by Paul Cudenec (who reads the article here)

They’re closing the schools
They’re burning the books
The church is in ruins
The priests hang on hooks
The radio’s on ice
The telly’s been banned
The army’s in power
The devil commands!

These lyrics by the English punk group The Damned belong to the distant decades of my youth (1979), but they seem to speak of the situation which we are facing now.

The song is called “I Just Can’t Be Happy Today” and I would certainly empathise with anyone currently feeling that way – indeed, it felt slightly odd to dispatch cards wishing my UK relatives a “Happy New Year” in view of what is likely to be coming our way in 2026.

However, I have to say that, on a personal level, I remain a resolutely cheerful individual, prone rather to chuckling over the absurdities of the modern world than to gnashing my teeth or tearing my hair out.

This is even so when it has been raining non-stop for a week, which is the case as I write!

It would, in truth, be incredibly ungrateful of me to turn into an Old Misery Guts, seeing that I have the inestimable good fortune of being alive and in good health (touch wood!), of living in a beautiful part of the world and of being able to spend my days as I see fit, rather than as The Boss tells me I must.

I find happiness in the simple pleasures of a morning coffee, a chunk of bread with cheese or some locally-brewed ale, which has become quite a thing here in France.

There is happiness, too, in all contact with nature, whether in the form of the river (whose swollen song calls out to me as a I type), the dripping woods, the herons, crows and cormorants passing by the window or the mother wild boar and her two babies who trotted beside me on the road yesterday.

In the direst of circumstances we can all find happiness in human contact – in my case particularly with the little band of village free-thinkers who found each other only because of the notching-up of the system’s tyranny in 2020.

But I couldn’t be happy, at peace with myself, if I did not know that I am doing what I can to counter the great evil dominating this world.

I have felt that way, in fact, ever since I was 16 years old (in 1979, the year that The Damned’s song came out) and first heard the inner call to step out into the world and fight for everything I felt to be important.

I have never stopped. There has not been a single point in the intervening 46 years when I have not been involved in some kind of dissident activity.

That’s me 15 years ago, between the “the”s!

The dreadful reality of what I have discovered relatively recently – that our societies are controlled by a vast and psychopathic judeo-supremacist organised crime network – has made sense of all my apparently diverse political battles.

Whether I was opposing globalisation or road-building, “anti-terrorism” laws or warmongering, CCTV surveillance or the privatisation of public land and services, the bankers’ bail-out or the Covid lockdowns, I was always opposing the nefarious activities and influence of one and the same entity.

All the disapproval I have encountered over the decades, all the names I have been called, the labels that have been slapped on to me, all the whispering behind my back, the obstacles placed in my path, all the disdain and denunciations, all have their origins in that same entity.

And whether I was fighting for self-determination or free speech, to protect our culture or to protect our nature, the underlying cause I was serving was, whether I knew it or not, always the same one – to liberate us from the yoke of the satanic industrial-imperialist overlords.

I can be happy today because of my understanding of this and my certainty that I have always followed my inner moral compass – blindly at times, it seemed – to the best of my ability.

You may tell me, of course, that nothing I have done in my life has changed anything, or ever will, and I cannot really argue otherwise.

But that does not matter to me and does nothing to dent the strange sense of happiness that comes from finally grasping, after the age of 60, who you always were and had to be.

I will leave you with the prayer that I now recite every day and which I incorporated into one of the little songs that also bring joy to my life.

My Beloved
Who art within me, around me and beyond me
I belong to thee!
May thy bliss flow through me and into the world
This day and every day
For as long as I shall live!