“If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.”— President Dwight D. Eisenhower
The government wants us to bow down to its dictates.
It wants us to buy into the fantasy that we are living the dream, when in fact, we are trapped in an endless nightmare of servitude and oppression.
Indeed, with every passing day, life in the American Police State increasingly resembles life in the dystopian television series The Prisoner.
First broadcast 55 years ago in the U.S., The Prisoner—described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.
Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned in a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.
While luxurious, the Village’s inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked by militarized drones, and stripped of their individuality so that they are identified only by numbers.
“I am not a number. I am a free man,” is the mantra chanted in each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role of Number Six, the imprisoned government agent.
Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.
Number Six refuses to comply.
In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two, the Village administrator a.k.a. prison warden. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”
Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.
Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.”
Still, he refuses to give up.
“Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”
Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.
As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”
The series 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 seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.
As Thill noted, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”
The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State, which is rapidly transitioning into a full-fledged Surveillance State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.
The American Surveillance State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.
Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”
Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.
Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.
Government eyes are watching you.
They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.
Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between bowing down in obedience to the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.
When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.
However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.
Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.
A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.
Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.
This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.
It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.
As Glenn Greenwald notes:
“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”
None of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the Village.
So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.
Think for yourself. Be an individual.
As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”
You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.
In Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1992) Ray Manzarek (Kyle MacLachlan) tells Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) a story about his experiences working in the Hollywood of the late 1960s. He says he told a studio executive that he did not need a script to make a film. “Godard doesn’t use one,” Manzarek claimed. The executive replied, “That’s great… Who’s Godard?”
By the late ’60s, Jean-Luc Godard was a legend among young cinephiles. Beginning withBreathless in 1960 and ending with Weekend just eight years later, the caustic former Cahiers Du Cinema film critic made 15 films which can only be described as revolutionary. Both in terms of cinematic form as well as political and personal content, these films broke the old rules while inventing new ones. The use of handheld cameras, jump-cuts, natural light, and improvisation were both old and new things he popularized. Many of these ideas were used during the freewheeling days of silent cinema before filmmaking was industrialized and, in the mind of Godard and his “New Wave” colleagues, fossilized.
Godard wanted to provoke. But unlike some of his more didactic later work, these initial films are playfully provocative. Most of them are defined by their adversarial relationship to popular movie genres. Breathless is Godard’s deconstructed take on the crime film. A Woman is a Woman (1961) is his musical comedy.
Alphaville(une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution) (1965)is two genres for the price of one: science fiction and noir. Maybe it’s even a third genre as well. It can be argued that the film is just another Eddie Constantine “Lemmy Caution” flick. “Lemmy Caution” flicks were big business in France since the ’50s, and Constantine played the role in over a dozen of them. Created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney, Caution is either an FBI agent or a private detective, depending on which novel you read, but it doesn’t really matter. He’s less a character than a genre archetype and it’s the archetype that Godard wanted. Especially one that was already lost in translation: British novels about an American detective adapted into French films starring an American actor speaking French.
Constantine was synonymous with the role, so Godard simply dropped him like a found object into his dystopian science fiction plot. The old fashioned tough guy Lemmy Caution does not belong here. His simple macho values and violent responses are hilarious when placed into this new context. In one scene, he shoots and kills a man then attempts to question him. Caution appears to have no idea what question to ask anyway, as his bizarre mission pits him against a fascist sentient computer called Alpha-60, which rules Alphaville and forbids any expression of emotion. Caution is deadpan but filled with primitive emotions both violent and romantic. It’s no surprise that Godard considered calling the film “Tarzan Versus IBM”.
By the end of the film, Caution gives up trying to understand the computer’s semantic games and resorts to his base instincts to bring Alphaville down. Along with using his fists and a .45 automatic, Caution expresses love for Natacha Von Braun (Anna Karina), the daughter of Professor Von Braun aka Leonard Nosferatu (Howard Vernon) — the man who built Alpha-60. Natacha grew up in Alphaville and does not know the meaning of words like “Love”. Caution challenges her to understand the meaning and challenges Alpha-60 by telling it a riddle that it cannot possibly comprehend.
From this description, the film may seem like a cold intellectual exercise. A film made by Alpha-60 itself. But this isn’t the case. I find Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), which is obviously inspired by this movie, to be a much colder experience. Alphaville is one of Godard’s wittiest and most emotionally moving. The pulpy sci-fi plot acts as a warm coat of familiarity as Godard slyly subverts one genre trope after another. Godard never really stopped being a film critic. His films were as much essays on how films worked as they were films themselves.
So Godard reveals the artificiality of B-movie fight scenes by presenting them as a series of posed comic book stills and gives Caution melodramatic theme music, which turns abruptly on and off at the most dramatically incorrect and hilarious moments. The excellent score by Paul Misraki shifts from this intentionally clichéd thriller music to beautiful and haunting pieces full of romantic longing.
This romantic theme is used most effectively at the end of the film, a scene which is a perfect example of what fellow French New Wave director Francois Truffaut called a “privileged moment”; brief moments in cinema when the film captures something intangible in a way no other art form could. As Misraki’s score builds, Godard holds on a lengthy closeup of Anna Karina, whose eyes are as hypnotic as any performer in film history. Karina’s expression slowly and subtly shifts from cold to warm and she ends the film by speaking the words she could not comprehend earlier: “Je vous aime…”
Since the dawn of human civilization 5,000 years ago, ordinary people like you and me have been engaged in an endless struggle to resist efforts by elites, whether local, national, international or global, to assert complete control over us and the resources around us.
And for 5,000 years, with some wins and a great many losses, we have managed to stave off the worst.
Finally, in January 2020, the World Economic Forum launched its ‘Great Reset’: The final assault in the Elite’s long war against humankind and nature itself.
As we pass the third anniversary since this final battle was launched, it is well worth evaluating the progress of our resistance.
Is our resistance being effective? Are we succeeding?
Unfortunately, as is obvious from any serious evaluation, we are being smashed. Let me explain why.
[While they are not addressed in this article, I wish to acknowledge the range of other profound threats that pose a serious risk to any worthwhile human future, most notably the threat of nuclear war which arguably stands greater than at any previous time in human history.]
Evaluating Progress
Any strategy to resolve a conflict of this nature must begin with a sound analysis of what is happening:
Who is driving it (which answers the question ‘Who benefits?’) What do they intend? Why are they doing it? And how?
Only once these questions have been clearly answered is it possible to develop a strategy that will be adequate to the challenge posed by the threat.
So who is doing what?
