Tag Archives: Gilets Jaunes

France Neoliberal Macron: Vanguard of a Covid Global Corporate Dictatorship?

Posted on by
2

By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite: under Macron’s pass sanitaire guillotine?

For the few of us who are students of history, and its aficionado travelers, meaning those who muse and wonder, at times, about how significant figures of the past would view our often dire predicament, it is rather obvious that, for example, the founding fathers of the French Revolution such as Danton, Mirabeau, St Just, and Robespierre would be shocked and angry by what has recently happened to their Republic. Even France’s last great statesman General de Gaulle, if alive today, would have likely been deeply enraged by the state of affairs in a country he loved and fought for with his heart and soul.

In the era of President Emmanuel Macron, who is merely a cynical actor, figurehead, and France’s public relation person in chief passing for a statesman, but who truly is a loyal servant of global corporatism, our revolution’s founders, as well as the subsequent republics’ principles, like the one of the Fifth Republic of de Gaulle, have been insulted, slapped in the face, and assaulted by some sort of insidious and limp dictatorship, under the cover of a health crisis. A complex authoritarian strategy using the pretense of shielding French citizens, often against their will, in this new lucrative conceptual war.

This war on a virus is even more advantageous than the previous conceptual one: the war on terror. In General Macron’s war, syringes are the weapons delivery system of choice, needles like billions of little worker bees at the ready to jab you for an invitation to control freedom, and a moderate slice of happiness: the joy once you have obtained the French COVID pass Sanitaire to go to museums, movie theaters, inside restaurants, and avoid wearing masks outdoor.

French citizens should be aware that the very motto of our dear Republic, Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite is under the assault of king Ubu Macron and could, without a strong popular resistance, be decapitated by the cold blade of Macron’s virtual guillotine. In a form of dictatorial grab of power for the benefit of big biotech and big pharmaceutical companies. Macron’s pernicious pass sanitaire, just approved by France Assemblee Nationale, is a power grab by global corporate imperialism. Of course, all of it done with a wink, a tan and a smile! All of it done for the greater good of ungrateful “Gaullois refractaire” French citizens, in the continuity of the pesky Gilets Jaunes. Science lover poseur Macron, an enlightened modern day Julius Cesar, is bent on defeating obscurantism armed only with syringes to deliver his brand of salvation thru vaccines. Those who have been in the forefront of the street protest in France to resist this hybrid neoliberal dictatorship personified by Macron are the still active Gilets Jaunes.

From war on terror to war on virus: maximum profit for big tech & pharma

Forget about the good old so-called war-on-terror, fading slightly since its start in September 2001 but still a nice little threat in the background, big enough to keep the military-industrial complex flush with cash. A new conceptual global war was needed: the global war on COVID virus came at the right time. This one is even more promising, as it potentially concern the entire world population or 7.5 billion people. The COVID war has also been an easy sell for the general population, as it can be viewed as a war of necessity with humans “all in it together.” It can also provide an astronomical stream of revenue by making vaccination mandatory. In terms of profit from pandemics, vaccine companies have not been the only beneficiaries of this COVID gold rush.

Big tech companies have racked up billions of dollars at a furious pace since March 2020 and the various restrictive measures of lock-downs and curfews. The likes of Amazon, Zoom and streaming media have handsomely benefited from the imposed partial move to a virtual world. As matter of fact, worldwide stock markets have become junkies to this trend: addicted to the war on COVID benefits.

Needless to say, this vast stream of income is also potentially endless because of the virus mutation into different variants. One loses track of this Greek alphabet catalogue. It was Alpha first or the English variant, then Beta or the Brazilian one, more contagious than the rhythm of Samba, and now it is the Delta variant originally called Indian mutation. As the virus mutates, as they all do, it could potentially take us all the way to Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. The side effect of the Delta variant’s rapid spread has been to allow Macron, and soon many others, head-of-states or figureheads, to tighten back the screw on fundamental liberties.

Rule by decree, states of emergency, arbitrary measures, absurd,or not, are a form of abuse of power that neoliberals like Macron are really enjoying. It is an insidious form of dictatorship under a benevolent disguise of the enlightened rulers forcing their citizenry’s behavior. In France a law is about to pass, in parliament, to make vaccine for healthcare workers across board mandatory. If they do not comply by September 15, 2021, they will be fired. In the case of France, this should be viewed as a prelude to mandatory vaccination for the entire population.

