by Paul Cudenec, who reads the article here

“A war is being waged against life itself, and we must choose sides”, [1] warns Swedish journalist and author Per Shapiro in an engaging 2025 book.

The War on Life: How We Are Manipulated by Archontic Intelligence is a (provisional) English translation of his 2023 work Kriget mot livet: hur vi manipuleras av arkontisk intelligens. [2]

I realised I had a lot in common with Per when we had a conversation on his Folkets Radio podcast a few months back, which he entitled ‘Calling Out the Satanic Rulers of the World‘. [3]

So I was not surprised to find that in his book he refers to thinkers that I feature on the organic radicals site – Derrick Jensen, [4] Theodore Roszak [5] and George Orwell [6] – and that he draws extensively on the work of John Lamb Lash, whose analysis features in my 2025 book Our Sacred World. [7]

As I do in that latter work, Per asks how it is that humankind has found itself in its current state of industrial debasement – “How could we distance ourselves so far from the living planet? Why are people spending more and more of their lives in a virtual bubble? Why is artificial intelligence being developed to a level where it can enslave, even wipe out, humanity?” [8]

He identifies a two-pronged process as having taken place. Firstly, we lost our awareness that “the Earth is a living being that humans can and should interact with and be guided by”. [9]

Thus torn from our roots, we became vulnerable to manipulation by what indigenous peoples regard as “something inhuman, sometimes described as a kind of non-biological, demonic entity that can influence and even hijack the human psyche”. [10]

I was already familiar, via Jensen, of the idea of wétiko, “a kind of mind-virus” [11] that turns a human being into a ruthless and parasitical creature who sucks up “the life force of others without giving anything of his own in return”. [12]

Per looks at its possible historical sources: “Exactly where the culture of dominance began is impossible to know today. However, historians and archaeologists agree that a long series of invasions in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (the Levant) began around 5000 BC.

“They were carried out by Indo-European nomadic tribes that originated from the northern parts of Europe and Asia. There were also Semitic nomadic invaders who invaded Canaan, which later came to be called Palestine. Whether there may have been a common origin between this group (the Hebrews) and the Indo-European tribes has been the subject of speculation and is not clear”. [13]

“Hierarchy, rape, plunder, slavery, devastation and exploitation thus seem to have begun with these invading nomadic peoples, who invoked the deadly power of the sword and a male, extraterrestrial creator god”. [14]

The rejection of Mother Earth by such groups was clearly indicated by their religious outlook, he explains.

“In her book When God Was a Woman, Merlin Stone describes how goddess religions were systematically banned and suppressed, first by the Indo-European conquerors, then by the Hebrews, then by the Christians and then again by the Muslims.

“They did what they could to wipe out the goddess religions and erase all traces of Her. Temples and other sacred sites were demolished and all visible symbols (including works of art, sculptures, tapestries and writings) were destroyed”. [15]

Per also writes about the erasure of the ancient Mysteries, a form of initiation rite in which participants gained a deeper understanding of the mystery of life and their relationship to nature.

These had taken place over large parts of the Mediterranean region, North Africa and the Middle East for thousands of years and he regards their loss as “the beginning of the process of alienation that has since gradually separated people from nature”. [16]

The harsh new religions declared war on anyone who possessed gnosis, that is to say direct spiritual knowledge of belonging to the natural living Whole.

Per writes: “The systematic extermination of people who might possess gnosis included the so-called pagan Europe and parts of the Middle East, but also the indigenous peoples of America, Africa and Australia.

“This should also include several of the targeted murder campaigns during the Inquisition and the extensive terror perpetrated over several centuries against mainly women, who were accused of being witches.

“The large-scale persecution of the Gnostics began in earnest when religious fanaticism allied with the military power of the Roman Empire. Theodosius the Great, emperor from 379 to 395, made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. During his 15 years in power, he passed over 100 new laws that deprived the Gnostics of their rights and their property – and not infrequently their lives.

“The temples and mystery schools were destroyed and banned. The emperor decreed that all books that contradicted the Christian message should be burned. Several important libraries were destroyed where much of the knowledge and mystery of antiquity was gathered, including the one in Alexandria, the largest in the world at the time”. [17]

Per points to the continuity between the crushing of nature-loving pagan rituals and beliefs in Europe and, subsequently, by Europeans elsewhere, such as in the Americas.

