Number 87
- For a digital dismantling!
- The globalist wing of anti-globalism
- Saint-Imier 2023: anarchy sabotaged
- Emma Goldman: an organic radical inspiration
- Acorninfo
A leading French mathematics professor has called for all research on AI to be halted and for the digital world to be dismantled.
Professor Romain Couillet describes his remarkable personal turn-around, at the age of 40, in an interview in the September 2023 issue of the real-green real-life newspaper La Décroissance.
The professor of applied mathematics, specialising in artificial intelligence, has won academic awards for this work on “sustainable AI” and a few years ago started work at the University of Grenoble Alpes.
His research aimed at better understanding and improving AI and to find ways of reducing its energy consumption.
Prof Couillet says: “The day that I got I my permanent post at Grenoble, where my research project was on the point of being launched, I was struck by a realisation: I must not do this.
“Since then I have stopped everything. I simply can no longer do mathematical research. When I go to listen to presentations by mathematical colleagues, it doesn’t interest me any more.
“In fact, I don’t go to them now, because there’s no point. For me, things are quite simple: we have to stop this research and set about dismantling everything digital.
“Who isn’t aware of the environmental disaster, of the insane ravaging of nature carried out by industry and research?
“The local STMicroelectronics factory, our famous jewel-in-the-crown of microchip production, consumes as much water every year as a town of 100,000 people, or the equivalent of 16 times the [highly controversial] Sainte-Soline mega-pond.
“And that’s not to mention the electricity bill, the tons of pollutants dumped into the Isère river or the social damage from the use of these chips!
“Beyond the environment, I have started to understand the extreme dependence, the dumbing-down, the destruction of freedom brought about by the techno-science in which I was a cog.
“When these beliefs became intuitive and even ‘visceral’, when they came from my guts, as they say, I simply couldn’t carry on. It’s over, there’s no more going back, this research has to stop.
“I still teach maths and IT. On the research side, my programme these days is what I call ‘digital dismantling’.
“I am opening up to a lot more subjects than just maths: history, psychology, techno-criticism…
“I am very fortunate, for the moment, to be protected by those directly above me in the hierarchy, particularly at my lab, which supports me.
“In fact, lots of researchers at Grenoble know it’s no longer possible to carry on like this. Some of them are also active in dissident movements, but keep their heads down at work.
“The question is for how long. Eventually, we have to exit the system. I think that sooner or later I can hardly do otherwise.
“But it’s difficult to make that move when I am lucky enough to have such freedom to act within the system itself…
“My knowledge is increasing as I abandon my narrow field of expertise and that makes me more useful to society than before.
“This world is beautiful and we should be grateful for it, develop our capacity for empathy and return as far as we can to a direct relationship with nature and against artificial and technological development.
“This return to our roots leads to determined political involvement. I see that with my students: when profound emotions are stirred, when fundamental questions are asked, then major upheaval becomes possible.
“This makes me think that all is perhaps not yet lost…”
2. The globalist wing of anti-globalism
You probably think it impossible for someone calling for revolution against the WEF and its Great Reset to simultaneously believe in a “sustainable” world state.
So did we, until we came across, on the social media formerly known as Twitter, a character by the name of Michael Breton.
He was posting enthusiastically about a coming “Global Revolution” and what he called “the implementation of the new global narrative”.
This latter phrase rather took us aback. “Implementation” is the language of authoritarian bureaucracy rather than of empowerment from below, from the people, where policies evolve through discussion.
And “global narrative” sounded very much like the agenda being pursued by Klaus Schwab, who has even written a book called The Great Narrative.
We asked Breton: “Are you serious? That sounds less like a revolution than the continuation of the familiar criminocracy! Where are you coming from, exactly?”
He didn’t give a straight reply and instead wanted to know what our own “action plan” was.
We replied that it was basically the opposite of his call for “the implementation of the new global narrative”.
“It comes from below. It means we run our own lives, in our communities, without any top-down central control”.
Since Breton was unwilling either to retract or explain his strange statement, we had a quick look at his background.
We found that he runs something called Nexus Global Movement, which he is proud to have founded on 02/02/2020, even producing a graphic to celebrate the number.
On its website, Breton’s movement specifically calls for “One World Government”!
The first of four pillars for his “global framework” is misleadingly called “The Gaia Principle” – nothing to with Mother Earth, but an acronym for “Guaranteed Annual Income for All” – ie social credit/universal basic income.
