Number 64
Double-sided A4 pdf version to print out and distribute
- The dictatorship will fall!
- Shocktroops of the New Fascism
- Spreading a message of hope
- Covid-1984: the truth about techno-totalitarianism
- Resist the G7 in Cornwall!
- René Guénon: an orgrad inspiration
- Acorninfo
1. The dictatorship will fall!
In these dark times for people all over the world, the UK seems to be slipping deepest of all into the shadows of tyranny.
With vaccination rates higher than elsewhere, the authorities are now suggesting that their “vaccine passports” may be needed not just for travel but for basic social activities, such as going to the pub.
But, at the same time, the country is also seeing an impressive wave of resistance to the newnormalist dictatorship.
Saturday March 20 saw protests for freedom in some 40 countries in Europe and beyond (see round-up videos here, here, here and here).
And the biggest of all was in London, UK, where tens of thousands of people took to the streets.
There were the usual attempts by mainstream media to avoid spelling out the huge numbers involved, to focus on arrests and to otherwise marginalise the participants.
But, this time, they couldn’t just pretend the protest hadn’t even taken place.
Overseas observers are noting “increasing signs that the British public are growing frustrated with the constraint” and seeing that there is “palpable restlessness among members of the public”.
Behind the scenes, our rulers must be quaking in their boots. They know that their power is crumbling and they risk losing control!
There was also a big turn-out in Kassel, Germany, with a crowd of at least 20,000. Many protesters were chanting “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”), a slogan taken from mass protests in 1989.
Cops in Amsterdam, Netherlands, used water cannons and violence against a large crowd which was chanting slogans like “Love, freedom, no to dictatorship” and singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.
In Belgium, people gathered in the Bois de la Cambre in Brussels to protest against “restrictions to our freedom and the harbingers of a dictatorship”.
A shocked journalist reported: “The majority of the protestors are not wearing face masks and are not keeping (sufficient) social distance, despite repeated calls from the police”.
A mass protest was staged by around 3,000 people in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Banners were emblazoned with slogans like “Covid-1984”, “Give our Freedom back”, “Leave the kids alone”, “The media is the virus”, and “Experimental vaccines: we will not be guinea pigs”.
In Romania, there was a protest with music in Bucharest and campaigners burned facemasks in Timisoara.
This followed on from a big event on March 7, when thousands of protesters took to the streets of Bucharest, chanting “Freedom!” and “Down with the mask,” and bearing the message “Say no to forced vaccination!”
In Croatia, freedom protests were held in Zagreb, Dubrovnik, Split, Šibenik and Osijek.
Hundreds of people defied Covid-pretexted restrictions on protesting in Helsinki, Finland, with a police chief complaining that “an uncontrolled number of people have packed in”.
Protester Jonas Nordberg told media: “This event has nothing to do with coronavirus. It’s about the right to be a free citizen in this country”.
In Warsaw, Poland, protesters, mostly without masks, carried banners with slogans like “Stop compulsory vaccination”, “Stop the plandemic” and “Stop genetic therapy”.
Police used stun guns and tear gas against the freedom campaigners. A government minister said it was “scandalous” that they had defied Covid rules and talked of “zero tolerance” of such dissent in future.
In Sweden there were protests in Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg.
In Austria, more than 1,000 people in Vienna protested against Covid tyranny near the city’s central railway station.
In Italy there were protests in cities including Udine, Venice and Turin, with placards reading: “Truth, justice, freedom, breath!”.
10,000 people protested in Liestal, near Basle in Switzerland, many wearing white suits and holding signs reading “Enough is enough”, “Vaccines kill” and “Let love be your guide, not fear”.
In France, there was a carnival flavour to the defiance of totalitarianism, with unauthorised pro-freedom festivities in places such as Marseilles and Les Vans in Ardèche.
In Ireland, anti-lockdown protesters chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” as they marched through central Dublin.
