Number 61
- Libertà, libertà, libertà!
- Us against them
- To the humans who refuse to disappear!
- England is a prison
- William Blake: an orgrad inspiration
- Acorninfo
“A massive new social struggle is about to begin, in which the vast majority of humankind will resist the techno-slavery being imposed on it by the fascist 1% elite”.
We sent out this urgent message on October 14 and reality has not been slow to catch up, as the slumbering masses everywhere awake.
The new front line is Italy, where thousands upon thousands have been taking to the streets in anger at the new curfew and draconian rules being imposed under cover of fighting “the virus”.
“Libertà, libertà, libertà!” they have been shouting across the peninsula, from Lombardy down to Sicily. “Freedom, freedom, freedom!”
Molotov cocktails have been thrown at the cops who ruthlessly enforce the despised clamp-down, with burning barricades blocking streets choked with tear gas.
Media report that “luxury goods shops, including a Gucci fashion shop, were ransacked in the centre of Turin as crowds of youths took to the streets after nightfall, letting off firecrackers and lighting coloured flares”.
The Italian insurrection seems to have begun in Naples, the famously feisty city in the south of the country.
Angry crowds defied the new curfew to march through the city streets on Friday night, October 23, “attacking police vehicles, forcing the officers to leave the scene”.
They were rebelling again on Monday night, October 26, filling up city squares and chanting “libertà!”
There were also protests in Rome at the weekend, as anti-lockdown rebels defied the curfew in the capital and were attacked with tear gas by police.
In Milan, protesters took to the Corso Buenos Aires, the swankiest commercial street. A molotov was thrown at a city security vehicle and a policeman was injured, apparently not seriously, in front of Milan Central Station. See videos here and here.
There were also significant protests in Genoa, Treviso and Viareggio, where young people blocked traffic and threw smoke bombs and firecrackers.
In Lecce protesters broke through the Carabinieri cordon shouting: “Libertà, libertà, libertà!”
The discontent spread to the island of Sicily, with protests in Catania, Siracusa and Palermo.
Hundreds of miles to the West, Europeans were also taking to the streets against The Great Fascist Reset in Barcelona, where angry protesters made burning barricades from rubbish bins.
On October 18, Czech riot police deployed tear gas, flashbang grenades, and a water cannon to disperse a defiant crowd of anti-lockdown protesters who refused to leave Prague’s Old Town Square.
In reaction, the protesters pelted the cops with stones and fireworks.
In Warsaw, Polish police detained an astonishing 278 people on Saturday October 24 after thousands protested against new freedom-crushing rules.
Hundreds of people took part in several “unauthorised gatherings” against the Covid coup in Brussels on Sunday October 25.
A group called “Black Sheep Belgium” called on people to gather on Rond-Point Schuman, in the heart of the European Quarter, to denounce the “freedom-killer” restrictions.
“It is time to reclaim our rights which have been, until recently, ignored,” they wrote. “We are asking you, the Belgian people, to come and claim back your rights”.
The Belgian state’s fascistic response involved the arrest of 71 dissidents.
In Berlin, thousands of demonstrators gathered at Alexanderplatz on Sunday October 26 to protest against the German capital’s “coronavirus” restrictions.
Some 600 cops were sent in to quash this latest sign of mass dissent, with police complaining that “neither minimum distance nor the obligation to cover one’s mouth and nose was observed”.
People shouted: “We are here and we are loud because we are being robbed of our freedom” and “we are the people!”
On the same day, bottles and petrol bombs were thrown at the front of a Berlin building belonging to the Robert Koch Institute, the government agency at the forefront of spreading Covid fear-propaganda in Germany.
In Dublin, Ireland, there have been a string of big anti-lockdown protests, with the demo on October 22 bringing city traffic “to a standstill”.
One activist said police were out in force because “they smell revolution in Ireland,” adding “they are waiting for the country to rise, basically. They’re waiting for the country to rise up”.
Across the Atlantic, there was a big anti-lockdown protest in Toronto, Canada, and in New York, USA, members of the Orthodox Jewish community have been burning masks in the streets in protests against new restrictions.
Australia has been the victim of one of the most draconian lockdowns in the world and huge protests against the new global tyranny have been held in both Brisbane and Melbourne.
Meanwhile, the UK has seen plenty more pro-freedom demos since the one on Saturday September 26 which we featured in our special photo report We Are the 99%.
There have been dangerous outbreaks of democracy in places including Leeds, Belfast, Edinburgh, Bournemouth and Liverpool, which saw two protests in two days.
And, of course, the big events in London continue, with protests on both Saturday October 17 and Saturday October 24.
In case anyone is in any doubt as to what is at stake here, it was set out with admirable clarity by the economist and author Ernst Wolff at a protest in Stuttgart earlier this year.