Whatever we have been told by such organizations as the World Health Organization, national governments and the corporate media during the past three years, the most cursory investigation reveals that the World Economic Forum has been just behind the scenes effectively directing the response of governments to the threat supposedly posed by a ‘pathogenic virus’ labeled SARS-CoV-2.
However, any serious investigation will reveal that even the World Economic Forum is simply another ‘front’ for more powerful individuals and their organizations, which I call ‘the Global Elite’
And if you want to watch or read other accounts carefully explaining why no ‘pathogenic virus’ has ever been isolated, here is a token sample of the extensive documentation of this point:
In parallel with monumental efforts to convince us that we are living under enormous medical threat, and must submit to an onerous series of restrictions on our freedom, including multiple injections of a gene-altering bioweapon, a great deal has been going on that has been deliberately obscured from public view.
However, while information about this program is readily available to those who investigate – see, for example, the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ – the reality is that few people have investigated because they were terrorized into believing the cover story: Their life was threatened by a ‘virus’.
But if we spend time investigating the material presented on the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ website and reading critiques of it offered by well-informed researchers, one has no difficulty discovering that, on behalf of the Global Elite, the WEF is now implementing the Elite’s long-planned changes to 200 areas of human life.
To briefly elaborate just one set of changes being imposed as part of this program, consider the prospect of our technological imprisonment as transhuman slaves in ‘smart cities’.
What does this mean?
In essence: the Elite is rapidly building a complete technocracy based on surveillance and control technologies.
These technologies include (among many others) 5G, 6G, the Internet of Things (which will be connected to artificial intelligence [AI] programs that monitor the network of ‘smart’ devices you were deceived into implanting in your body and installing in your home),
geofencing (which will technologically confine you to five kilometres from where you live),
smart street poles and lights (which will gather data via facial recognition cameras and environmental sensors,
display digital signage and use speakers to instruct the immediate population how to behave), digital identity (which will be used to control your access to ‘approved’ activities),
central bank digital currencies (that will be used to control what you can buy,
how much of it and where),
surveillance and (3D) facial recognition cameras deployed in all public spaces (to monitor your movements and control your access), license plate readers, vehicle kill switches,
drones (used as aerial police), robots (including as a ‘deadly force option’) as well as autonomous and electromagnetic weapons. Beyond this, transhuman slaves will become ancilliary ‘workers’ in an increasingly robotized workforce.
To reiterate, these technologies will be used to monitor your every movement and completely control your behaviour, including by using the utterly transformed model of AI policing by drones and robots armed with electromagnetic weapons, as just touched upon.
In case it is not already obvious, this Elite-controlled technocratic prison will subvert human identity, human dignity, human volition, human privacy and human freedom.
Everything that makes human life worth living will be taken from you.
Why is the Elite doing this?
In brief, using a variety of means, this program based on a reduction of a substantial proportion of the human population, as is now happening, imprison those left alive as transhuman slaves in technocratic ‘smart cities’, enclose the Commons forever and deliver all remaining wealth into Elite hands.
Hence, according to the WEF, by 2030 ‘You’ll Own Nothing. And You’ll Be Happy.
And how is the Elite implementing this heinous program?
While the brief discussion above highlights the responsibility of the Global Elite for planning this program and then having it implemented through Elite agents including the World Economic Forum, relevant international organizations such as the WHO, national governments, pharmaceutical corporations and national medical associations, a critically important role has long been played by education systems, the corporate entertainment industry as well as the corporate media in ensuring that what most people regard as ‘knowledge’ and what most people believe is ‘true’ is always consistent with the Elite-promoted narrative.
Hence, in the current context, government media channels and most corporate newspapers, television and radio news programs as well as corporate social media giants have heavily promoted the Elite-driven narrative and routinely censored those telling the truth in exposing the Elite program.
As a result, while some people resisted the onerous restrictions on human freedom, few of these people understood the genuine threat that we faced from the elite plan concealed behind the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative. Consequently, most resistance has been focused on the wrong people, using ineffective means and with negligible understanding of what is taking place.
Hence, we are three years into this crisis that portends profound changes to human society, including the death of billions of people and the transhuman enslavement of virtually all those left alive, with only negligible progress in resisting this long-planned and sophisticated Elite program.
Let me elaborate.
We Are Being Smashed Politically
With the vast bulk of the human population trapped in the delusion that governments make the important decisions that shape our lives, virtually all effort to halt the substantial encroachments on our identity, dignity, volition, rights and freedom, including the injection mandates, has been directed at protest demonstrations, lobbying politicians (or voting for them) and petition-signing with those mobilized demanding that governments withdraw the restrictions and mandates.
This has meant that three years of efforts to mobilize people to resist have been misdirected and the resulting demonstrations, lobbying/voting and petitions have absorbed and dissipated the dissent, as those who truly govern intend.
As has been systematically documented, Elites of a local, regional, national, international and, most recently, global reach have controlled the political destiny of the population over which they exercised jurisdiction making the word ‘government’ a meaningless term. For a brief elaboration of this point, see
Beyond this, however, since World War II there has been an ongoing series of developments to create global infrastructure that subverts any remaining national sovereignty while shifting power to the Global Elite.
Among many initiatives, for example, the Global Public-Private Partnership has been presented by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham, on behalf of the World Economic Forum.
So what is it? According to Davis, the Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P) is a worldwide network of stakeholder capitalists and their partners:
the Bank for International Settlements,
central banks, global (including media) corporations,
the ‘philanthropic’ foundations of multi-billionaires,
policy think tanks,
governments (and their agencies),
key non-governmental organizations and global charities,
selected academic and scientific institutions, labour unions and other chosen ‘thought leaders’. (You can see an instructive diagram in the article cited below.)
The G3P controls the world economy and global finance.
‘It sets world, national and local policy (via global governance) and then promotes those policies using the mainstream media’, typically distributes the policies through an intermediary such as the IMF, WHO or IPCC and uses governments to transform G3P global governance into hard policy, legislation and law at the national level. ‘In this way, the G3P controls many nations at once without having to resort to legislation.
This has the added advantage of making any legal challenge to the decisions made by the most senior partners in the G3P (an authoritarian hierarchy) extremely difficult.’ In short: global governance has already superseded the national sovereignty of states: ‘National governments had been relegated to creating the G3P’s enabling environment by taxing the public and increasing government borrowing debt.’ See ‘What Is the Global Public-Private Partnership?’
As Davis notes:
We are supposed to believe that a G3P-led system of global governance is beneficial for us and to accept that global corporations are committed to putting humanitarian and environmental causes before profit, when the conflict of interest is obvious. ‘Believing this requires a considerable degree of naïveté.’