Killing personal freedom and liberties

In France, government controlled mainstream media, critiques rightly calling the Macron administration’s sweeping COVID policies a “dictature sanitaire” or healthcare dictatorship have been labeled conspiracy theorists. This is pure disinformation, as what defines a dictatorship, semantically speaking, is a government, elected or not, forcing policies on its citizens. It is done under the premise that it is an action for the benefit of the common good, but nonetheless it is the exercise of authoritarian power on a population.

Through the COVID-19 pandemics, governments have learned that, if fear and paranoia were prevalent enough, and they run a lot of polls in their respective population, any dictatorial measures could be implemented without risking much social turmoil. A great majority of people did, and would likely comply again to other lock-downs, wearing masks outdoors, curfews, but without much protest. Now the final frontier is mandatory vaccination from 12 years-old on, which will give you some sort of health passport. If approved. this pass would give people the right to live almost free. This new type of passport, given to you as a reward to your obedience, will give you access to a mythical promised land often called by Macron “the return of the happy days!”

COVID fear mongering: subterfuge to hide climate collapse threat

There is no doubt, for any rational minds, that contesting the reality of the COVID pandemic is pure conspiracy theory. More than that, it is full blown lunacy! There are two radical anti-vaxers thought processes here: firstly, deny the existence of the pandemic entirely; secondly, which might be even more disturbing, an unshakable belief that the virus was man made, and released on purpose by the like of Fauci, Bill Gates, and a hand full of mad scientists. And, of course, here’s the icing on the cake: they’re all acting on behalf of a cabal of globalist pedophiles. These are the kinds of conspiracy theories that currently get you banned on social media.

As much as they are colorfully insane, this type of COVID-19 conspiracy theory denials are not, in essence, any worse than climate change crisis denial. The difference being that your average run of the mill climate change denier won’t get banned on social media. The nature of the capitalist global corporatism system, where neoliberals like Macron are leading figures, is not to create a crisis from scratch, which is either an impossible or very challenging task, but instead to take advantage of crisis either to further general policy goals, or in most cases benefit punctually from them like an opportunistic predator. This predatory aspect is after all the very nature of capitalism.

Besides the numerous advantages that Macron, his political colleagues and their patrons from the billionaire class have found in the COVID crisis, as explained above, not only huge financial gains for pharmaceutical companies, but also for tech companies involved in this sort of forced quantum leap to the virtual world. In brief, this has been a chance to brutally shock the global economy. Not to make it more equal or sustainable, but quite exactly the opposite: COVID has been an opportunity to concentrate wealth even more in fewer hands with a net result of more social inequality.

Because in today’s press one story is always used to hide another, the pandemic has been also a blessed opportunity to hide, not the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room, but instead the 10,000-ton Godzilla wrecking the planet: Godzilla, in this case, being the growing certainty of an upcoming global climate collapse.

Of the “Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite” motto of the French revolution, all the great values have been trampled and gutted. With lock-downs, curfews, mandatory masks and vaccine, Liberte is now gone. In the era of Macron, a former investment banker, nobody can talk about Egalite in a country which is on its way to become almost as unequal as the United States; and last but not least, how could anyone see any Fraternite left? The community sense of brotherhood died quite sometime ago in France. There is no brotherhood left, no deep sense of connection within the nation, we are not “all in this together”.

In reality, there is only all of us, common men and women worldwide, against the billionaire class that controls the levers of the global corporate imperialist machines, with their political servant facilitators acting as heads of state. The specific names within the political class are of little significance, since they represent the identical interests. It’s a bit like the names given to the COVID variants. The Delta variant, portrayed as the top threat right now, started more modestly as India’s mutation. Who knows, perhaps in some billionaire class circles, Emmanuel Macron is just called factor X, LV or MANU.

Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia Merger: Global Empire of Dystopia?

Posted on by
Reply

By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

The nature of reality in times of universal confusion

The world and our interpretation of it are often at best an idea and, at worse, a figment of our imagination. In our full-blown Orwellian construct, the truths of some are the fake news of others. Invisible forces and undisclosed interests rule the world and its so-called leaders, who are mostly actor-puppets directed from scripted narratives. They largely live in an alternate universe where, if you repeat outlandish lies often and loudly enough, the disinformation becomes the unquestionable reality for countless people. Reality has become stranger than fiction because the conflicting narratives about what is supposed to be real are, by and large, fictional. They are cleverly crafted propaganda that manipulate by maximizing confusion. The masters of this craft have gutted familiar words of all meaning.