A protest was held in Sofia, Bulgaria, where a man was photographed with a poster declaring “I want a normal life!” and in Serbia, demonstrators danced around a Belgrade monument.
Freedom rallies were held in Canada, too, for instance in London, Ontario, and Calgary.
A huge and angry crowd turned out in Melbourne, Australia, with one speaker at the rally declaring:”We’ve gathered here today because of the lies that have been told to us for way too long!”
The March 20 protests were not a one-off, of course, but the continuation of an ongoing global revolt.
Since the last Acorn came out, there have been significant protests in the UK, Ireland (including Cork), Israel, Quebec, Australia, the Netherlands…
And March 20 was certainly not the end of protests against Covid tyranny either; more like the start of a new phase of intensified resistance as awareness spreads of exactly what is going on.
As a reporter for the New York Times writes: “A year after European leaders ordered people into their homes to curb a deadly pandemic, thousands are pouring into streets and squares.
“Often, they are met by batons and shields, raising questions about the tactics and role of the police in societies where personal liberties have already given way to public health concerns.
“From Spain and Denmark to Austria and Romania, frustrated people are lashing out at the restrictions on their daily lives.
“With much of Europe facing a third wave of infections that could keep these stifling lockdowns in place weeks or even months longer, analysts warn that tensions on the streets are likely to escalate”.
* The next advertised protest date for London, UK, is 1pm on Saturday April 24, with the emphasis on medical freedom and the right to protest.
2. Shocktroops of the New Fascism
For a long time, our freedom and autonomy have been under attack from two sides.
On one flank is the State, which uses physical violence to impose its rules on us, to insist that we never step outside of the cage it has built for us.
On the other flank is Money Power, which constantly tries to manipulate and exploit us, to leech off our labour and to sell us the products and lifestyles from which it can profit.
For a long time, too, there has been a serious overlap between the goals of these two oppressive forces, in that Money Power depends on the State to protect its interests and to keep the people in their place.
But they have remained, on the surface at least, distinct entities, allowing some to fondly imagine that we might find refuge from one in the arms of the other.
Socialists and communists say that the State can be wrestled from the grip of Money Power and turned into a transitional force for good, before perhaps being allowed to gradually wither away in the new post-capitalist world.
Some libertarians, identifying the State as the main enemy, insist that only the “free market” economics of some kind of imaginary “pure” capitalism can free humanity from the dead hand of tyranny.
Only anarchists have understood that both State and Money Power have to be swept away if we are to reclaim the freedom and happiness that is our birthright.
Anarchists know that all power corrupts, that true authority can only come from within the heart of the individual and the collective to which they belong, and that the State, no matter how supposedly benign and democratic, can never be anything other than an obstacle to the free organic flowering of human community.
They also know that no healthy society can be built on the pursuit and accumulation of individual wealth, on selfish greed, on a commercial mindset in which quantity is favoured over quality and in which all higher values have been replaced by the lowest of financial calculations.
Today, in the 2020s, the anarchist insight that State and Money Power are one and the same enemy has been dramatically shown to be right.
Behind the scenes, the two became increasingly entwined during the neoliberal period, with decades of privatisation, outsourcing, and public-private partnerships.
Money Power has dominated the agenda of government to the point that its demands for limitless “growth” and increasing access to public funds have become unrefusable in the corridors of power.
The global coup launched under the cover of “Covid” has finally drawn back the curtain on the frighteningly advanced point which this State-Money convergence has now reached.
We are far from alone in identifying the new hybrid entity as nothing other than a 21st century form of fascism.
This should be the time for all anarchists to step forward proudly from the political shadows and declare that we were right all along, that our struggle has always been about opposing State, Money Power and fascism and that we invite everyone else to join us in slaying this monster.
However, the State-Money system has so thoroughly corrupted society with its unlimited networks of wealth and power that even this potentially powerful source of resistance has been neutralised.
Incredibly, many who have flown the flag of “anarchism” (or some half-hearted version) have chosen this crucial historical moment to back away from the principles they claim to uphold and have been aggressively insulting those few anarchists who have remained true to the philosophy.