He said: “Never before in the history of mankind have so few people owned so much as today. Since we live in a society ruled by money; this means that never before have so few people held as much power as today.
“And that power has played a historic role in the past few months, because never before has power been abused to such a large extent as during the corona pandemic”.
Our task, he said, is to break free from the control and exploitation of the 1% and find our way to “a future that looks different from the digital financial prison in which the current rulers want to lead us!”
@js100js100 has also put it very succinctly on Twitter: “Covid is being used to create a global economic crash to distribute wealth and resources upwards, and turn people into serfs under authoritarian control in a biosecurity state”.
This is, as James Corbett warns in a video on the Great Reset, about nothing less than the future of humankind.
We have to rise up and reclaim our lives!
A deep fog of ideological confusion surrounds the global Covid-1984 coup and the new order which it is trying to force on humankind via its Great Reset.
Not only do those going along with it often seem to have no idea as to what they are endorsing, but those standing up to the dictatorship are also sometimes in the dark as to what it actually represents!
This is hardly surprising, as the system’s deliberate dumbing-down of people’s minds does not stop short with its “news” and “current affairs” propaganda, but extends to the historical dimension, where it want to make sure that people have no bearings at all.
In the famous words of George Orwell’s fictional dictatorship: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past”.
In truth, as explained at great length here, here and here, the newnormalist Schwabism of the Great Reset is nothing but a mutation of fascism, the dehumanising totalitarian creed of which the world supposedly rid itself some 80 years ago.
But this is difficult for some people to accept, because of the way in which “fascist” has been, and still is, bandied about as general insult to close down debate.
Furthermore, if you regard fascism as only applying to the national level of centralisation, as it did in the 1930s, then you will conclude that global fascism cannot be actual fascism simply because it is global.
But Schwabism takes fascism on to the global level. This 21st century Fourth Reich wants to control the whole world.
It is also crucial to understand that this new global fascism, like its historical predecessors, is entirely capitalist. Not free-market capitalist perhaps, but capitalist nevertheless.
Its whole raison d’être is the protection of the wealthy ruling elite from popular challenges and the increase of its power by means of new mechanisms of control and exploitation.
But here, too, the relentless mind-scrambling propaganda of the system has done its work. Capitalism is seen by some as being principally about “freedom”, so anything threatening freedom must come from what we have been taught is the “opposite” of capitalism.
The reality that the WEF is an international capitalist organisation engineering a Great Reset for the profit of the world’s richest billionaires does not deter some of its confused opponents from insisting that it is “communist”!
The fascist project of a merger between state and corporate power, in the interests of the latter, is, in fact, widely misunderstood by people of various political backgrounds.
Some right-wingers think that the problem with fascism was that it was basically “left-wing”, without understanding that fascism bails out big businesses under the mere pretext of acting for the general good, whether this is framed as “national” or “global”.
Some left-wingers, while obviously not endorsing historical fascism, find themselves cheering on its 21st century counterpart because they have fallen for its sleight of hand and (apparently, incredibly!) really imagine that great global capitalist institutions such as the WEF, the IMF and the World Bank have seen the light and converted to some new kind of socialism.
Too many of those who are proud to identify themselves as “antifascists”, are nowhere to be seen when a real struggle against real fascism is at hand.
They are too busy supporting the government in its “fight against coronavirus“, parroting the system’s warnings of “conspiracy theories about the imaginary ‘deep state’” or announcing obediently that “we recommend practicing [sic] social distancing“.
By openly supporting the new world dictatorship and condemning those who challenge it as “far right” or “fascist”, these deluded leftists of course further reinforce the impression in other people’s minds that there is something “left-wing” about the new tyranny…
This absurd knot of misunderstanding and underinformed name-calling leaves those engineering the coup sitting pretty. We are unable to even name them properly, let alone resist them!
We urgently need to strip away all the confusion caused by this labelling and counter-labelling and see the truth for what it is.
The events of 2020 have made it quite plain that the old “left” versus “right” division is no longer fit for purpose.
What we are looking at is an ultra-rich, extremely powerful technocratic mafia which is trying to enslave humankind for its own profit.
It’s really very simple, once you cut out the noise from their distorting propaganda.
It is the people against the ruling elite, it is the 99.99% against the 0.01%, it is us against them!
Our international revolt against the would-be slavemasters will come neither from left nor from right, but from below!
3. To the humans who refuse to disappear!
Translation of Communiqué #80 – September 2020 from GARAP in France
To all those who are not paralyzed by fear but rather motivated,
To all those who have kept the memory, know the history, seek the truth,
To all those who are not exhausted, jaded, who are resourceful,
To all those who want to fight oppression, who want to live free and equal,
We address this appeal:
We do not believe the official lies – mapped out by the rogue “Scientific Council” – that present the Covid-19 as a pandemic so serious that it requires villainous measures installing a real dictatorship in France and elsewhere. The sole function of the propaganda bombing we are daily subjected to is to neutralize our revolt in the face of a merciless social war.