For example, at the heart of Oceania, the white-orange clown emperor, obsessed with walls to protect his subjects from southern brown invaders, told his adoring patrons and sycophants, “we renew our resolve that Oceania shall never be socialist!” The aging patricians gathered for the obligatory annual feast gave him a standing ovation, and loudly chanted “Oceania, Oceania, Oceania!…” This enthusiastic chanting from Oceania’s Patricians, except for the more dignified Supreme Elders and Commanders of the Praetorian Guard, repeated itself on cue at least four of five times, to celebrate the great universal superiority of the invincible mighty empire of the free and the brave! The egotistical emperor’s writers must have laughed as he served up their outstanding fictions to the empire’s docile subjects!

Schopenhauer’s relevant pessimism

In his essential book, The World as Will and Idea, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) contested the rationalist notion that reason alone gave humans the universal key to an infinitely complex, and often irrational, reality. He took the assessments Immanuel Kant had made in his Critique of Pure Reason a step further by adding the fundamental notion of sufficient reason. This was a less absolute concept of the relation of cause to effect, which he anchored in what he deemed to be four categories of human knowledge: science, morality, logic, and metaphysics. Schopenhauer’s work was in part a reaction to the overly optimistic vision of the rationalists, with Rene Descartes in the lead.

In his inherent pessimism, Schopenhauer turned out to be more realistic about the limitations of humans to grasp, not only the full elusive scope of reality, but also their own frailty and insignificance as a self. In these gloomy times of uncertainty and of a general dumbing-down effect in our impoverished global culture, Schopenhauer’s work helps to explain why most aspects of our existence, including our relationship with nature, are beyond most people’s comprehension. For most humans, the absolute reality is an extremely fragmented knowledge filtered through the prism of their perceptions.

Global empire of dystopia?

In other words, whether one lives in Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia, the definitions of reality and information have been tailored in these different places to different needs, but almost all the narratives fulfill opaque agendas whose main objectives are to keep people on edge and in despair. The brainwashing from most media makes nearly everybody thoroughly dazed and confused. The goal is to break the will of populations and beat their souls into submission. For this to work, dissent must be eradicated. Let’s face it, if we stay on course, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia could soon merge into the global Empire of Dystopia where 2+2=5. For example, Oceania claims that, with its satellite-vassals, the empire defeated ISIS, which it had worked to create, although it is the leader of sovereign Syria (with the help of Eurasia and the former empire of Persia) who defeated both Oceania and ISIS after seven years of war.

From one manufactured crisis to another, always in what my esteemed colleague Dady Chery calls “other people’s countries,” the mad circus goes on and on like a merry-go-round. And it works, so long as the big lies are salted with a little truth for seasoning. As world citizens, we are tasked with dismantling this monstrous global Orwellian Empire of many faces that is tightening its grip everywhere.

Empires of the past and present, which are in flux, have always extended their powers through satellite provinces and spheres of influence. Empires dislike dissent from within, as well as nearby states that are eager to stay independent and sovereign. During the simpler times of the Cold War when the United States and USSR tried to divide the world in two, some independently minded head of states, such as Tito, Nasser and Castro, refused to submit to this bipolarity and initiated the nonaligned movement. This notion must be urgently revisited, for the sake of the little that is left of smaller nations’ sovereignty.

Of course, Orwell’s cartography of the three entities of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia no longer reflects the geopolitical reality, but his principle of mass indoctrination is at play on a global scale. The narratives appear to be in conflict, but the nitty-gritty mechanics below the radar are similar. Under the surface, and despite the veneers of ideological or religious clashes, a global scheme of wealth and power concentration has been unleashed. Worldwide, the super-rich, and the corporate entities they control, are getting richer while the middle-class is vanishing and the poor are becoming enslaved. Merciless capitalism is the true god of the Orwellian Empire’s three subdivisions. Capitalism demands daily sacrifices of sweat, tears and blood. The system’s blatant contradictions do not trouble its ruling class. On one hand, pseudo nationalist-populists are the servants of a supra-national corporatism, and on the other, the so-called liberals and neoliberals can, on short notice, adopt the worst methods of authoritarian repression.