They have abandoned opposition to the State and called for people to obey its most draconian laws, echoing its own line that to do otherwise is irresponsible and “puts lives at risk”.
They have failed to stand up to Money Power, by refusing to acknowledge its influence and by refusing to listen to those who have researched and exposed the way in which has taken over our societies, and in doing so they have again adopted the terminology of the system by branding these dissidents “conspiracy theorists”.
These anarchists, all avowedly “anti-fascist”, have abjectly failed to stand up to the New Fascism with which we are now faced.
Indeed, they will not even admit that it exists or that it presents any real threat to humankind.
Clinging to their juvenile cardboard cut-out understanding of fascism as purely a 20th-century form of authoritarian nationalism, they refuse to recognise its re-emergence in a new and even more dangerous guise.
Worse still, they direct their phoney “anti-fascism” against the dissidents who dare stand up to the real contemporary New Fascism, accepting without question the system’s strange and wildly inaccurate narrative that opposition to worldwide tyranny is the sole preserve of the “far right”.
One of the leading exponents of this approach in recent years, Alexander Reid Ross, has recently been exposed (unsurprisingly as far as we are concerned) by The Grayzone as a complete sham, now openly working with former cops and CIA agents at a militaristic think tank funded in part by billionaire Charles Koch.
These Ross-style “anarchists” (who, by jettisoning the philosophical basis of anarchism, are now indistinguishable from the rest of the fake left) are not simply failing to engage in the struggle.
By amplifying the system’s narrative, by helping it to conceal its fascistic nature, by smearing and abusing its opponents, they are actively aiding and abetting tyranny.
On top of all this there is a problem that has dogged the left since the 19th century – its largely uncritical embrace of industrial “progress”.
It has failed to see that technology is far from being “neutral”, something which could be used for the common good in certain conditions, and is instead the ever-more powerful tool with which the ruling class has gradually imprisoned and disempowered the rest of us.
It has neither understood nor accepted Miguel Amorós’s crucial insight that “factories, machines and bureaucracies are the real pillars of capitalist oppression”.
More than that, it even joins the ruling class in declaring any such fundamental critique to be ridiculous, unrealistic or “reactionary”, a threat to the “progressive” values with which it associates.
When we add to this the insidious way in which “left-wing” agendas have been realigned to suit the needs of impact investors, as exposed here and here, an ugly reality starts to emerge.
We find ourselves looking at a pseudo-left, including pseudo-anarchists, which defends both State and Money Power, disallows analysis of their inter-connections and machinations, refuses to acknowledge or challenge the New Fascism and eagerly embraces the very structures and technologies through which humanity is being enslaved.
What is the meaning of a “left” which actively supports everything that was previously associated with the right? In what way can we distinguish it from the right, other than by the self-righteous framing with which it presents the very same insidious life-denying agenda?
For real rebels, real freedom-fighters, real anarchists, this fake left has now clearly identified itself as our enemy and its Covid-reinforcing activists have been revealed as nothing other than the shocktroops of the New Fascist global dictatorship.
Authentic revolt will come neither from left nor right, but from below!
3. Spreading a message of hope
We are clearly at a crossroads in political history, particularly that of the resistance to global capitalist tyranny.
With too many people under the spell of media indoctrination, it is more important than ever that we communicate our message of empowerment and liberation.
We recently heard from a fellow dissident who has drawn up ten points to bear in mind as we move forward in this crucial struggle and we share them here:
1. Using populist rhetoric to counter the right wing demagogues.
2. Making left wing politics seem less radical, less intellectual and more connected to the masses.
3. Stop letting the ruling class dictate the limits of debate.
4. Making it more socially acceptable to discuss “conspiracy theories” and ask tough questions about deep events like false flag terrorism, wars, the economy, and the ruling class behavior.