Davis clearly perceives ‘an emergent global, corporate dictatorship that cares not one whit about truly stewarding the planet.
The G3P will determine the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons. There is no opportunity for any of us to participate in either their project or the subsequent formation of policy.’ Davis goes on:
‘in theory, governments do not have to implement G3P policy, in reality they do. Global policies have been an increasing facet of our lives in the post-WW2 era…. It doesn’t matter who you elect, the policy trajectory is set at the global governance level. This is the dictatorial nature of the G3P and nothing could be less democratic.’
But, as explained previously and despite the claim by Davis of ‘an emergent global, corporate dictatorship’, this is just one of the more recent manifestations of national sovereignty being usurped by a Global Elite intent on removing even the delusion of any form of citizen engagement in policy determination and implementation. See ‘Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until “You’ll Own Nothing.”’
But, obviously, it doesn’t usually get to this. The Elite has a multitude of measures that enable it to control what most people like to believe are ‘democratic’ processes. For example, have you heard of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Young Global Leaders’ program in which the Forum indoctrinates carefully recruited young people to play their lifetime part in implementing Elite initiatives. You don’t get chosen for this program, or graduate from it, if you don’t have impeccable credentials. Just ask people as ‘diverse’ as President Emmanuel Macron, President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
As WEF head Klaus Schwab boasted at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2017:
But the YGL isn’t the only program of this nature. Have you heard of Schwarzman Scholars?
And if you think that we have legal redress to defend all those rights and freedoms supposedly guaranteed by a plethora of treaties, conventions, national constitutions and human rights laws, then you haven’t been paying attention while these have long been systematically ignored, if not simply wiped out. After all, legal systems exist to defend Elite power, profit and privilege, as the record demonstrates. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.
Next time you hear of a legal ruling that appears to favour ‘ordinary’ people, check back some months and years later to see if it survived the usual appeal processes and was ever actually implemented. And, if it was, did it actually change anything or simply lead to more of the same, as happens, for example, when a corporation is occasionally fined for some outrageous behaviour but absorbs the fine as a ‘cost of doing business’.
In summary, if you believe that international or national legal processes will hold the Global Elite (and not just the occasional scapegoated minion) to account, strike down vaccine mandates and a vast range of other violations of human rights, or even allow some of us to get some form of genuine compensation for the vast death, injury and damage inflicted historically or even just during the last three years, then I simply encourage you to read some history to see if you can find any evidence to support your belief.
We Are Being Smashed Economically
While many people have noted the damage done to the world economy by a series of measures supposedly carried out in response to the threat posed by the ‘virus’, ranging from lockdowns (which shuttered vast areas of the economy by disrupting all parts of the global supply chain and stopped most people from working) to vaccine mandates, the fact is that these measures were just the latest and most visible in a 5,000-year history of Elite action to secure and consolidate economic control, progressively enclose the Commons, enslave the human population in work to achieve Elite ends and capture all wealth, among other outcomes explained elsewhere in this article.
But the essence of this report is simple: Building on millennia of effort, since the late C19th a small group of extraordinarily politically powerful and wealthy families, that I call the Global Elite, has accelerated previous efforts to create a global political, economic and legal infrastructure that facilitates the unending concentration of Elite power. This includes effective ownership and control of all key components of the economy including the banking, asset management, weapons, energy, technology, agrochemical, food, mining, pharmaceutical and media industries.
In this world order, neither international governmental organizations such as the United Nations nor national organizations such as governments have any significant say in what takes place. And you don’t either.
We Are Being Smashed Medically
As noted above, there is no documented scientific proof that any such thing as a ‘pathogenic virus’ has ever been isolated, including in the instance of SARS-CoV-2.
But underlying this fact is a very lengthy story about how many long-standing traditional natural healing methods that are very powerful and were used for millennia were systematically discredited and destroyed, as well as how a conflict of ideas about how to approach the maintenance of human health – characterised by the opposing views of Antoine Béchamp and Louis Pasteur in the C19th – culminated in the success of the latter’s ideas, because they enabled a rapid advance in the development of the centralized control desired by Elites, thus replacing long-standing and effective systems of health with one designed to attack human health and kill the patient or precipitate their (highly profitable) lifetime dependency on drugs.
Beyond this, however, ongoing strenuous efforts have consistently been made since the late C19th to control the health, medical and pharmaceutical information available to the public to ensure the suppression of effective treatments for various illnesses, including cancer – see Gerson Therapy – and thus ensure the profitability of the lethal medical, pharmaceutical, processed (including junk) food and confectionery industries, among others, as well as to endlessly consolidate the ever-tightening control over the human population exercised through medical means including through the latest manifestation of this effort, the Covid-19 scam.
However, like many subjects of this nature, much of the documentation in relation to this history has been carefully suppressed or eliminated, one way or another. Nevertheless you can read a sample of books that document it here:
In any case, as we discovered during the period supposedly marked by the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’ and, as noted above, despite the complete absence of any scientific evidence of the existence of any such thing as a ‘pathogenic virus’, including in the instance of SARS-CoV-2, we were nevertheless subjected to a wide range of measures that constituted martial law and violated a wide range of our human and constitutional rights.
Notably, for example, James Roguski characterized the proposed changes to the International Health Regulations as amounting to ‘medical martial law’ and, out of a list of 100 reasons he compiled for opposing the proposed changes, he highlighted ten that were particularly offensive. These included the facts that the proposed changes would alter the status of the WHO from an advisory body to one that made proclamations that are binding on governments; remove from Article 3 a provision requiring ‘respect for dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people’; give the WHO the power to mandate medical examination, proof of prophylaxis, proof of vaccine, contact tracing, quarantine and treatment; institute an intrusive system of digital (or paper) health certificates; and greatly expand the WHO’s capacity to censor what they believe to be misinformation or disinformation, among many other onerous provisions. See ‘A World-Wide Call to Take Immediate and Massive Action’.
Given that these proposed changes to the draft Regulations violate long-standing laws, implemented following the Nuremberg trials of Nazi doctors – see ‘The Nuremberg Code, 1947’ – protecting people’s right to choose whether or not to seek the form of medical treatment of their choice, it is clear that the Elite interests that have exercised ever-deepening control of human society are intent on continuing to use the pharmaceutical and medical industries as key tools in their armory to kill off significant numbers of people and control those left alive.