And he sees a cause-and-effect connection: “There are scholars who believe that the genocide that the European population had been subjected to long before – by the Christian church – led to similar atrocities on the American continent, in a perverted victim-perpetrator dynamic. Instead of seeing in the Indian his distant self, the European saw a ‘cruel savage’ that had to be exterminated”. [18]

“Thus, it was a traumatized culture whose representatives came to see nature as inanimate objects to be exploited and directed its genocidal violence against people who still saw nature as close relatives with whom to create relationships”. [19]

The author then digs down still deeper to ask why all this violence was conducted against those who preserved knowledge of the mysteries of nature.

He remarks: “If you look at these persecutions without any special prior knowledge, they seem to suggest something in nature that those in power need to alienate people from in order to rule.

“The impression is, in simple terms, that the Earth and nature communicate with us, but on a frequency that most people in their everyday state cannot perceive”. [20] The oppressors’ aim was therefore, “in short, to wipe out and burn up all accumulated knowledge about how humans could become receptive to this frequency”. [21]

Per identifies the attitude of the Abrahamic religions as lying behind this, with their purpose being not to help people connect to the Whole but “rather the opposite: to subdue people’s spiritual lives, figuratively speaking covering the ‘third eye’ with thick tape”. [22] This puritannical anti-spirituality was based on a fundamental hostility to life – [23] an outlook which I have termed “vitaphobic” and which Per calls “biophobic”. [24]

At this point in the writing of this article, dear reader, I decided to pause and instead sit outside in the sunshine to digest a little more of a long, complicated and fascinating book about Italian neofascism that I hope to be able to present at some point in the future.

Then, an hour or two later, I headed off to a local documentary film festival [25] where, magically enough, the first screening that I attended provided an ideal illustration of The War on Life that Per describes, as well as thematic links with the book I am reading.

Atlas Oculto, directed by Anne-Laure Boyer, tells of the horrendous damage caused to both human communities and nature by the numerous dams built in the mountains of Spain. [26]

This grandiose project was dreamed up at the end of the 19th century, when the lie of glorious technological “progress” was everywhere at its most seductive.

But it was really pushed hard under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, who had triumphed in the Spanish Civil War thanks to military backing from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

As I am constantly reminding people, while all varieties of historical fascism sold themselves to the public as great defenders of national tradition, they were in fact Trojan Horses used to accelerate the industrialist steamroller that has destroyed old and organic ways of life across the world. [27]

In the discussion following the screening of her film, Boyer explained that Franco’s regime used forced prisoner-of-war labour – the Spaniards who had fought against its rule – for several decades in order to advance its full-spectrum “modernisation” programme, including the construction of the dams.

Whether in the American plantations, the Nazi work camps or the Soviet gulags, the System ever thirsts for the suffering sweat of slave labour.

Franco’s regime of course did not hesitate to use military force to evacuate all the Spanish villages that were to be wiped off the map by its dams.

But when it was replaced by a “democratic” model, after Franco’s death in 1975, people found that the same remained true – the only change was that now, for the first time, the media were able to report on what was happening.

Scenes from this period, included in the film, are simply shocking – villagers literally clinging to the roofs of their homes while their legs are being pulled by robocops, the despair and loss written on the faces of those whose homes have been confiscated by the state, the cold wail of a demolition siren as their ancient church is blown to pieces.

Sometimes new “modern” concrete versions of the villages were built further up the hillside, although many residents refused to go and live in them.

Even when people’s homes were spared, the fertile riverside fields where they grew the crops which sustained them were now underwater and they had no choice but to go and live in a city and submit to a life of wage-slavery.

Meanwhile, the once-natural landscape was scarred with dams and bridges across the new artificial lakes, while once-living rivers were sadly imprisoned within concrete banks.

And who benefited from all this? Not the locals, not the Spanish people, but the global financiers (one resident used the English word “holdings” to identify this non-native entity) who make money both from the hydro-electricity and the industrial agriculture watered by the mountain reservoirs.

All across the world, this entity cares nothing for the lives, memories, identities and belonging of the people whose homes it demolishes and whose land it steals.

In his book, Per draws on Gnostic writing to identify the spiritual source of this evil as “the Archons”, explaining: “The Archontic influence thus often has this characteristic: not respecting borders. It is thus not a boundary crossing in a mystical sense, but in a psychopathic one – not respecting natural boundaries, breaking taboos.