The second pillar is a “sharing” one in which we “re-imagine a world that is sustainable”, by diverting funds from rich countries to poorer ones for “the creation of infrastructure”.
A touch of the BRICS.
The third pillar, “The 25 Rule”, proposes top-down global control of everyone’s earnings by the world state.
The fourth pillar “War and Peace”, proposes to abolish war.
Great! But how?
“Nexus will maintain a sizeable military presence all over the world to ensure all sides lay down their arms”.
Global military occupation by a world-state army!
Together with Breton’s talk of “meaningful transition” and “the implementation of the new global narrative”, all this means that his “revolution” is not for us.
Nor for most of our readers, we imagine!
3. Saint-Imier 2023: anarchy sabotaged
The capture of the anarchist movement by pro-system imposters has long been a theme explored by this site, as well as by our comrades at Nevermore and The Stirrer.
So we were, in equal measure, intrigued and appalled to read accounts from comrades who had attended a big supposedly-anarchist event in Switzerland this summer.
A report from Fédération Anarchiste (FA) activists, for instance, states: “It is not our place to give a detailed account of the extremely violent events that took place over three days, which were marked by several attacks on the press table: the overturning of the table by hooded assailants, the theft of books, the throwing of coffee on the books on display, constant insults, threats and harassment, the facial injury of an activist from the Fédération anarchiste, and the burning of Hamid Zanaz’s books.
“And finally, on the last day, a demonstration was organised against the FA, with a banner reading ‘racism kills’”!
Greater detail is provided by two representatives of the French group PMO.
They explain that the event was held at Saint-Imier because it was here in 1872 that anarchists, including Mikhael Bakunin, Errico Malatesta and Elisé Reclus, gathered to form a new international resistance movement after splitting from the bureauratic pro-state socialists led by Karl Marx.
In 2023, Saint-Imier hosted 5,000 people identifying as anarchists, from Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, the USA, Turkey, Belarus, Iran, Poland, Ukraine, Russia and no doubt elsewhere.
The festival, featuring a diversity of workshops and activities, was co-ordinated by the local group of the International Anarchist Federation.
While there was no official top-down organising, explain authors Tomjo and Mitou, any discussion deemed problematic was prevented from taking place by an invisible dominant tendency.
“This is how, for example, suspicions of links to ‘conspiracy theory’ prevented all discussion of the authoritarian response to an authoritarian virus – lockdowns, travel permits, QR codes, fines, vaccine passports, vaccine mandates, sackings etc – at this anti-authoritarian gathering”.
They report that those attending mainly consisted of three types: bearded anarchists, punks with dogs and those terming themselves “queers”, who were by far the largest group.
These queers are individuals – sometimes called postmodernist, intersectionalist, or woke – who have spurned old-fashioned notions of fighting the capitalist system in favour of struggling for the rights of minorities within that system.
They are fans of technological “progress” and, explain the authors, engage in a battle against “essentialism” that often serves as cover for the destruction of both language and thought.
These activists had their own queer campsite, queer lunches and queer parties and were subdivided into racial and biological sub-groups, such as “racialised” queers, trans, or “fat and queer”.
There was also a workshop at which people in “sexual transition” could learn how to inject themselves with hormones.
The gathering was patrolled by persons in fluorescent pink jackets belonging to “Team Care”, operating out of the “Safer Space”.
They were on the look-out for instances of what they described as “discomfort, conflict, harrassment or discrimination, whether sexist, transphobic, racist, exoticising, ableist, fatphobic, classist or any other act reproducing systemic discrimination”.
Comment Tomjo and Mitou: “The atmosphere at Saint-Imier is more about drawing up proscription lists and monitoring words and behaviour than about allowing the free expression of ideas and desires”.
As one example they cite the appearance on the walls of the slogan/order: “White hippies, cut your dreads off”.
For today’s terminally woke, the hairstyle favoured by anarchist “crusties” everywhere amounts to the serious crime of “cultural appropration”.
Team Care at Saint-Imier also rushed into action when a “trans woman” complained of a micro-aggression when someone reminded him that he was actually a man.
But, strangely enough, they didn’t seem too bothered when “queer” pseudo-anarchists verbally and physically attacked actual anarchists for not having the same opinions as them.
The trouble started on the first day, when someone noticed that the Groupe Kropotkine of the Fédération anarchiste, from Laon dans l’Aisne in France, was selling a book by René Berthier on the question of Muslim women wearing veils.