As an aside, while Katherine Watt carefully details the ongoing militarization of public health since the 1960s and the use of US military ‘kill box’ planning and tactics in relation to Covid-19 – see ‘Kill Box: Multi-Service Tactics, Techniques and Procedures for Kill Box Planning and Employment’ – she attributes this approach to the ‘globalist central bankers’ realizing that pharmaceutical killing enabled a more credible ‘plausible deniability’ and more reliable basis for legal impunity, compared to some of its other measures – such as orchestrated wars, famines and financial crises – for killing off substantial human populations. See ‘Katherine Watt presentation’.
But, in fact, the Global Elite is well aware that there is no prospect of it being held accountable, legally or otherwise, just as its predecessor Elites have never been held accountable for their millennia-long rampage to kill off substantial human populations through wars, imperialism, colonialism, acts of genocide against indigenous and other peoples, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, precipitated famines, the functioning of capitalism, precipitation of depressions and other financial crises, as well as other measures. Why won’t the Global Elite be held accountable now? For the same reason Elites have never been held accountable, as illustrated above: A range of measures give it control over governments and legal systems, as well as control of the narrative (via ownership of the corporate media). See ‘Historical Analysis of the Global Elite: Ransacking the World Economy Until “You’ll Own Nothing.”’
And, just briefly on another initiative, Leo Hohmann has drawn attention to a new category added to the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases: a code specifically for those who are unvaxxed in relation to Covid-19 and another for those who have had inadequate booster shots. In short, your doctor will be required to advise your ‘disease’ if you have not been vaccinated.
As the past three years have demonstrated, after more than a century of harm and killing on a prodigious scale, with ‘medical error’ ranking third on the list of causes of death in the USA, the pharmaceutical-medical complex has been let loose to wreak havoc on humanity. And it is not over yet. See ‘Who’s Driving the Pandemic Express?’ and watch the plan for the next ‘pandemic’, already available: ‘Catastrophic Contagion’.
So if you think the threat to our health from the pharmaceutical-medical industry is over, the reality is that we have simply had the first, ‘warm-up’ round of what must be a very long fight.
We Are Being Smashed Technologically
While most people embrace any new technology without question, the most casual investigation soon reveals that most technologies being made now can be used to surveil and control us and/or to harm or kill us outright. And given that this is the explicit intention behind ‘smart’ technologies, the long-planned and incredibly detailed Elite program to kill off many of us and build a technocracy in which we are permanently enslaved is proceeding at a breathtaking pace.
If you doubt this, have a look at the extensive range of videos and ‘Transformation Maps’ accessible from the World Economic Forum’s ‘Strategic Intelligence’ website.
Among the critically important technologies that are making this transhuman enslavement possible, the deployment of 5G, introduction of Digital Identity and the shift to Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are vital and are being rapidly rolled out around the world as you read this article. As a matter of interest, were you consulted about any of this? Were you shown the extensive documentation of the dangers of the electromagnetic radiation from 5G? See ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’
Were you informed that your Digital ID will make your freedom and privacy a thing of the past, especially when your social credit score has been determined? See ‘Digitizing Your Identity is the Fast-Track to Slavery: How Can You Defend Your Freedom?’ And have you been told that, based on your social credit score, the CBDCs will be used to control where you can spend your ‘money’, on what it can be spent and how much you can spend at any one time in any one place?
Beyond this, have you been consulted about the facial recognition (which record and store a 3D representation of your face) and surveillance cameras being installed everywhere?
With some 20 billion cameras already installed, there will be plenty to keep an eye on you, wherever you are.
And did you know these cameras will be linked to artificial intelligence that will be keeping exact track of your movements. Of course, your phone, other smart household devices, along with the license plate readers and vehicle kill switches will make sure that you are kept within the 5 kilometres you are allowed to travel from your home, once you are technologically imprisoned in one of the Elite’s ‘smart’ (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) cities. With geofencing, that is simple.
In his thoughtful article on ‘smart’ cities, technocracy expert Patrick Wood briefly explains why smart cities are central to Elite plans: Because cities don’t have the physical resources – the land which makes it possible to farm, mine resources, harvest timber and so on – found in rural areas, the technocrats devised a strategy to force people from rural to urban settings and then imprison them there. See ‘Day 9: Technocracy And Smart Cities’.
And remember when you gave a voice recording as biometric evidence that it was your bank account? How safe was that, do you think? See
While much more could be written about the technological hell that is being built around us, a little time reading about the Metaverse is well worth the effort if you want a clearer understanding of the technocratic dystopia in which we might soon live. See ‘Virtual Beauty, Virtual Freedom, Virtual Love: Is the Matrix Metaverse Our Future?’
If you still doubt the technological threat we face, the good news is that key Elite agents in this context are happy to spell it out. For example, consider reading this original World Government Summit report written in 2018 with Elite projections for 2071: ‘Government in 2071: Guidebook. Preparing for new frontiers’.
At the latest World Government Summit just held in Dubai from 13-15 February 2023, Klaus Schwab was his usual, straightforward self: ‘Our life 10 years from now will be completely different, very much affected, and who masters [fourth industrial revolution] technologies, in some way, will be the masters of the world’. He also warns that failure to master these advanced technologies could mean that people like you and me ‘escape our power’. Watch ‘Klaus Schwab Calls For Global Government To “Master” AI Technologies’.
So unless you see yourself in the category of those who will master and control these technologies, and hence the rest of us, you will not be one of the ‘masters of the world’. You can read another critique of the recent conference, outlining more of the horrors being planned for us, here:
To summarize: Virtually all of us have been surrendering our personal data for decades and most of it is still stored on a government or corporate computer in a databank (referred to, misleadingly, as ‘the cloud’) where it can be accessed to determine your future social credit score (and everything that this score will, and will not, allow). Combined with the substantial range of technologies now available that are able to use this data in a multiplicity of ways, you will soon be imprisoned in a technocratic slave city, subject to the arbitrary rule of our ‘masters’, with escape virtually impossible.
In essence, we are endlessly being promised greater privacy, security and convenience. But all the evidence suggests that your data makes it very convenient for the Elite to invade your privacy and deny you security. And, of course, freedom simply won’t exist.
Why Fear Is Preventing Humanity from Resisting the Elite Program Strategically
As parents, teachers and religious figures, we are told we are responsible for socializing our children. In practice, as everyone unconsciously understands this, it means that we terrorize children into being submissively obedient.