5. Start bringing class consciousness to the working class and the petite bourgeoisie which means 99.9% of humanity (even more) and start explaining to people that socialism is not more collectivist than capitalism (on the contrary), not less free (capitalism is tyranny) and it’s not about hating the rich (they hate us more than we hate them and most of them suffer from the system).
6. Connected to number 5, enough of demoralized class collaboration mentality and capitulation. We should not be unrealistic but we should make very clear what our goals are and that we oppose class collaboration at any cost.
7. Explaining to people that capitalism is not “free” nor anti government and that what we see now is not communism (under Stalin, Bill Gates and his friends would have probably doing several months of labor in the Gulag).
8. Explaining to people that demagoguery and other distractions are nothing more than bourgeois control over society. In a sense, telling people to stop being afraid of what the “news” tells them and to beware of the strategy of tension.
9. Giving people hope! The ruling class spent the last 50 years pacifying and demoralizing our society.
10. Explaining the dangers of liberalism and the idea of free countries and free thought.
4. Covid-1984: the truth about techno-totalitarianism
Gaslighting has been one of the main weapons with which the system has tried to silence critics of the New Fascism it is imposing on the world.
Those of us who have spoken out against what is happening have been derided as idiots, lunatics, whose opinions are based on ignorance and “unscientific” prejudice.
Tame academics and intellectuals have played their (well-paid) role in this operation by repeating and amplifying this message, effectively declaring all questioning of the global coup to be beyond the intellectual pale.
It is therefore good news to come across a book from an academic, a philosophy professor in fact, which wholeheartedly challenges the current dictatorship and everything that lies behind it.
The bad news for most of our readers is that it is in French, so here we are summarising the contents of Covid-1984 by Michel Weber (Chromatika, Belgium, 2020), subtitled “The (political) truth about the medical lie: digital fascism”. (1)
Weber is forthright in his description of what is happening to humankind, warning: “The political system which is being put into place is totalitarian”. (2). “This is about the extension of the neoliberal sphere, which wants to transform everything into a product”, (3) he says. “The real-fake crisis health crisis of 2020 is the pretext used to definitively strip populations of the social and political gains conceded after 1945”. (4)
He makes it clear that we are witnessing the massive extension of corporate rule and draws comparisons with pre-war Germany and Italy. “We have to understand, for once and for all, that politicians do not represent the people, but the oligarchs and their multinationals”, (5) he says, concluding that this amounts to “a new fascist totalitarianism, much more pernicious than its 20th century predecessors, because of its digital nature”. (6)
He agrees with German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich that the Covid coup is “the greatest crime against humanity ever perpetrated”. (7)
Weber addresses the physical means by which this New Fascism seeks to control us: “Technology – and in particular the devices associated with 5G – now allows total panoptical surveillance: tracing of all internet activity (big data) and physical movement (geolocalisation), the disappearance of cash transactions, house arrest (electronic bracelets, remote working, online education, interent shopping, online consultations) etc” (8).
He explains how 5G is needed to launch the Internet of Things and the Internet of Bodies and entails “a radical advance of technoscientific totalitarianism, since it aims to master, and thus control, every aspect of our existence”. (9)
He cites the prophetic Edgar Evans Cayce, who warned as long ago as 1934: “Some day tiny radios placed in the brain may make possible the enslavement of entire nations”. (10)
And he quotes this sinister 2014 question from Michael Goldblatt, former head of the Defense Sciences Office of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA): “How is having a cochlear implant that helps the deaf hear any different than having a chip in your brain that could help control your thoughts?” (11)
Writing about the use of fear to control people, Weber invokes Leo Löwenthal, who was writing just after the Second World War about what had happened to the individual under the heel of the first fascism: “Fear robs him of the power of spontaneous emotional or mental reaction. Thinking becomes a stupid crime; it endangers his life. The inevitable consequence is that stupidity spreads as a contagious disease among the terrorized population”. (12).
Along with fear comes cowed conformism: “It is striking to see with what facility an individual can ignore what his senses are telling him and renounce his own free will so as not to break the consensus of the group”. (13)
The book essentially consists of a series of interrelated essays and in some of these Weber looks more generally at the direction our society has been taking over recent decades.