The sanitary pretext allows them to carry out a policy of general enslavement never seen in this part of the world since the Nazi occupation. This coercive and repressive mechanism comes alongside a provoked economic collapse because the crisis of capitalism had entered in 2019 into a dangerous dead end, the absence of global growth being combined with the outbreak of insurrections on all continents.
The goal of the Macronist State, in agreement with the governing bodies of the world’s major powers, is to try to give capitalism a few more years of survival. A good expression of this view is seen in Prime Minister Jean Castex’s speech at the MEDEF Summer University. It is about restructuring the economic system on the back of the workers, by forcing down wages, liquidating social and democratic rights, throwing millions of us into unemployment and misery.
This reformatting of society, which has no visible timeline, relies on the destruction of what constitutes the human bond in favour of an ultimate mercantile colonization of all spaces and activities. Every attitude, place, and moment that still escapes capitalist valorization must be erased or converted to the barbaric course of profitability. Capitalism wages war on what constitutes our humanity.
In these conditions of generalized lies, of sanitary dictatorship, of violent crisis of capitalism, the memory of our predecessors who were actively resisting oppression is revived. It summons us to rise up and strike at the tyranny of an unbearable world from which only the capitalist scoundrels take profit.
Resistance begins with individual action, the refusal to submit to discipline, the desire to show solidarity, to regroup. It continues with organizing the exploited, the oppressed, outside the bodies responsible for taming their forces, i.e. political parties, unions and other NGOs. It is carried out through counter-information, sabotage, strikes, demonstrations and insurrection.
Circulate this appeal and take action. If you don’t do it for yourself, at least think of future generations.
https://garap.org/communiques/communique80.php
Inspired by Gerrard Winstanley who was born 411 years ago in Wigan.
Most are happy to say they belong to a ‘nation’ or ‘country’ and feel a strong sense of pride in their connection to its land and shared ancestry. We think the times when monarchs and lords made claims on everything and everyone living on the land have long since gone and that these ‘nobles’ now ‘serve’ us and there are laws and safeguards to stop this kind of wicked exploitation happening again.
What if on the surface it only looks like this but, in reality, these old ruling elites have found more covert ways to exploit us, keeping us in a similar state to how we were back in the dark and middle ages only with a veneer of modern state crafted respectability?
Are modern day ‘nations’ no more than ‘mega brands’ that can be owned and managed for personal gain? Does state propaganda, and a corrupted mainstream media convince us that we have more freedoms than we in fact do, and that by voting once every 5 years, we have a say in who governs us when really we don’t?
You only have to look at current leaders like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to wonder how they got to these important positions on which so many lives depend. Do these wily old families continue to benefit unfairly from the most constant and lucrative revenue stream available to a people? That is, its collective creative energy; namely the taxes we all pay on everything we earn, spend and own… For which we receive very little in return.
Where does all this money go? How is our country still in debt after all this time, and the hard work we all put in? To give recent and obvious examples of everyday corruption, we know that £12 billion has just been spent on a phone app and £103 million was spent on a ferry company with zero ferries and so on… This list is in fact endless! Is something still ‘Rotten in the State of Denmark?’ as Shakespeare said? It appears it most definitely is.
If it is the case, it means countries are more like fiefdoms and our common status that of chattels rather than a modern citizenry. In other words, 21st century slaveism.
Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves some pertinent questions. Are we falling for a very clever marketing con trick that makes us feel free and empowered when the reality is that a few power-obsessed and stupidly rich groups are still running everything behind the scenes, while life for the rest remains a constant struggle on an increasingly damaged Earth? How far have we come as a society when the weak are still made to carry the strong? You have to ask – and keep asking.
C.D.
“England is a prison; the subtleties in the Laws are the bolts, bars and doors of the prison; the Lawyers are the Jailers; and Poor Men are the prisoners”. Gerrard Winstanley. (19 October 1609 – 10 September 1676)
5. William Blake: an orgrad inspiration
The latest in our serious of profiles from the orgrad website.
“Human Thought is crush’d beneath the iron hand of Power”
The poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) is today held in high esteem in his native land.
His art is regarded as among the greatest of the period, his poems such as ‘The Tyger‘ are widely appreciated and the song ‘Jerusalem‘, which uses his words, has become a kind of unofficial English national anthem.
But in his lifetime Blake was an entirely marginal figure, a social, artistic and intellectual misfit who died in poverty and obscurity.