How do we do this? We inflict an unending stream of violence – in three categories I have labeled ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – on the children in our lives. The sophistication of this program of terrorizing children is obscured from public view because the bulk of the everyday violence we adults inflict is, literally, ‘invisible’ or even ‘utterly invisible’; that is, the behaviour is not perceived or acknowledged as violent even though that is how it is perceived by children who are on the receiving end of it. Moreover, it was perceived by us as violent when we were children but we were terrorized into suppressing our awareness of this reality. For a full explanation, see
So while other supposedly psychological explanations of what has transpired historically (the causes of war, imperialism, colonialism, genocide, slavery and a host of other heinous elements of human history) or even during the past three years, are routinely promulgated – see, for example, Mattias Desmet’s theory of ‘mass formation’:
One needs courage to face the truth, and to respond to it powerfully, and courage is not an attribute that can be genuinely ascribed to many people.
It is difficult to investigate the truth when a childhood of being terrorized into obediently believing and doing what you are told stands in the way.
Hence, human history proceeds in a simple linear fashion: We use violence to terrorize children into submissive obedience while using more (particularly ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’) violence to force them to suppress awareness of that fact. The child grows up having unconsciously ‘learned’ to use violence to achieve many outcomes, but particularly how to use violence against their own children to make them obedient. So violence is endlessly recycled: wars and violence of all kinds – against ourselves, other people and nature in an infinite variety of ways and settings – repeat endlessly.
Because it is not the violence we end up being too terrorized to confront. It is our own fear. Again, see ‘Why Violence?’
So we are rapidly entering a world in which all of that terrorizing of children has left us with a world of submissively obedient adults who are doing what they are told by international agencies, their government and the corporate media: Get injected four, six, eight… times; remain ‘locked down’ or, soon, in your ‘smart’ city prison; submit your data for a digital ID and a social credit score; accept the surveillance and control technologies without question (although they will tell you it is for your convenience, privacy and security just as your parents told you obedience ‘was for your own good’ when you were a child), and accept the delusional symbols of ‘freedom’ represented by your ability to travel up to 5 kilometres from your home to do one of the approved activities and to wear a metaverse mask to delude yourself that you are in a place you would prefer to be.
So while most people will fearfully delude themselves that ‘the worst is behind us’, those who are paying attention know that this fight has barely begun and that the Elite has a 50-year timeframe to impose their full program upon us, even if the worst will happen by 2030.
This means that if we are to survive not only the current onslaught but also maintain our commitment and capacity to sustain our struggle for years and, possibly, decades, we need to ensure that we are paying careful attention to our own emotional health and that of our family members and the people in our community too.
A long-planned, vast range and parallel sequence of measures is being rapidly implemented to capture political, social, economic, medical and technological control of the human population. The intention is to kill off a substantial proportion of humanity and imprison those left alive as transhuman slaves in the Elite’s technocratic (surveillance and control) ‘smart’ cities, which will be policed by a range of current and emerging technologies.
And, as I have explained previously and above, because the Global Elite controls conventional political, economic, financial, technological, medical, educational, media and other important levers of society, the Elite has control of how events unfold while simultaneously giving it control of the narrative about what is taking place. As a result, the truth about the Elite plan is easily concealed. Consequently, effective resistance to this complex and sophisticated program requires a response based on a full understanding of the Elite’s deeper agenda and that is equally sophisticated.
This means that we cannot rely on any conventional channel, political, legal or otherwise.
It also means that those campaigns based on a disintegrated set of actions that lack strategic focus can achieve nothing, although they mislead those resisting into wasting their effort: a rapid path to disempowerment and disenchantment for those deceived by people deluding themselves that they understand strategy.
The only way we can defeat this long-planned, complex and multifaceted threat, is to mobilize sufficient people all over the world who are willing to nonviolently noncooperate with its foundational components, that is, those elements that make the entire Elite program possible.
So if you are interested in being strategic in your resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.
In addition and more simply, you can download the one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 23 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Turkish) with several more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘One-page Flyer’.
If this strategic resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).
And if you want to organize a mass mobilization, such as a rally, at least make sure that one or more of any team of organizers and/or speakers is responsible for inviting people to participate in this campaign and that some people at the event are designated to hand out the one-page flyer about the campaign.
If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.
In parallel with our resistance, we must create the political, economic and social structures that serve our needs, not those of the Elite. That is why long-standing efforts to encourage and support people to grow their own food – see ‘23 Reasons You Should Start a Garden in 2023’ – participate in local trading schemes (involving the exchange of knowledge, skills, services and products with or without a local medium of exchange) and develop structures for cooperation, governance, nonviolent defence and networking with other communities are so important.
Of course, indigenous peoples still have many of these capacities – lost to vast numbers of humans as civilization has expanded over the past five millennia – but many people are now engaged in renewed efforts to create local communities, such as ecovillages, and local trading schemes, including Community Exchange Systems. Obviously, we must initiate/expand these forms of individual and community engagement in city neighbourhoods too. And we must learn to defend them as well.
In addition, to reiterate, if you want to raise children who are powerfully able to investigate, analyze and act, you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.
Conclusion
We are currently living in the final phase of a 5,000 year effort to impose total control over the human population. There are many reasons why it has reached this point. Some key reasons are explained above. And despite the comfortable delusion that the most obvious and onerous restrictions that we have experienced over the past three years have temporarily receded, the fact remains that a vast range of political, economic, medical and technological measures are being implemented as you read these words and we have only just ended the first round of what must be, if we are to be successful, a protracted fight.
In essence, what we do between now and 2030 will determine the fate of humanity. If we can mobilize enough people to resist strategically, we will succeed. But there is little sign of that so far.
Understanding how power works in the world system as well as who, precisely, is driving what is happening, what they are doing, why, and how they are doing it are crucial prerequisites for developing an effective strategy to resist the current Elite program to kill off a substantial proportion of humanity, enslave those left alive in a technocratic prison, enclose the Commons forever and consolidate all wealth in Elite hands.
It is the failure to understand these crucial points that accounts for the ineffective ‘resistance’ that has characterized the past three years.
And this is complicated by the fact that fear makes most people unable to learn either from their own failed experience or to seriously investigate what is happening and how to resist it most effectively. So they fearfully repeat what is familiar, without even asking if it has worked in the past.
So each passing day we still witness fruitless attempts to convince one elite agent or another – a politician, a judge, a corporate media executive… – to take action that will turn the tide in our favour. But none of these individuals can help us.
The reality is simple: If we do not act strategically ourselves, and mobilize sufficient others to do so too, then human identity and freedom will be lost forever.