He explores, for instance, how education has been largely reduced to a training programme “which corresponds very closely to the demands of businesses”. (14)
He examines the link between war and capitalist economics, referencing George Orwell when he wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the primary aim of modern warfare was “to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living”. (15).
Weber adds: “The gigantic military market is underwritten by the State and funded by taxes (paid by the poor) and loans (benefiting the ‘financial markets’)”. (16)
Weber also takes a close look at the idea of economic growth, asking why it is generally regarded as an economic necessity, even by the left. He concludes that this “growth” is needed to pay interest to the banks on money lent into circulation: “It’s a huge Ponzi scheme”. (17)
Insisting on the need for a radical form of décroissance, or degrowth, he explicitly insists on the need to bring down the system before any better society can be envisaged.
“It is neither possible nor desirable to draw up a priori a detailed political agenda before deciding to bring down capitalist tyranny”. (18)
Weber reflects that contemporary society has managed to spawn the apparent contradiction of an ideal consumer-citizen who is, at the same time, both individualist and conformist.
He declares that “authenticity requires solidarity to replace atomisation and the individual to replace the clone” (19) and calls for “communities which allow both free individuation and solidarity among each and all”. (20)
And he suggests that this authentic way of living might be based on the watchword of the ZAD free zone at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France: “Resist, act, live”. (21)
1. Michel Weber, Covid-1984 ou La vérité du mensonge sanitaire: un fascisme numérique (Chromatika, Belgium, 2020).
2. p. 9.
3. p. 21.
4. p. 42.
5. p. 33.
6. p. 36.
7. p. 217.
8. pp. 46-47
9. pp. 137-38.
10. p. 147.
11. cit. p. 149.
12. Leo Löwenthal, ‘Terror’s Atomization of Man’, 1945/46, cit. pp. 95-96.
13. p. 98.
14. p. 135.
15. cit. p. 183.
16. p. 184.
17. p. 159.
18. pp. 172-73.
19. p. 204.
20. p. 189.
21. p. 204.
The G7 is coming to Cornwall… and so is resistance!
A Resist G7 Coalition has been established in the UK to confront the global capitalist gathering planned for June 2021.
There is a call for international days of action from June 11 to 13, with a Mass Day of Action on Saturday June 12.
Says the campaign website: “Boris Johnson has chosen to host the G7 in a luxury resort in Cornwall with its own private beach. But Johnson is bringing the G7 to one of the poorest places in Europe. Behind the beauty is severe poverty.
“World leaders will not see the real Cornwall. Holed up in their fancy hotels that locals couldn’t afford to spend a night in, they won’t see the rundown estates, the child poverty, the fuel poverty and the misery their unjust system creates.
“But it’s there. On the doorstep of the hotel they’re staying in. Down the road from Carbis Bay, in St Ives, child poverty is at some of the highest rates in the country.
“Meanwhile, due to the prevalence of second homes, the average property price in the area is a whopping £416,892.
“Cornwall has become a playground for the rich. Locals are supposed to be grateful for the money created in menial jobs to serve their needs.
“Many kids leave as soon as they’re able. With either no jobs or only seasonal work, no infrastructure and no services, it shouldn’t be surprising.
“The Resist G7 Coalition is made up of local, national and international groups who’ve come together to build resistance and positive alternatives to the G7.
“This isn’t about opposing one summit. It’s about building on and creating a legacy, of showing what’s possible when diverse groups come together and start organising the world we want to see.
“We believe in a world where we put people and planet before profit, where justice means justice on a global scale, where wealth is shared equally and not pocketed by the 1%.
“Our world should not be a play thing for the rich. It belongs to all of us. And it’s down to us, the people, to stand together, to resist, and to create the future we want to see.
“The world leaders at the G7 aren’t going to do it for us. The system needs changing. And if we want change, we have to act”.