Woke thinking apparently considers that, simply because Berthier is a “white cisgendered male”, he has no right to express an opinion on the issue.
In an escalating series of events, books were stolen and burned, the stall overturned, and FA members physically attacked.
In their own report of the incident, the woke activists boast of having taken “direct action” against the books.
Retort Tomjo and Mitou: “As if ‘direct action’ was, per se, virtuous and just… While anarchist direct action targets the representatives and structures of power, the queers of Saint-Imier (and elsewhere) attack people without power.
“Are these queers anarchists? Even young anarchists? Today’s anarchists? Or are they rather anti-anarchists, the ultimate offspring of consumer society, whose personal whims have to become the law for everyone?
“This isn’t about youth, but about idiocy – and that has no age. Please don’t confuse the two. Just between us, there is no ‘generational conflict’. Perhaps a class conflict – we are not children of the technocracy and we don’t defend its interests – but most assuredly a political conflict.
“If the queers are offended by criticism of monotheistic religions, by people refusing to obey their injunctions on moral issues and by any denounciation of their totalitarian ways, at anarchist gatherings… then they’ve turned up at the wrong campsite.
“Or maybe it’s that they knowingly came as saboteurs, so as to get their hands on what little remains of anarchy and to subvert or destroy it, as they have done with other places and groups”.
Citing a 2022 article by academic Laure Murat, they discuss the way that these woke-interectional-postmodern queers systematically “cancel” left-wing intellectuals, feminists, anarchists and environmentalists who have the cheek to contradict them and to criticise the latest (bio)technological developments in eugenics, transhumanism and human reproduction.
They ask: “How can we thus not regard queers as agents (objective or subjective, little matter) of state and industry?”
4. Emma Goldman: an organic radical inspiration
The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.
“I wept, conscious of the eternal rebirth in nature”
Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was an inspiring anarchist activist and writer who helped shape the movement in both the USA and Europe.
Her anarchism was not some sterile pseudo-academic dogma but the vision of free human beings coming together to reassert the vital spirit of the species.
Goldman knew Peter Kropotkin and was influenced by a diversity of other thinkers and writers, including Mikhail Bakunin, Johann Most, Henry David Thoreau, Knut Hamsun, (1) Mary Wollstonecraft and Gustav Landauer, whom she described as “brilliant”. (2)
Most of all, perhaps, she admired Friedrich Nietzsche, who expressed his unique philosophy in the soaring and stormy language of the Romantic movement, the spirit of which is very present in Goldman’s own deeds and writing.
In her autobiography, Living My Life, she wrote of Nietzsche: “The magic of his language, the beauty of his vision, carried me to undreamed-of heights. The fire of his soul, the rhythm of his song, made life richer, fuller and more wonderful for me… (3)
“I pointed out that Nietzsche was not a social theorist but a poet, a rebel and innovator. His aristocracy was neither of birth nor of purse: it was of the spirit. In that respect Nietzsche was an anarchist, and all true anarchists were aristocrats, I said”. (4)
Goldman’s anarchism exemplifies the way in which the philosophy, in its authentic undiluted form, combines a fierce sense of the need for individual freedom with an understanding of our belonging to a greater whole.
She wrote that her own life was linked with that of the entire human race: “Its spiritual heritage was mine, and its values were transmuted into my being. The eternal struggle of man was rooted within me”. (5)
In describing the wonderful “tempest of vehement indignation” against the status quo that she encountered on a 1919 lecture tour, she concluded that “it was the eloquent voice of the awakened collective soul, thrilled by new hope and aspiration. We merely articulated its yearnings and dreams”. (6)
One beautiful passage in Living My Life particularly conveys the depth and power of her commitment to battling for a better future for humankind: “The storm outside had stopped. The air was still, the sun slowly rising and spreading its red and gold over the sky in greeting of the new day.
“I wept, conscious of the eternal rebirth in nature, in the dreams of man, in his quest for freedom and beauty, in the struggle of humanity to greater heights. I felt the rebirth of my own life, to blend once more with the universal, of which I was but an infinitesimal part”. (7)
As witnessed by the title of the political and literary review she published, Mother Earth, a sense of our belonging to nature formed an important part of Goldman’s anarchist philosophy.