Indeed, he was an outright enemy of the dominant culture and until the end of his days did not “cease from mental fight”, nor did his metaphorical sword sleep in his hand, (1) as he challenged its deepest assumptions.
Blake was very much an opponent of the Industrial Revolution, which already had a firm grip on the England into which he was born.
This “poet of the soul”, as Max Plowman describes him, (2) was of course appalled by the “dark Satanic Mills” (3) which blighted “England’s green & pleasant land”. (4)
In the new cities, he saw:
turrets & towers & domes
Whose smoke destroy’d the pleasant gardens, & whose running kennels
Chok’d the bright rivers.
(5)
But his disgust extended beyond the merely physical into the whole way of thinking which underlay industrialism and which had made possible its emergence and its expansion.
Theodore Roszak judges that “Blake was among the first to link scientific sensibility to the killing pressure of the new industrial technology upon the landscape”. (6)
And Kathleen Raine writes: “For Blake, outward events and circumstances were the expressions of states of minds… Man has made his machines in the image of his ideology”. (7)
Blake used the term “single vision” to describe the mechanistic worldview – the “enemy of life” in Raine’s words (8) – which had been pieced together from the bone-dry philosophies of Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke.
He saw this narrowing of the intellect as amounting to a spiritual enslavement of the people of Albion, an old name for England, making them fit for nothing more than lives of docile wage-slavery in the capitalist factories that were taking over the land.
This is beautifully expressed in his long poem ‘Jerusalem’:
… O Divine Spirit, sustain me on they wings!
That I may awake Albion from his long & cold repose;
For Bacon & Newton, sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion. Reasoning like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.
I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton; black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
(9)
For Blake, all the social evils that he saw around him were merely aspects of one vast problem, a civilization in which “Human Thought is crush’d beneath the iron hand of Power”. (10)
E.P. Thompson, in his fascinating study of Blake’s philosophy, examines the political meaning of the poem ‘London’:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
(11)
“Charter’d” clearly refers to commerce, says Thompson, and is perhaps a reference to the East India Company which was becoming increasingly powerful in the British capital city at that time. The mark seen in “every face”, he adds, “is the mark of the Beast, a mark explicitly associated with commercialism”. (12)
But the poem continues:
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
(13)
These mind-forg’d manacles are the single vision imposed by Blake’s “tyrant-demon Urizen”, (14) the narrow materialistic mindset at the root of all the misery and poverty.
Undaunted by the enormity of the problem facing him and his beloved Albion, Blake leapt up on to his philosophical chariot of fire to embark on what Raine calls a “prophetic mission” (15) to “pull down a civilization”. (16)
To do so, he created a powerful alternative vision drawn from sources far removed from the arid calculating spirit of the Enlightenment and the commercial world it had spawned.
Blake’s worldview was holistic, emphasising the sacredness and interconnectedness of all life. “Every thing that lives, Lives not alone, nor for itself”, he wrote. (17) And: “Every thing that lives is Holy” (18).
This outlook shines through in his illustrations, which are full of tendrils, roots, skies, clouds and insects, and also in poems such as ‘Auguries of Innocence’.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
(19)
In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, he describes the “Energy” which he feels behind all the various manifestations of glorious living.
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
(20)
Peter Marshall regards Blake’s metaphysics as “a kind of pantheistic idealism” (21) and also as dialectical in nature in that “he saw reality as a constant process of flux and believed that change occurs only through the dynamic interplay of opposing forces”. (22)
In all respects, Blake’s ideas were very much out of place in the society in which he lived and worked.
Like his compatriots John Ruskin and William Morris, those Victorian enemies of the modern commercial system, Blake was inspired by medieval civilisation, as reflected in his “lifelong love of Gothic art”. (23)
He wrote: “Grecian is Mathematical Form: Gothic is living form, Mathematic Form is external in the Reasoning Memory: Living Form is Eternal Existence”. (24)
Blake’s politics were defiantly radical. He was very much inspired by the American and French revolutions and instinctively opposed to authority, as witnessed by his famous ejection of a soldier from the grounds of his cottage while he was living in Felpham, West Sussex, during which he is alleged to have cursed the king.
He was also deeply offended by the blatant inequality he saw around him in London, as the poem ‘Holy Thursday’ illustrates.
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc’d to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
(25)
Furthermore, Marshall regards Blake’s awareness of his radical politics as being behind the somewhat obscure direction his work increasingly took.
He writes: “Blake witnessed the government repression of radicals, the censorship of the ‘Gagging Acts’, and the anger of the Church and King mobs who were ready to ransack libraries and throw the disaffected artist or poet in the mud. Blake was obliged to clothe his radical message with allegorical garments”. (26)
However, Blake’s radicalism was built on very different foundations to that of contemporaries such as Thomas Paine or William Godwin, as he himself well realised.