6. René Guénon: an orgrad inspiration
The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.
“Everything seems to be increasingly artificial, denatured, and falsified”
René Guénon (1886-1951) was a Sufi philosopher and important 20th century critic of Western industrial capitalist civilization.
Because his primary interest was metaphysics rather than ideology, Guénon is sometimes regarded as apolitical.
But there is a strong organic radical dimension to his thought. In his early life he was heavily influenced by the anarcho-Sufi Swedish artist Ivan Aguéli (1) and by Gérard Encausse, part of an alternative spiritual scene embracing feminism, homeopathy, anarchism and animal rights. (2)
Guénon’s own traditionalist or perennialist philosophy was an appreciation of the age-old and timeless universal human wisdom at the esoteric core of all the world’s major religions.
He abandoned his native France to spend the rest of his life in Egypt, with the new name of Abd al-Wâhid Yahyâ, and condemned all nationalism as “essentially opposed to the traditional outlook”. (3)
Like his friend Ananda Coomaraswamy, Guénon was appalled by Western imperialism and the way in which it everywhere imposed its exploitative, productivist, industrial way of life.
In 1927’s The Crisis of the Modern World, he described the concept of “civilization” as a pretext designed to fool the public, “mere moralistic hypocrisy, serving as a mask for designs of conquest or economic ambitions”. (4)
He poured scorn on the idea that capitalist powers like Britain or France were “improving” the lives of indigenous peoples by colonising them.
He wrote: “It is really an extraordinary epoch in which so many men can be made to believe that a people is being given happiness by being reduced to subjection, by being robbed of all that is most precious to it, that is to say of its own civilization, by being forced to adopt manners and institutions that were made for a different race, and by being constrained to the most distasteful kinds of work, in order to make it acquire things for which it has not the slightest use”. (5)
For Guénon, the whole Western idea of work, the idea that people should be made to spend their lives producing goods and profit, was abhorrent.
He wrote: “The modern West cannot tolerate that men should prefer to work less and be content to live on little; as it is only quantity that counts, and as everything that escapes the senses is held to be non-existent, it is taken for granted that anyone who is not in a state of agitation and who does not produce much in a material way must be ‘lazy’”. (6)
Guénon saw capitalist modernity as a hideous affront to everything that was traditionally important to human beings. It promoted objects above people, quantity above quality, money above life.
In 1924 he wrote in East and West: “Modern civilization suffers from a lack of principles, and it suffers from it in every domain. By a monstrous anomaly, it is, alone, among the others, a civilization without principles, or with only negative ones, which amounts to the same thing. It is as if an organism with its head cut off went on living a life that was at the same time intense and disordered”. (7)
Inseparable from the insanity of this foul Western civilization was the industrialism with which it expanded and imposed its power.
He observed: “What the modern world has striven after with all its strength, even when it has claimed in its own way to pursue science, is really nothing other than the development of industry and machinery; and in thus seeking to dominate matter and bend it to their service, men have only succeeded in becoming its slaves”. (8)
Twenty years before Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle, Guénon identified modern Western society in 1945 as one in which “everything seems to be increasingly artificial, denatured, and falsified”. (9)
The falsity of this society extended to the way it encouraged people to think – or rather, not to think. If the public could understand clearly what was going on it “might endanger certain political interests”, Guénon suggested.
This would explain why the education system favoured certain methods over all others: “Consciously or not, they begin by removing everything that might make it possible to see things clearly, and that is how ‘public opinion’ is formed”. (10)
As an example of this, he cited the way that philosophy had increasingly been dominated by academics who focused on narrow facts and details at the expense of the bigger picture.