The first issue of the magazine, published in March 1906, explained: “Man issued from the womb of Mother Earth, but he knew it not, nor recognized her, to whom he owed his life. In his egotism he sought an explanation of himself in the infinite, and out of his efforts there arose the dreary doctrine that he was not related to the Earth, that she was but a temporary resting place for his scornful feet”. (8)
Goldman joined Bakunin and Kropotkin in equating anarchism with the free functioning of the natural laws that allow animal and human life to flourish organically, without interference from authority and hierarchy.
She wrote: “A natural law is that factor in man which asserts itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature…(9) Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man”. (10)
This organic radical approach was spelled out explicitly in her autobiography, where she explained: “Just as the animal cells, by mutual co-operation, express their latent powers in the formation of the complete organism, so does the individuality, by co-operative effort with individualities, attain its highest form of development… Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear or punishment and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism”. (11)
Her understanding of anarchism as a force of nature – nature defending itself – was extended to her vision of revolution. She wrote: “Anarchism, whose roots, as it were, are part of nature’s forces, destroys, not healthful tissue, but parasitic growths that feed on the life’s essence of society. It is merely clearing the soil from weeds and sagebrush, that it may eventually bear healthy fruit”. (12)
She added elsewhere that anarchist revolution was “the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man’s inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves.
“It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality.
“It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society… It is the mental and spiritual regenerator”. (13)
This liberating revolutionary vitality which pulsated through the anarchist philosophy and movement at the time was in stark contrast to the impression she gained of Marxist socialism as “colourless and mechanistic”. (14)
This poor opinion of Marxism was confirmed by her experiences with the Bolshevik regime in Russia. She went back to her native country, alongside lifelong friend and lover Alexander Berkman, full of hope for the dawning of a new age, only to witness “the best human values betrayed, the very spirit of revolution daily crucified”. (15)
But Goldman also encountered signs of a stagnating of the vital spirit in the ranks of her own anarchist comrades, complaining that they thought Mother Earth was “not revolutionary enough”, because “it treated anarchism less as a dogma than a liberating ideal”. (16)
And it was a young male anarchist who prompted Goldman’s famous comments about dancing, often paraphrased as “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution”.
After watching her enjoying herself, he took it upon himself to tell her that she shouldn’t dance “with such reckless abandon”.
Commented Goldman: “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful idea, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy.
“I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. ‘I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant, things’.
“Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world – prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal”. (17)
Goldman lived the way she advocated we should all live – from the heart – and was not embarrassed to describe the physical power of her anarchist ideals when they were awoken in her as a teenager by the execution of the anarchist Haymarket martyrs in Chicago in 1887.
She recalled how a woman visiting her father’s house had declared that it was a good thing that the four defendants had been hanged: “With one leap I was at the woman’s throat. Then I felt myself torn back. Someone said: ‘The child has gone crazy’. I wrenched myself free, grabbed a pitcher of water from a table, and threw it into the woman’s face. ‘Out, out,’ I cried, ‘or I will kill you!’
“The terrified woman made for the door and I dropped to the ground in a fit of crying. I was put to bed, and soon I fell into a deep sleep. The next morning I woke as from a long illness, but free from the numbness and the depression of those harrowing weeks of waiting, ending with the final shock.
“I had a distinct sensation that something new and wonderful had been born in my soul. A great ideal, a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades, to make their cause my own, to make known to the world their beautiful lives and heroic deaths”. (18)
Video links: Emma Goldman (18 mins), Emma Goldman – An exceedingly dangerous woman (1hr 23 mins).
1. Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Vol I, (London: Duckworth, 1932) p. 239.
2. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol II, p. 681.
3. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol I, p. 172.
4. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol I, p. 194.
5.Goldman, Living My Life, Vol II, p. 695.
6. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol II, p. 709.
7. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol II, p. 946.
8. Emma Goldman and Max Baginski, Mother Earth, Vol.1, March 1906, p. 1.
9. Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 8. https://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/america-essential-learning/docs/EGoldman-Anarchism-1917.pdf
10. Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 5.
11. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol I, pp. 402-03.
12. Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 4.
13. Emma Goldman, My Further Disillusionment With Russia (1924), The Anarchist Reader, ed. by George Woodcock, (Glasgow: Fontana, 1986) p. 161.
14. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol I, p. 9.
15. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol II, p. 757.
16. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol I, p. 395.
17. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol I, p. 56.