Thompson writes: “Blake had always been decisively alienated from the mechanical materialist epistemology and psychology which he saw as derived from Newton and Locke. And he did not for a moment shed his suspicion of radicalism’s indebtedness to this materialism”. (27)
In addition, unlike other contemporary radicals, Blake believed in innate qualities. In criticising the thinking of the artist Joshua Reynolds, Blake insisted: “Innate Ideas are in Every Man, Born with him; they are truly Himself”. (28)
“The Man who says that the Genius is not Born, but Taught – Is a Knave” (29) he insisted. “Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted & Sown” (30)
One illustration, “What is Man!”, the frontispiece to The Gates of Paradise (1793) depicts a human baby as a caterpillar in the chrysalis of metamorphosis which will allow it to take wing and fulfil its innate potential.
Raine describes how, in Tiriel, Blake “denounced the current view of childhood – deriving in great measure from Locke, that early forerunner of behaviourism and brain-washing – as a passive state to be ‘formed’ by ‘instruction’. The poem describes with scathing indignation the consequences of ‘forming’ a child according to the laws of mechanistic rationalism, imposed all from outside and regardless of the mysterious formative laws of life itself”. (31)
Some of Blake’s aphorisms on this theme are very similar to those deployed by Chuang Tzu, the Taoist metaphysician.
“No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings”, (32) wrote Blake. “The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion the horse, how he shall take his prey”. (33)
Blake brushed aside other radicals’ fears that the notion of innate ideas could be used by conservatives to justify “innate” social inequality. He stressed that for all our differences every single one of us has a divine potential as part of Universal Humanity.
He also differed from many other modern radicals in his interest in archetypes and ideal forms.
“There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature”, wrote Blake in ‘The Last Judgement’. (34)
He anticipated the work of Carl Jung with his belief in a collective archetypal realm full of “ever Existent images” (35) behind the particularities of the physical world,
Responding to those who criticised the way he represented these abstract forces in bodily form, he commented that they “would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are all of them representatives of spiritual existences, of Gods immortal, to the mortal perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble”. (36).
There has been much scholarly debate concerning the sources for Blake’s passionately-expressed personal philosophy.
Raine rightly points out that the concept of “ideal form” is very much part of “Neoplatonic – and specifically Plotinian – aesthetics”. (37)
She traces Blake’s thinking not just to Plato and Plotinus, but also to the Hermetica, to Paracelsus and Robert Fludd, to Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg (38) and stresses “Blake’s knowledge of Christian Cabbala, Neoplatonism, and the mystical theology of the Western Esoteric tradition as a whole”. (39)
Marshall puts more emphasis on a radical heritage, seeing Blake as “looking back to the gnostic heresies of the Middle Ages and anticipating modern anarchism and social ecology”. (40)
He describes “an underground heretical tradition” which “finds its roots in the mystical anarchists of the millenarian sect of the Middle Ages; especially the Brethren of the Free Spirit”, then “re-emerged in the extreme Left among Anabaptists, Ranters and Diggers of the English Revolution” and lived on still in the London of Blake’s youth. (41)
This is also the conclusion reached by Thompson, whose detailed research suggests that Blake was not quite as isolated in his thinking as it may appear to us today.
His references and images belong very strongly to the dissenting antinomian tradition of Protestantism, which spurned the worldly power of authority and the law in favour of the inner light in every human being.
This tradition, forced to hide from repression since the heady days of the “quasi-pantheist” radicalism (42) which flourished during the 17th century English Revolution (see Gerrard Winstanley), had been notably kept alive by the Muggletonians.
Thompson says antinomianism’s “Londonish rhetoric” (43) was “consciously anti-hegemonic”, (44) which is to say that opposition to the ruling culture was absolutely central to its worldview.
The antinomianism given voice by Blake existed outside “polite” society with its universities, courts of law, sciences and classical learning and often expressed itself in tones of “class war”, (45) encouraging “a stubborn lack of deference, both social and intellectual”. (46)
Writes Thompson: “Everything in the age of ‘reason’ and ‘elegance’ served to emphasise the sharp distinctions between a polite and a demotic culture. Dress, style, gesture, proprieties of speech, grammar and even punctuation were resonant with the signs of class; the polite culture was an elaborated code of social inclusion and exclusion.
“Classical learning and an accomplishment in the law stood like difficult gates-of-entry into this culture… These accomplishments both legitimated and masked the actualities of brute property and power, interest and patronage”. (47)
Blake presented this conflict in a particular way which is not always easy to understand for a modern reader. His “Spectre” of tyranny, ego, empire, false reason and the Church was contrasted with the “Emanation” of creativity, imagination, forgiveness and inner divinity as personified by Jesus Christ.