Guénon complained: “What interests them is not whether a certain idea is true or false, or in what measure it is so; their only concern is to find out who first propounded the idea, in what terms he formulated it, and at what date and under what accessory circumstances he did so; and this history of philosophy which busies itself exclusively with the scrutiny of texts and biographical details, claims to take the place of philosophy itself, thus bringing about its final divorce from any small intellectually valuable residue that it might have retained in modern times. By clinging to the letter only, it is unable to enter into the spirit”. (11)
He noted elsewhere: “Modern man, instead of attempting to raise himself to truth, seeks to drag truth down to his own level”. (12)
Guénon described how the Western system deliberately used this disconnection from the truth to keep its victims in a permanent state of disempowered delusion: “The great ability of those who are in control in the modern world lies in making the people believe that they are governing themselves”. (13)
The biggest lie of all was the absurd optimism projected in the notion of “progress”, the idea that industrial development had improved human society and would continue to do so in the future.
Guénon identified instead “a change that is the direct opposite of ‘progress’, amounting indeed to a veritable regression of intelligence”. (14)
This cultural regression, which went hand in hand with economic growth, was rapidly gathering speed, he thought, like “a mobile body running down a slope and going faster as it approaches the bottom”. (15)
In these circumstances, a “mere readjustment” of society would not be enough and Guénon welcomed the opportunity for “a complete renovation”. (16)
And how might this renovation be achieved? “Modifying the mental outlook of a people is the one and only means of bringing about any deep or lasting change”. (17)
Video link: Guénon, Coomaraswamy, Schuon, Burckhardt, Pallis and Nasr (13 mins)
1. Robin Waterfield, René Guénon and The Future of the West: The life and writings of a 20th-century metaphysician (Wellingborough: Crucible, 1987), p. 41.
2. Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 45-48.
3. René Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, trans. by Arthur Osborne, Marco Pallis & Richard C. Nicholson (Ghent NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001), p. 98.
4. Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, p. 92.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. René Guénon, East and West, trans. by Martin Lings (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004), p. 106.
8. Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, p. 87.
9. René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, trans. by Lord Northbourne (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004), p. 192.
10. Guénon, East and West, p. 15.
11. René Guénon, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, trans. by Marco Pallis (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004), p. 215.
12. Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, p. 66.
13. Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, p. 74.
14. Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, p. 50.
15. Guénon, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 43.
16. Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World, p. 17.
17. Guénon, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, p. 250.
People who froth at the mouth at any hint of what they call “conspiracy theory” are stuck in an infantile state of mind where they see all authority as the trustworthy “mummy and daddy” on whom they emotionally depend. So judges a fascinating article from Tim Foyle. He writes: “This is the core, comforting illusion at the root of the conspiracy denier’s mindset, the decrepit foundation upon which they build a towering castle of justification from which to pompously jeer at and mock those who see otherwise”.
* * *
A new Coronavirus Megalab is being developed in Leamington Spa, in the English Midlands, with another in Scotland. A government statement says: “Cutting-edge technology made by British manufacturers will be used in both labs, including automation, robotics and consumables. This means more tests will be processed more quickly and at a lower cost, and therefore faster turnaround times for test results”. Local campaigners warn: “Warwick District will therefore become the hub of the biosecurity state for England”.
* * *
“The ruling elites consider democracy a ‘necessary illusion'” but “a society that is thoroughly democratic is incompatible with an organization of society favored by the ruling elites”. So writes Rainer Mausfeld, a retired professor of psychology, in an important article translated from German by Dr Daniel Wollschläger, which can be read here.
* * *
Tributes have been paid to Ian Crane, the dynamic UK anti-fracking campaigner who died on February 25. Writes Ruth Hayhurst: “Some in the anti-fracking movement disagreed with his views and tactics. But his supporters have described him as hugely influential, inspirational, courageous, determined and a great speaker”. A week after his death, victory was claimed in the long battle against fracking in the Sussex village of Balcombe, when councillors blocked industry plans for a well test.
* * *
“Central to the protest is how much people loved the land and the price they paid for that in terms of serving jail sentences, and suffering physical attacks and intimidation”. A new book by Helen Beynon, with Chris Gillham, called Twyford Rising: Land and Resistance explores the massive anti-road struggle at Twyford Down in Hampshire, England, 30 years ago.
