from two parties that both march in lockstep with the Deep State and answer to an oligarchic elite.
We think we have freedom of speech, but we’re only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners allow.
We think we have the right to freely exercise our religious beliefs, but those rights are quickly overruled if and when they conflict with the government’s priorities, whether it’s COVID-19 mandates or societal values about gender equality, sex and marriage.
We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Punitive programs strip citizens of their passports and right to travel over unpaid taxes.
We think we have property interests in our homes and our bodies, but there can be no such freedom when the government can seize your property, raid your home, and dictate what you do with your bodies.
We think we have the freedom to defend ourselves against outside threats, but there is no right to self-defense against militarized police who are authorized to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, and granted immunity from accountability with the general blessing of the courts. Certainly, there can be no right to gun ownership in the face of red flag gun laws which allow the police to remove guns from people merely suspected of being threats.
We think we have the right to due process, but that assurance of justice has been stripped of its power by a judicial system hardwired to act as judge, jury and jailer, leaving us with little recourse for appeal. A perfect example of this rush to judgment can be found in the proliferation of profit-driven speed and red light cameras that do little for safety while padding the pockets of government agencies.
We have been saddled with a government that pays lip service to the nation’s freedom principles while working overtime to shred the Constitution.
By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect the constitutional rights of the citizenry while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants.
We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth—in terms of profit and resale value—to our “owners.”
Under the new terms of this revised, one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and “we the people” have none.
Only in our case, sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, we’ve allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.
The problem with these devil’s bargains, however, is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.
We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.” In exchange for the promise of safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, lower taxes, lower crime rates, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization and government corruption.
In the end, such bargains always turn sour.
We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.
We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.
We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”
We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red-light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in hefty fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.
We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, “we the people” are being reminded that we possess no rights except for that which the government grants on an as-needed basis.
Indeed, there are chilling parallels between the authoritarian prison that is life in the American police state and The Prisoner, a dystopian television series that first broadcast in Great Britain more than 50 years ago.
The series centers around a British secret agent (played by Patrick McGoohan) who finds himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village. While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.
Much like the American Police State, The Prisoner’s Village gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.
Described as “an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia,” The Prisoner is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy.
Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of mankind to meekly accept his lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of his own making.
The Prisoner is an operations manual for how you condition a populace to life as prisoners in a police state: by brainwashing them into believing they are free so that they will march in lockstep with the state and be incapable of recognizing the prison walls that surround them.
We can no longer maintain the illusion of freedom.
After the Crash 