But behind the biblical language he and the antinomian tradition as a whole were essentially challenging the power of wealth, the state and its official religious structures in the name of an egalitarian universalism.
Thompson says that when Blake or others declaimed against “Reason”, we might today interpret this as “Ideology” or as the compulsive constraints of the ruling “discourse”.
He adds: “Antinomian doctrine was expressive of a profound distrust of the ‘reasons’ of the genteel and comfortable, and of ecclesiastical and academic institutions, not so much because they produced false knowledges but because they offered specious apologetics (‘serpent reasonings’) for a rotten social order based, in the last resort, on violence and material self-interest”. (48)
In the place of this corrupted England they offered “the Everlasting Gospel”, a new Golden Age in which people would find spiritual freedom and be “liberated from the bondage of Morality and Legality”. (49)
Marshall explains that Blake, like other antinomian radicals, wanted to restore humanity to what he saw as its original state: “He assumed like them that in the Garden of Eden man and woman lived in a state of innocence and wholeness, without private property, class distinctions and human authority”. (50)
It was this “revolutionary anarchist” (51) vision of a possible future which Blake named ‘Jerusalem’ and which he longed to see built “in England’s green & pleasant land”. (52)
Video link: The Life of Poet William Blake (48 mins)
1. William Blake, ‘Milton: A Poem’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1954), p. 110.
2. Max Plowman, ‘Introduction’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. xi.
3. Blake, ‘Milton’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 110.
4. Ibid.
5. William Blake, Complete Writings, ed by Geoffrey Keynes, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 361, cit. Peter Marshall, William Blake: Visionary Anarchist (London: Freedom Press, 2008), p. 39.
6. Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (New York: Touchstone, 1993), p. 42.
7. Kathleen Raine, William Blake (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), pp. 73-74.
8. Raine, p. 50.
9. William Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 177.
10. Blake, ‘Milton’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 137.
11. William Blake, ‘London’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p 31.
12. E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 182.
13. Blake, ‘London’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p 31.
14. Raine, p. 76.
15. Raine, p. 111.
16. Raine, p. 171.
17. William Blake, ‘The Book of Thel’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 40.
18. William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 55.
19. William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 333.
20. Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 43.
21. Marshall, p. 24.
22. Marshall, p. 23.
23. Raine, p. 17.
24. William Blake, cit. Raine, p. 17.
25. William Blake, ‘Holy Thursday’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 23.
26. Marshall, pp. 16-17.
27. Thompson, p. 193.
28. Blake, Complete Works, p, 459, cit. Marshall p. 30.
29. Blake, Complete Works, p. 470, cit. Marshall, p. 30.
30. Blake, Complete Works, p. 471, cit. Marshall, p. 30.
31. Raine, p. 47.
32. Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 45.
33. Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 46.
34. William Blake, ‘The Last Judgment’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 358.
35. William Blake, cit. Raine, p. 7.
36. William Blake, cit. Raine, p. 9.
37. Raine, p. 114.
38. Raine, p. 51.
39. Raine, p. 186.
40. Marshall, p. 13.
41. Marshall, p. 22.
42. Thompson, p. 26.
43. Thompson, p. 8.
44. Thompson, p. 109.
45. Thompson, p. xxii.
46. Thompson, p. 112.
47. Thompson, p. 110.
48. Thompson, p. 109.
49. Thompson, p. 6.
50. Marshall, p. 38.
51. Marshall, p. 13.
52. Blake, ‘Milton’, Blake’s Poems and Prophecies, p. 110.
“Before we walk through the door of digital identity, realize it opens onto a maze designed to disorient, confuse, and control us”. So warns Alison McDowell in a recent analysis of blockchain techno-slavery on her excellent Wrench in the Gears website. She can also be seen on this video showing up Naomi Klein as the apologist for the capitalist system that she unfortunately turned out to be.
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Shocking facts about the new worldwide pollution threat caused by disposable masks are revealed by investigative journalist Cory Morningstar in an important new article. She writes: “Six months of face masks alone equates to seven hundred seventy-four billion while 12 months of consumption equates to stunning one trillion five hundred forty-eight billion face masks. What happened to all those who cared about our environmental crises? That of climate change, biodiversity and ocean pollution?” A new video interview with Cory can be seen here.
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An insightful article on stopping Bill Gates’ insidious global agenda and defending humanity against the greed machine comes from Indian campaigner Vandana Shiva. She writes: “The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded”.
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“The people are under attack by their own State. All the necessary components of a fascist technocracy are rapidly being assembled”. A great piece on the In This Together blog.
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An open letter has been published by Belgian doctors and healthcare workers calling for an end to all ‘Covid’ measures and the immediate restoration of “our normal democratic governance and legal structures and of all our civil liberties”.