18. Goldman, Living My Life, Vol I, p. 10.
“We definitely don’t have a healthy market economy. We have a metastasizing monopoly. Black Rock actually owns a big chunk of Vanguard. And Vanguard owns part of Black Rock. And it’s destroying our whole society”. So warns Nancy Robertson in this fascinating conversation with Stella Morabito on the 11th Hour blog.
* * *
“You want nations to control their own monetary policy? Are you completely insane? Do you have any idea how damaging that would be for strong, sustainable, balanced, and inclusive growth?” Riley Waggaman’s irony hits the nail on the head in his Edward Slavsquat blog.
* * *
“The UN wants us to believe whatever it tells us without reason. This is essential for the UN because it is ambitious, malevolent and utterly ‘untrustworthy’. It can only achieve its nefarious goals while we accept its claimed authority”. A key institutional pillar of the globalist system is exposed by researcher Iain Davis.
* * *
“In their alliance with the NGO-intelligence complex, the climate activist Left has become what it has claimed to oppose; it is the twenty-first century successor to Rhodes and Rockefeller and constitutes the vanguard of Western imperialist crony capitalism”, writes Dr Phil Bevin in a piece for UK Column.
* * *
Resistance fighters in Italy are staging a counter summit at the same time as the “World Congress for Climate Justice” in Milan later this month. The alternative event, warning that the climate agenda is being used to destroy freedom and impose top-down global control, will feature contributions from Silvia Guerini, Maria Heibel, Philippe Pelletier, Cristiana Pivetti and Costantino Ragusa. It will take place from 1.30pm to 7pm on Sunday October 15 at Spazio Pin (Sala Cosmo) Viale Sondrio 5, Milan.
* * *
A stirring message introduced September’s Chisinau Forum 2023, on the theme of “UN Agenda 21 and The Great Reset. The Fall from Liberalism to Technocracy and Transhumanism”. Said Youri Roshka, former vice president of the Moldovan parliament: “In the face of existential threat for the whole human race, we must overcome all kinds of divisions and differences and form a Global Resistance Movement (GRM) in order to reject the total aggression of globalist demonic elites”.
* * *
Thousands took to the streets in London, UK, on Saturday September 23 as part of a worldwide protest against the theft of our rights, freedoms and bodily integrity by the increasingly totalitarian global system. “We will not comply!” is a simple but powerful slogan of resistance.
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Massive demos against the transgender/transhumanist agenda, and the sexualisation of children in schools, took place across Canada on September 20. All together: “Leave the kids alone!”
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Big protests have been taking place in Greece against “reforms” from the “New Democracy” government introducing 13-hour working days, “zero hours” contracts, bans on strikes and the effective suspension of overtime pay. As with the Macronist pension “reforms” in France, the Greek government said the new legislation incorporates EU directives into Greek law. Once more, directives from above rather than democracy from below!
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British journalist Peter Oborne has woken up to what he warns is “the capture of the British political process by very rich individuals”. He adds: “In all kinds of different ways, the rich have bought our politics”.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was forced to make a half-baked apology after Waffen-SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka, aged 98, was applauded as a hero by the Canadian parliament during the visit of Ukrainian president Zelensky. The stench of hypocrisy was also increased by memories of the way the Freedom Convoy was smeared as “Nazi” by these same individuals. As Matt Taibbi comments: “It’s almost funny, how repugnant these people are”.
* * *
Impact capitalism is about making “sustainable” profit from the social and environmental problems created by the very same financial parasites, explain Taschi Sidford and Kate Mason in an important new video conversation. “There’s a lot of data being collected and this is the reason why it is being collected… Everything needs to be categorised, identified, measured and managed. And monetised!”
* * *
“It seems quite clear to me that there is one big Rothschildian system which hides behind fronts. It has to hide because people wouldn’t accept it. They can’t say to everyone in the world, ‘oh yeah actually, we’re not really a democracy, it’s a monopoly'”. Paul Cudenec is interviewed by William Ramsey about his latest collection of essays, Converging Against the Criminocrats.
* * *
Well, how telling! The claret served to Charles III, launcher of the Great Reset, during the lavish banquet recently laid on for him by President Macron at the Palace of Versailles, was a 2004 Mouton Rothschild, for which Charles himself designed the label!
* * *
“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think – refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing!” – Ursula Le Guin
(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)
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Professor Romain Couillet, please consider getting in touch with Alison McDowell at wrenchinthegears.com . Thank you.
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