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?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
If you want a perfect example of how corrupt our system of government has become, just look at the massive cover up that is going on in East Palestine, Ohio right now. Federal, state and local officials are telling the public that everything is just fine when everything is obviously not just fine. On February 3rd, a 50 car Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine. 5 of the cars were carrying vinyl chloride which is an extremely hazardous substance that has been proven to cause several types of cancer. Unfortunately, with the approval of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a decision was made on February 6th to conduct a “controlled burn” of the wreckage. They knew that burning the vinyl chloride would create vast amounts of phosgene gas. By now, most of you already know that phosgene gas was actually used as a chemical weapon in World War I. The cloud of toxic chemicals that was created by the “controlled burn” was so large that it could literally be seen from space, and the long-term health problems that are being caused all over the east coast could stretch on for decades.
But Ohio Governor Mike Dewine doesn’t want to be blamed.
He is telling everyone from East Palestine to go back to their homes, and he insists that the water in the area is “safe to drink”…
Ohio Governor Mike Dewine: "The water is safe to drink. We never thought that the municipal water was contaminated. But out of abundance of caution our Ohio EPA took samples which were analyzed and they in fact came back and were shown to be safe." pic.twitter.com/sGJYZHrG8S
Visited a local creek in East Palestine today. These waterways are still very polluted. It’s time for Norfolk Southern to finish the cleanup. Check this video out: pic.twitter.com/4lsHBmrMJj
The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency has said he would allow his own children to drink and bathe in public water near the site of a train derailment and chemical spill in Ohio, so long as it had been tested and deemed safe by officials.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan visited the site of the East Palestine derailment on Thursday, seeking to reassure skeptical residents that the water is fit for drinking and the air is safe to breathe.
Nobody wants to see your children do that Michael Regan.
But we would love to see you down a tall, cool glass of tap water from a home right in the middle of East Palestine.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration is going to work relentlessly to downplay the severity of this crisis because they know that if they admitted the truth it would make them look bad to the voters.
And there is a presidential election coming up in less than two years.
The White House explained why it turned down Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s request for disaster relief this week in the aftermath of a derailment of a train hauling toxic chemicals.
A Biden administration official told Fox News Digital that it has provided extensive assistance to surrounding communities following the chemical release earlier this month in eastern Ohio. However, the official said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency that usually provides relief to communities hit by hurricanes and other natural disasters, isn’t best equipped to support the state’s current needs.
I was floored when I saw that.
We have just witnessed one of the greatest environmental disasters in the entire history of our country, and the Biden administration is not even willing to grant a request for disaster relief?
Ultimately, this is all about protecting the asses of the politicians and protecting the asses of the executives and shareholders of Norfolk Southern.
To the elite, it really doesn’t matter if the poor people of East Palestine all get cancer and die.
What matters is controlling the narrative, and up to this point the corporate media is doing a wonderful job of helping them do it.
“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984
As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground. As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam. I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late. It depressed me.
Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from The New York Times’ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.” It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing. Yet it is no laughing matter, for The N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war. So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality. This angered me.
The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad. “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.
On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue. When you support a U.S. war, as has always been TheTimes’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have existed since they are not mentioned.
But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.” No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.” U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”
Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn’t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission. The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times.(Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)
All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.”
Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Rumania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc. In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would respond forcefully.
This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.
The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident. The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:
Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
“Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”
This is expert opinion for dummies. A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address. The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.
It is a fight they will lose in the days to come. Russia was, is, and will triumph.
Everything in the editorial is disingenuous. Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys. Putin another Hitler. The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t). History is repeating itself.
Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1972 was appropriate. As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world. It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial. It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that The New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth. It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.
The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
In this age of ubiquitous surveillance, there are no private lives: everything is public.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices.
There are roughly one billion surveillance cameras worldwide and that number continues to grow, thanks to their wholehearted adoption by governments (especially law enforcement and military agencies), businesses, and individual consumers.
With every new surveillance device we welcome into our lives, the government gains yet another toehold into our private worlds.
Indeed, empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.
As law professor Avidan Y. Cover explains:
A key feature of the surveillance state is the cooperative relationship between the private sector and the government. The private sector’s role is vital to the surveillance both practically and legally. The private sector, of course, provides the infrastructure and tools for the surveillance… The private sector is also critical to the surveillance state’s legality. Under the third-party doctrine, the Fourth Amendment is not implicated when the government acquires information that people provide to corporations, because they voluntarily provide their information to another entity and assume the risk that the entity will disclose the information to the government. Therefore, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their calling data, or potentially even their emails. As a result, the government does not normally need a warrant to obtain information transmitted electronically. But the Fourth Amendment is not only a source of protection for individual privacy; it also limits government excess and abuse through challenges by the people. The third-party doctrine removes this vital and populist check on government overreach.
Critical to this end run around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures by government agents is a pass play that allows police to avoid public transparency requirements (open bids, public meetings, installation protocols) by having private companies and individuals do the upfront heavy lifting, leaving police to harvest the intel on the back end.
Stingray devices, facial recognition technology, body cameras, automated license plate readers, gunshot detection, predictive policing software, AI-enhanced video analytics, real-time crime centers, fusion centers: all of these technologies and surveillance programs rely on public-private partnerships that together create a sticky spiderweb from which there is no escape.
As the cost of these technologies becomes more affordable for the average consumer, an effort underwritten by the tech industry and encouraged by law enforcement agencies and local governing boards, which in turn benefit from access to surveillance they don’t need to include in their budgets, big cities, small towns, urban, suburban and rural communities alike are adding themselves to the surveillance state’s interconnected grid.
What this adds up to for government agencies (that is, FBI, NSA, DHS agents, etc., as well as local police) is a surveillance map that allows them to track someone’s movements over time and space, hopscotching from doorbell camera feeds and business security cameras to public cameras on utility poles, license plate readers, traffic cameras, drones, etc.
It has all but eliminated the notion of privacy and radically re-drawn the line of demarcation between our public and private selves.
Over the past 50 years, surveillance has brought about a series of revolutions in how governments govern and populations are policed to the detriment of us all. Cybersecurity expert Adam Scott Wandt has identified three such revolutions.
The first surveillance revolution came about as a result of government video cameras being installed in public areas. There were a reported 51 million surveillance cameras blanketing the United States in 2022. It’s estimated that Americans are caught on camera an average of 238 times every week (160 times per week while driving; 40 times per week at work; 24 times per week while out running errands and shopping; and 14 times per week through various other channels and activities). That doesn’t even touch on the coverage by surveillance drones, which remain a relatively covert part of police spying operations.
The second revolution occurred when law enforcement agencies started forging public-private partnerships with commercial establishments like banks and drug stores and parking lots in order to gain access to their live surveillance feeds. The use of automatic license plate readers (manufactured and distributed by the likes of Flock Safety), once deployed exclusively by police and now spreading to home owners associations and gated communities, extends the reach of the surveillance state that much further afield. It’s a win-win for police budgets and local legislatures when they can persuade businesses and residential communities to shoulder the costs of the equipment and share the footage, and they can conscript the citizenry to spy on each other through crowdsourced surveillance.