Two examples of this are unfolding that serve as valuable case studies. First, there is Oceania’s effort to grab a critical piece of what it views as its birthright continent. This is, of course, Venezuela. Secondly, in La Macronie, an eastern asset of Oceania that used to be an empire in its own right, there is the intent to create an authoritarian neoliberal regime with a metrosexual humanitarian touch, to curtail widespread popular protests.

Venezuela: Revolution is imperialism

Oceania has in its crosshair the sovereign state of Venezuela, founded by Simon Bolivar. All empires have precepts or doctrines that conveniently serve to expand their territories and influence by various means, including military invasions, organization of coups and, lately, severe economic sanctions to engineer failed states that become ripe for orchestrated revolutions. The nervous system of Oceania, in Washington DC, views Venezuela as a natural appendage, based on one of the oldest formative tenets of the empire: the Monroe Doctrine, concocted in 1823. It came about using the seemingly altruistic but false notion that the newly independent countries of Central and South America had to be protected from their old colonial masters. In time, it became a claim to all the Americas as the United States’ domain and backyard.

To topple the legitimately elected Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, whom Washington does not like, the empire is again trying to manufacture a revolution led by someone it handpicked and groomed. The name of the man who currently aspires to be Oceania’s Governor in Venezuela hardly matters. Through the years, the strategy of fake revolution following economic sanctions has had mixed results: it failed in Iran in 2009; it worked against Qaddafi in Libya, combined with a small military intervention; it partially worked in Ukraine until Eurasia stepped in; it failed entirely in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad remains in power. With Venezuela’s military still firmly on his side, this strategy is unlikely to work with the heir of Hugo Chavez.

So far the aggression against Venezuela has served as a thorough head count of Oceania’s vassals and enemies. In the Americas, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay have defied the with-or-against-us litmus test. The rest, including Canada, have aligned themselves with the imperial diktat that Maduro must go. It is the same with most of the European imperial colonies of Oceania, except for Italy and Greece. This is a clear demonstration that the leaders of most states in the European Union lack a foreign policy independent from Oceania and operate largely as governors for Oceania rather than heads of state.

Indeed, according to Mr. Temir Porras, who has worked as Nicolas Maduro’s chief-of-staff and a foreign-policy advisor to Hugo Chavez, the position of most EU countries in supporting Guaido reeks of “neocolonialist interference.” The eight-day “ultimatum to hold presidential elections before recognizing Juan Guaido is a schizophrenic and incomprehensible position.” Porras elaborates that it is “absurd to say that Juan Guaido represents a consensus with Maduro’s opposition in Venezuela,” and that Guaido from the far-right populist party, Voluntad Popular, was almost unknown in Venezuela two weeks ago.

On the opposite side, to go back to Orwell’s cartography lexicon, those that claim so far that “Maduro must stay,” besides the four Latin American countries named above, involve an interesting alliance of Eurasia, Eastasia, and the former Persian and Ottoman empires.

Gilets Jaunes: rays of sunshine on a bleak horizon

Meanwhile, in La Macronie, a beautiful land with a soil rich in its bounty of bread, wine and revolution, a real revolution is brewing from the streets. A little light flickers at the end of the tunnel of our gloomy path, it is like countless little rays of sunshine that try to brighten our dark days, it is the Gilets Jaunes movement. The little governor for Oceania, an arrogant and imperious man who might have liked to be king in a parallel universe, is trying to stop the flow of a tempestuous Gilets Jaunes river with rubber-bullet guns, riot-police shields, and repressive legislation. The disparity between his actions and his almost humanitarian discourse have lost him all credibility. In La Macronie, the governor, by curtailing the freedom to protest and freedom of the press, is testing a brand new form of oppression. It is a young elegant authoritarian regime, with a smile, that caters to the global elite of murderous capitalism. This is an important test, and many worldwide are counting on the Gilets Jaunes to prevail.

 

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photographs one, five, six, seven and eight from the archives of Jakob Reimann; two from the archive of Wackystuff; three from the archive of Philip Pacemaker; four by Daryn Moffitt; nine by Nicholas J. Potter; ten and eleven by Joka Madruga; and fourteen by Urban Nauth.