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Veteran journalist John Pilger has condemned in the strongest terms the UK/US legal persecution of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange. He writes: “I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process; this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with ‘British justice’, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial”.
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“To deprive a child’s or an adolescent’s brain from oxygen, or to restrict it in any way, is not only dangerous to their health, it is absolutely criminal. Oxygen deficiency inhibits the development of the brain, and the damage that has taken place as a result CANNOT be reversed”, says Dr Margarite Griesz-Brisson MD, PhD, a Consultant Neurologist and Neurophysiologist with a PhD in Pharmacology, with special interest in neurotoxicology, environmental medicine, neuroregeneration and neuroplasticity.
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The Corona fraud scandal is “probably the greatest crime against humanity ever committed” says German lawyer Dr Reiner Fuellmich in this video. “Democracy is in great danger of being replaced by fascist totalitarian models”. Meanwhile an unofficial translation of the German Corona Inquiry’s short report (part 1) can be downloaded in pdf from here.
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“A new government document lists anti-capitalist views alongside racism and the desire to overthrow democracy as ‘an extreme political stance'”, reports Sky News in the UK. Overthrow democracy? What democracy? It is the idea of restoring democracy, real democracy, that frightens those in power. Talking of which, the Million Mask March protest will be held in Trafalgar Square, London, on November 5 from 6pm. Remember, remember…
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“Technological optimism is the snake oil of urban-industrialism”.
Theodore Roszak
(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)
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Here he 
He enthuses: “While it may not feel momentous to those of us experiencing a series of small but significant adjustments to life on a daily basis, it is not a minor change—the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a new chapter in human development, on a par with the first, second and third Industrial Revolutions, and once again driven by the increasing availability and interaction of a set of extraordinary technologies”. (5)
In case the meaning of “creating value” was not clear, he gives some examples: “Drones represent a new type of cost-cutting employee working among us and performing jobs that once involved real people” (8) and “the use of ever-smarter algorithms is rapidly extending employee productivity—for example, in the use of chat bots to augment (and, increasingly, replace) ‘live chat’ support for customer interactions”. (9)
But this does not stop him presenting them in a positive light, as when he declares that “public crime is likely to decrease due to the convergence of sensors, cameras, AI and facial recognition software”. (27)
The idea of neurotechnologies, in which humans will have fully artificial memories implanted in the brain, is enough to make some of us feel faintly sick, as is “the prospect of connecting our brains to VR through cortical modems, implants or nanobots”. (44)
“This gives rise to an inequality that goes beyond the societal one described earlier. This ontological inequality will separate those who adapt from those who resist—the material winners and losers in all senses of the words. The winners may even benefit from some form of radical human improvement generated by certain segments of the fourth industrial revolution (such as genetic engineering) from which the losers will be deprived. This risks creating class conflicts and other clashes unlike anything we have seen before”. (51)
One of these “narratives” whitewashes the reasons for which 4IR technology needs to be installed everywhere in the world as soon as possible.
The new order envisaged by Schwab will embrace the entire world and so global governance is required in order to impose it, as he repeatedly states.
Genuine democracy essentially falls into the same category for Schwab. He knows that most people will not willingly go along with plans to destroy their lives and enslave them to a global techno-fascist system of exploitation, so giving them a say in the matter is simply not an option.
For Schwab, the role of the state is to advance capitalist aims, not to hold them up to any form of scrutiny. While he is all in favour of the state’s role in enabling a corporate take-over of our lives, he is less keen about its regulatory function, which might slow down the inflow of profit into private hands, and so he envisages “the development of ecosystems of private regulators, competing in markets”. (88)
Published in July 2020, the book sets out to advance “conjectures and ideas about what the post-pandemic world might, and perhaps should, look like”. (91)
“A policy paper prepared by Systemiq in collaboration with the World Economic Forum estimates that building the nature-positive economy could represent more than $10 trillion per year by 2030… Resetting the environment should not be seen as a cost, but rather as an investment that will generate economic activity and employment opportunities”. (107)
They can barely conceal their delight at the direction society is now taking: “The pandemic will accelerate innovation even more, catalysing technological changes already under way (comparable to the exacerbation effect it has had on other underlying global and domestic issues) and ‘turbocharging’ any digital business or the digital dimension of any business”. (111)
“The pandemic may prove to be a boon for online education,” Schwab and Malleret report. “In Asia, the shift to online education has been particularly notable, with a sharp increase in students’ digital enrolments, much higher valuation for online education businesses and more capital available for ‘ed-tech’ start-ups… In the summer of 2020, the direction of the trend seems clear: the world of education, like for so many other industries, will become partly virtual”. (116)
In putting forward the idea of barter as a healthy means of exchange, he questioned why modern societies insisted on “interposing this purely human device of money between food and starvation”.