* * *
“Eventually I began to feel that each new species I harvested represented a single note and as the season of each species layered with or followed the next, the procession of species became a repeating rhythm to me. I was beginning to make out the melody to an ancient and never-ending song, that I could play along with. But only if I were there, living closely amongst its natural composers, could I hear it loud enough to join in”. This beautiful passage comes from an article on mushrooms and anarchism originally published in Black Seed magazine.
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This video is a real smoking gun from 2019. Marc Van Ranst, Belgian Flu Commissioner, is talking at Chatham House in London. Nothing about caring for sick people, his speech is all about using the media to sell a pandemic narrative.
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“It was one of those moments during which the exploited class rises up out of the shadows to express its revolutionary vitality, its capacity to shake the foundations of this world which imprisons it, and so breaks the logic of commodity accumulation, profit-making and the increase in value of capital”. The 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune is celebrated in this useful analysis.
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“We are living through historic times. We will be judged by history for what we do now and over the coming months”. We heartily recommend this excellent article by Dave, editor of the Essex Stirrer, one of the rare UK anarchist outlets to have remained true to long-held ideals in the face of the Covid coup and all the associated cowardice and collaboration.
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“For the cyber-liberal left there is no equality without recourse to biotechnology”.
(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)
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In 
Instead, we have to listen to what Indian tradition calls the jagad-guru, the universal guiding wisdom to be found inside each one of us, deep within our hearts.
We certainly recognize that individuals may be asked for their cooperation in achieving a collective goal. But we also recognize the fundamental importance of consent in such situations, and that force and punishment are antithetical to an anarchist worldview.
But with the Covid19 crisis, the war being waged by those in power is ostensibly a war to save lives, and this shift in presentation seems to have effectively hacked the hearts and minds of so many anarchists who at the bottom of everything, carry a deep and genuine care for others.
Information and analysis that can be considered “good news” has been largely ignored by the state and their technocrats, while also being blacked out by the media.
JOHN: You said you felt driven to paint this horrific image. What message are you trying to convey?
* Edge Fund’s Longhurst is also part of Bond, “the UK network for international development and humanitarian organisations”, which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
* Edge Fund activities have been funded by Lankelly Chase, which was involved in the world’s 1st social impact bond alongside J Paul Getty Jr Charitable Trust, K L Felicitas Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Ronald Cohen.
Our resistance needs to be based on solidarity and unity in the face of oppression, rather than on divisive classification and fetishisation of people along lines of race or gender.
Three years later he penned the essay ‘France Against the Robots’ (‘La France contre les Robots’), in which he declared war on those he described as “the imbeciles”. He condemned the machine-civilisation and its technology, declaring: “The Civilization of the Machines is the civilization of quantity opposed to that of quality”. (2)
Many of us have been content to use the word “capitalism” to describe the combination of wealth and power behind this clique.
There are some out there who think these dictators are “communists”, because of the strong element of state control involved.
And we have never before been in a situation where this sociopathic ultra-rich elite seems prepared to ditch the vehicle that brought them this far – capitalism – and switch into a 
The faux-green scam was brought to a much wider audience by the documentary 
Naomi Klein, erstwhile darling of the anti-capitalist movement, who once warned us about The Shock Doctrine often used to accelerate corporate control, has finally stopped pretending to be on our side.
One of the few exceptions to this betrayal seemed, until very recently, to be Vandana Shiva, whom we have often mentioned on this site.
Do you remember the Christmases we used to have when we were young, in the good old days, way back in the 2020s?
We took off our masks, put on our plastic hats and tucked in. Mounds of protein-rich lab-grown meat substitute with genetically-modified fake-veg chunks and lashings of synthetic chemically-enhanced gravy, followed by freshly-printed Christmas pudding strips sprayed with post-custard dessert fluid! De-bloody-licious!
Number 61
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.
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!
Peter Marshall
There has been much scholarly debate concerning the sources for Blake’s passionately-expressed personal philosophy.
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 
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”.
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.