The third revolution was ushered in with the growing popularity of doorbell cameras such as Ring, Amazon’s video surveillance doorbell, and Google’s Nest Cam.
Amazon has been particularly aggressive in its pursuit of a relationship with police, enlisting them in its marketing efforts, and going so far as to hosting parties for police, providing free Ring doorbells and deep discounts, sharing “active camera” maps of Ring owners, allowing access to the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, which enables police to directly contact owners for access to their footage, and coaching police on how to obtain footage without a warrant.
Ring currently partners with upwards of 2,161 law enforcement agencies and 455 fire departments, and that number grows exponentially every year. As Vice reports, “Ring has also heavily pursued city discount programs and private alliances with neighborhood watch groups. When cities provide free or discounted Ring cameras, they sometimes create camera registries, and police sometimes order people to aim Ring cameras at their neighbors, or only give cameras to people surveilled by neighborhood watches.”
In November 2022, San Francisco police gained access to the live footage of privately owned internet cameras as opposed to merely being able to access recorded footage. No longer do police even have to request permission of homeowners for such access: increasingly, corporations have given police access to footage as part of their so-called criminal investigations with or without court orders.
We would suggest a fourth revolutionary shift to be the use of facial recognition software and artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics, clothing, behavior and car, thereby synthesizing the many strands of surveillance video footage into one cohesive narrative, which privacy advocates refer to as 360 degree surveillance.
Finally, Wandt sees autonomous cars equipped with cameras that record everything around them as yet another revolutionary expansion of surveillance to be tapped by police.
Yet in the present moment, it’s those public-private partnerships that signify a watershed moment in the transition from a police state to a surveillance state and sound a death knoll for our privacy rights. This fusion of government power and private power is also at the heart of the surveillance state’s growing stranglehold on the populace.
As always, these intrusions into our personal lives are justified in the name of national security and fighting crime. Yet while the price to be paid for having the government’s so-called protection is nothing less than our right to privacy, the guarantee of safety remains dubious, at best.
As a study on camera surveillance by researchers at City University of New York concluded, the presence of cameras were somewhat effective as a deterrent for crimes such as car burglaries and property theft, but they had no significant effect on violent crimes.
On the other hand, when you combine overcriminalization with wall-to-wall surveillance monitored by police in pursuit of crimes, the resulting suspect society inevitably gives way to a nation of criminals. In such a society, we are all guilty of some crime or other.
The predatory effect of these surveillance cameras has also yet to be fully addressed, but they are vulnerable to being hacked by third parties and abused by corporate and government employees.
After all, power corrupts. We’ve seen this abuse of power recur time and time again throughout history. For instance, as an in-depth investigative report by the Associated Press concludes, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. As the AP reports, federal officials have also been looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.
These cameras—and the public-private eyes peering at us through them—are re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear and, in the process, empowering “people to not just watch their neighborhood, but to organize as watchers,” creating not just digital neighborhood watches but digital gated communities.
Finally, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity. As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
No one knows, but it’s a pretty good bet that the surveillance state will be keeping a close watch on anyone seen as a threat to the government’s chokehold on power.
In recent weeks I’ve been seeing an interesting narrative fallacy being sold to the general public when it comes to the designs of globalists. The mainstream media and others are now openly suggesting that it’s actually okay to be opposed to certain aspects of groups like the World Economic Forum. They give you permission to be concerned, just don’t dare call it conspiracy.
This propaganda is a deviation from the abject denials we’re accustomed to hearing in the Liberty Movement for the past decade or more. We have all been confronted with the usual cognitive dissonance – The claims that globalist groups “just sit around talking about boring economic issues” and nothing they do has any bearing on global politics or your everyday life. In some cases we were even told that these groups of elites “don’t exist”.
Now, the media is admitting that yes, perhaps the globalists do have more than just a little influence over governments, social policies and economic outcomes. But, what the mainstream doesn’t like is the assertion that globalists have nefarious or authoritarian intentions. That’s just crazy tinfoil hat talk, right?
The reason for the narrative shift is obvious. Far too many people witnessed the true globalist agenda in action during the pandemic lockdowns and now they see the conspiracy for what it is. The globalists, in turn, seem to have been shocked to discover many millions of people in opposition to the mandates and the refusals to comply were clearly far greater than they expected. They are still trying to push their brand of covid fear, but the cat is out of the bag now.
They failed to get what they wanted in the west, which was a perpetual Chinese-style medical tyranny with vaccine passports as the norm. So, the globalist strategy has changed and they are seeking to adapt. They admit to a certain level of influence, but they pretend as if they are benevolent or indifferent.
The response to this lie is relatively straightforward. I could point out how Klaus Schwab of the WEF savored the thrill of the initial pandemic outbreak and declared that covid was the perfect “opportunity” to initiate what the WEF calls the “Great Reset.”
I could also point out that Klaus Schwab’s vision of the Reset, what he calls the “4th Industrial Revolution”, is a veritable nightmare world in which Artificial Intelligence runs everything, society is condensed into digital enclaves called “smart cities” and people are oppressed by carbon taxation. I could point out that the WEF actively supports the concept of the “Shared Economy” in which you will “own nothing, have no privacy” and you will supposedly be happy about it, but only because you won’t have any other choice.
What I really want to talk about, however, is the process by which the elites hope to achieve their dystopian epoch, as well as the globalist mindset which lends itself to the horrors of technocracy. The common naive assumption among skeptics of conspiracy is that the globalists are regular human beings with the same drives and limited desires as the rest of us. They might have some power, but world events are still random and certainly not controlled.
This is a fallacy. The globalists are not like us. They are not human. Or, I should say, they despise humanity and seek to do away with it. And, because of this, they have entirely different aspirations compared to the majority of us which include aspirations of dominance.
What we are dealing with here are not normal people with conscience, ethics or empathy. Their behavior is much more akin to higher functioning psychopaths and sociopaths rather than the everyday person on the street. We saw this on full display during the covid lockdowns and the vicious attempts to enforce vaccine passports; their actions betray their long game.
Take a look at comments by New Zealand’s prime minister and WEF attendee, Jacinda Ardern, from a year ago. She admits to the deliberate tactic of creating a two-tier class system within her own country based on vaccination status. There is no remorse or guilt in her demeanor, she is proud of taking such authoritarian actions despite numerous studies that prove the mandates are ineffective.