“In this range, we find everything from incest, rape and perversions to various manifestations of hubris, such as genetically manipulated crops, laboratory-made life and the fission of the atomic nucleus”. [28]

“The Gnostics also describe how the Archons initially wanted to become like the humans. When they realized that they could never be human, they instead tried to remake humans so that we become like them – that is, turn us into soulless zombies – and assimilate us into their hive-mind”. [29]

He says that the Archontic Program that was spread across the continents of the world led to the banning of traditional ceremonies as heresy and “the replacement of local culture and diversity with globalization, monotheism and monoculture”. [30]

“The blind envy and hatred of the diversity of the living planet is visible in the brutal destruction of everything indigenous; the genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples, their traditions and languages, the devastation of primeval forests and the poisoning of the sea and air”. [31]

Per, like Ludwig Klages, [32] sees this phenomenon as taking its most extreme form with Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament, who for the Gnostics was “an insane demon who has the delusion of having created the universe. A deranged being who is jealous of the living planet and wants to destroy it, and who has also made people perceive this being as their almighty god and protector”. [33]

“One interpretation of the Gnostic warnings is that they saw a psychopathic seizure of power and the spread of a new cult, which used manipulation and extreme brutality to oppress and exploit”. [34] “Psychopathy is something fundamentally alien that exists in our midst”. [35]

The life-hating Archontic force was regarded by the Gnostics as “something non-organic, a way of thinking that lacks intention, empathy and creativity, in other words a bit like we today regard a machine or a computer”, [36] says Per.

“The Archontic essence lacks originality, but is masterful at twisting and distorting what already exists. It deceives and misleads our psyche through simulation (virtual reality)… The Gnostics use the word antimimon; in English, counter-mimicry. It is about simulating, but in an inverted and perverted way. The copies serve a purpose opposite to that of the original and will therefore consistently work against life and harmony on Earth. In English, the Archons are called the counterfeiting spirit”. [37]

Because of its simulation of reality, and its characteristic inversion of values, Archontic domination can manage to remain invisible for long periods of time, he adds. “Like a fish in water that doesn’t recognize water because it is everywhere, both inside and outside, many of us don’t perceive the collective insanity that surrounds us because it is so ubiquitous that it has become normalized”. [38]

But that situation is now changing fast, as John Lamb Lash told Per in an interview during which he insisted that today is the best possible time to be alive: “What we are seeing in the world now is definitely the endgame, when the Archons and their accomplices are doing everything in their power to pursue their agenda.

“So some would say that this is the worst time to live in, because, what could be worse than that? But anyone who is aware of what is happening in the world also sees that there is – at the same time – a growing counter-movement that wants to expose and overthrow these insane and inhuman authorities”. [39]

And, to reinforce this message, Per cites a fragment of a Gnostic text in which the Aeon Sophia, who later became Mother Earth, angrily tells Ialdabaoth, the leader of the Archons: “You are only a pretender god, inflated by your illusion of power. The authority you claim rests on deception, and when the deception fails, you perish”. [40]

[1] Per Shapiro, The War on Life: How We Are Manipulated by Archontic Intelligence (Folkets Radio, 2025), p. 7,
https://www.abebooks.com/9789152773987/Life-Being-Manipulated-Archontic-Intelligence-9152773981/plp
All subsequent page references are to this work.
[2] Kriget mot livet: hur vi manipuleras av arkontisk intelligens (Folkets Radio, 2023), https://karnevalforlag.se/bocker/kriget-mot-livet/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EoEtonMBKg
[4] p. 9, p. 12, p. 31, https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/derrick-jensen/
[5] p. 65, https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/theodore-roszak/
[6] p. 93, p. 107, https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/george-orwell/
[7] https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/our-sacred-worldonline-2.pdf
[8] p. 12.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] p. 24.
[12] p. 25.
[13] p. 36.
[14] pp. 37-38.
[15] p. 38.
[16] p. 39.
[17] pp. 46-47.
[18] p. 54.
[19] p. 28.
[20] p. 55.
[21] Ibid.
[22] p. 56.
[23] Ibid.
[24] p. 104.
[25] https://doc-cevennes.org/
[26] https://www.atelier-documentaire.fr/fr/films/atlas-oculto
[27] Paul Cudenec, ‘Totalitarian industrial slavery: the modernisation weapon’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/02/25/totalitarian-industrial-slavery-the-modernisation-weapon/
[28] p. 96.
[29] p. 98.
[30] p. 103.
[31] pp. 103-04.
[32] Paul Cudenec, ‘Against the modern mindset!’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/05/20/against-the-modern-mindset/
[33] pp. 104-05.
[34] p. 104.
[35] p. 97.
[36] p. 95.
[37] pp. 95-96.
[38] pp 115-16.
[39] p. 176.
[40] p. 219.