Indeed, Kumarappa was highly critical of orthodox socialism for its dependence on a central state to manage its supposedly egalitarian society.
In his 1934 book The Hindu Conception of the Deity, Kumarappa set out to counter “critics who think that morality finds no place in the philosophical and religious thought of India”. (12)
He 
The totalitarian capitalist elite have been planning this coup for years, probably even decades, and they are not going to cave in at the drop of a hat, tinfoil or otherwise.
StandUpX say on their website: “We are living in a state of authoritarian control. We do not consent to Government social distancing measures infringing upon public and private life. We do not accept enforced masks. We do not accept a dictatorship of lockdowns, threats of lockdowns, and Covid Ghettos.
She writes: “In pursuit of social discipline, an attack was launched against all forms of collective sociality and sexuality including sports, games, dances, ale-wakes, festivals, and other group-rituals that had been a source of bonding and solidarity among workers”.
Instead of opening up the horizon, it closes it down, trapping us in the eternal present. Instead of pointing to the possibility of living something completely different, it offers at the very most the certainty of surviving by managing the catastrophe.
He explained: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived”. (1)
Thoreau noted that the wisest of people had historically often lived in the simplest of ways and was convinced that this was all part of their wisdom.
Thoreau was more than sceptical about the point of industrial progress and all the so-called “modern improvements” it brought with it, writing that “there is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance”. (12)
In this essay he described the “ghost leaves” produced by hoar frost and was prompted to reflect on the inherent form within the natural world.
This realisation, drawn from his observation of plants and frost, formed a nature-sourced philosophical basis for his libertarian political views.
He wrote: “The State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest”. (24)
It cites the famous 80-page evaluation of the Corona measures by Oberregierungsrat K., deputy head of the department for crisis management (critical infrastructure protection) in the Federal Ministry of the Interior: “The observable effects and impacts of Covid19 do not provide sufficient evidence (solid evidence) that it is more than a false alarm in terms of health effects on society as a whole”.
It was counter-cultural to the prevailing philosophies of the time: linguistic analysis, logical positivism and Marxism. For a few weeks they weren’t sure whether to call this new generation of writers Angry Young Men or Outsiders and Wilson was feted by his contemporaries, including Kingsley Amis and Francis Bacon.
For night after night, in various parts of France, police were pelted with stones and fireworks and their vehicles and at least one local police station set on fire. “Mort aux porcs!”, “Death to the pigs!” was the slogan of choice.
“As ever, and as was frequently the case with the Gilets Jaunes, the political and media class will condemn these popular revolts and explain to us that nothing can justify such violence. That people can be angry and have legitimate complaints, but that they can’t be expressed in this fashion.
Imagine a world where corporations didn’t exist because we produce what we need for ourselves.
Imagine a world where we cared for each other without having to rely on governments, institutions or corporations.
Imagine a world where we stood in solidarity with indigenous and tribal peoples instead of supporting the climate capitalists hell bent on plundering more of their lands. [7]
We live opposite a park with play equipment, now taped off. It’s been silent since March when the lockdown was brought in. Along with the closure of nurseries and schools, kids have been denied the opportunity to play with each other. Play is not a frivolous activity. From toddlers onwards, play is how kids learn to interact with each other. It’s how they learn to negotiate, compromise and co-operate with each other. It’s how they learn from mistakes and go on to become fully rounded human beings. Denying kids the opportunity to play for any significant length of time is going to cause long term developmental and mental health issues down the line.
So, people who may think they’re doing the right thing by supporting restrictions on movement and gatherings, as well as increased tracking and surveillance are actually supporting the creation and enhancement of an apparatus that will completely screw our lives and freedoms. All we ask is that you take a deep breath, take a few steps back, do your best to get some perspective and start to ask some hard questions about what’s being done to us. If those questions aren’t asked and we continue on the trajectory we’re on, for many of us, life will become mere existence as we’re effectively plugged into a dystopian matrix. Many may not even survive to experience this.
* The Gates Foundation is the World Health Organization’s second biggest donor. “This largesse gives him outsized influence over its agenda” 
He wrote: “The state, with its police and all its laws and its contrivances for property rights, exists for the people as a miserable replacement for Geist and for organizations with specific purposes; and now the people are supposed to exist for the sake of the state, which pretends to be some sort of ideal structure and a purpose in itself, to be Geist…
The 4IR wants to scare us into its devouring jaws by pointing to impending disaster and claiming that nobody can save us but itself.
And yet its forked robotic tongue tells us that this phoney reality is in fact an “enhanced” or “augmented” one.
When the 4IR talks about “