Beyond the covid response, though, I suggest people who deny globalist conspiracy take a deeper dive into the philosophical roots of organizations like the WEF. Their entire ideology can be summed up in a couple words – Futurism and godhood.
Futurism is an ideological movement which believes that all “new” innovations, social or technological, should supplant the previous existing systems for the sake of progress. They believe that all old ways of thinking, including notions of principles, heritage, religious belief systems, codes of conduct, etc. are crutches holding humanity back from greatness.
But what is the greatness the futurists seek? As mentioned above, they want godhood. An era in which the natural world and human will is enslaved by the hands of a select few. Case in point – The following presentation from 2018 by WEF “guru” Yuval Harari on the future of humanity as the globalists see it:
Harari’s conclusions are rooted in elitist biases and ignore numerous psychological and social realities, but we can set those aside for a moment and examine his basic premise that humanity as we know it will no longer exist in the next century because of “digital evolution” and “human hacking.”
The foundation of the WEF vision is built on the idea that data is the new Holy Grail, the new conquest. This is something I have written about extensively in the past (check out my article ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Secular Look At The Digital Antichrist’) but it is good to see it expressed with such arrogance by someone like Harari because it is undeniable evidence – The globalists think they are going to build a completely centralized economy and society based on human data rather than production. In other words, YOU become the product. The average citizen, your thoughts and your behaviors, become the stock in trade.
Globalists also believe that data is most valuable because it can be exploited to control people’s behaviors, to hack the body and mind in order to create human puppets, or create super-beings. They dream of becoming little gods with omnipotent knowledge. Yuval even proudly proclaims that intelligent design will no longer be the realm of God in heaven, but of the new digitized man.
While Harari pays lip service to “democracy” vs “digital dictatorship”, he goes on to assert that centralization may become the defacto system of governance. He says this not because he fears dictatorship, but because that has always been the WEF’s intent. The globalist argues that governments cannot be trusted to hold a monopoly on the digital wellspring and that someone needs to step in to regulate data; but “who would do this?”, he asks.
He already knows the answer. The UN, a globalist edifice, has consistently said it should be the governing body that takes control of AI and data regulation through UNESCO. That is to say, Harari is playing coy, he knows that the people who will step in to control the data are people just like him.
At no point in Harari’s speech does he suggest that that any of these developments should be obstructed or stopped. At no point does he offer the idea that the digitization of humanity is wrong and that there are other better ways of living. He actually mocks the concept of “going back” to old ways; only the future and the Tabula Rasa (blank slate) hold promise for the globalists, everything else is an impediment to their designs.
But here’s the thing, what the globalists are trying to accomplish is a fantasy. People are not algorithms, despite how much Harari would like them to be. People have habits, yes, but they are also unpredictable and are prone to sudden awakenings and epiphanies in the moment of crisis.
Psychopaths tend to be robotic people, acting impulsively but also very predictably. They lack imagination, intuition and foresight, and so it’s not surprising that organizations of psychopaths like the WEF would place such an obsessive value on AI, algorithms and a cold technocratic evolution. They don’t view their data Shangri-La as humanity’s future; they see it as THEIR future – The future of the non-humans, or the anti-humans as it were.
Who will produce all the goods, services and necessities required in this brave new world? Well, all of us peons, of course. Sure, the globalists will offer grand promises of a robot driven production economy in which people no longer need to engage in menial labor, but this will be another lie. They’ll still need people to plant the crops, maintain infrastructure, take care of manufacturing, do their fighting for them, etc., they’ll just need less of us.
At bottom, an economy built on data is an economy dependent on illusion.
Data is vaporous and oftentimes meaningless because it is subject to the biases of the interpreter. Algorithms can also be programmed to the biases of the engineers. There is nothing inherently objective about data – it is all dependent on the intentions of the people analyzing it.
For example, to use Harari’s anecdote of an algorithm that “knows you are gay” before you do; any twisted group of people could simply write code for an algorithm that tells the majority of easily manipulated kids that they are gay, even when they are not. And, if you are gullible enough to believe the algorithm is infallible, then you could be led to believe that numerous falsehoods are true and be convinced to behave against your nature. You have allowed a biased digital phantom to dictate your identity, and have made yourself “hackable.”
In the meantime, the elitists entertain delusions of surpassing their mortal limitations by “hacking” the human body, as well as reading the minds of the masses and predicting the future based on data trends. This is an obsession which ignores the unpredictable wages of the human soul, that very element of conscience and of imagination which psychopaths lack. It’s something that cannot be hacked.
The legitimacy of the data based system and the hacking of humanity that the WEF aspires to is less important than what the masses can be convinced of. If the average person can be persuaded to implant their cell phone in their skull in the near future, then yes, humanity might become hackable in a rudimentary way.
The algorithms then supplant conscience, empathy and principles. And, without these things all morality becomes relative by default. Evil becomes good, and good becomes evil.
By the same token, if humanity can be persuaded to set down their cell phones and live a less tech focused life, then the digital empire of the globalists comes crashing down quite easily. There is no system the elites can impose that would make their digital consciousness a reality without the consent of the public at large.
Without a vast global framework in which people willingly embrace the algorithms rather than their own experience and intuitions, the globalist religion of total centralization dies. The first step is to accept that the conspiracy does indeed exist. The second step is to accept that the conspiracy is malicious and destructive. The third step is to refuse to comply, by whatever means necessary.
Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.
He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.
And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.
Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time
The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell. Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state. They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.
Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’
Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too. He was concerned about the Sovietisation of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties. He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.
Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviours and attitudes. This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it, ‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.
Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.
Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing. He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927. And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinised left.
The hostility was mutual. Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travellers continue to display towards Orwell today.
The importance of words
Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. Just think, for example, of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government – a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia (1938)).
Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview. Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation. As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:
‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’
As Orwell wrote elsewhere, ‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’
This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.
But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control. Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak. Newspeak is more than mere censorship. It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible. It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thoughtcrime’).
As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:
‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’
The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated. In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police. There is little of that in our societies today – people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.
However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thoughtcrime. And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realised in an openly dictatorial manner. No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.
The intellectual turn against freedom
But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.
Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organisation, English PEN. Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticise Soviet Russia or wartime censorship. Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.
‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.
Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.
An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is ‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.
These are insights which have stood the test of time. Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus. They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.
And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged. This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age. Free speech does not support privilege. We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC. But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.
Orwell’s legacy
Orwell is everywhere today. He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture. But his value and importance to us lies in his defence of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.
His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.
Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry. Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language’ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’. He said: ‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’
Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:
‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’
Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.
After the Crash 