resistance | winter oak

The Acorn – 62

Posted on December 17, 2020December 18, 2020 by winter oak

Number 62

In this issue:

We will prevail!
Naming the enemy
Shattering illusions
Here comes Santa Klaus!
Jaime Semprun: an orgrad inspiration
Acorninfo

1. We will prevail!

It was back in March 2020 that we first reported signs of resistance against the Covid-themed totalitarian coup.

We hoped back then that this would quickly develop into a largescale uprising that would quickly see off this unprecedented global power grab.

Things didn’t quite work out that way, though, and opposition has been much slower to build than we would have imagined.

But now, as 2020 draws to an end, things in England and elsewhere are finally hotting up.

People who were pro-lockdown are seeing through the illusion, and GPs and hospital staff are voicing their huge concerns about the mRNA vaccine and so-called hospital statistics.

There’s a definite swing occurring – and not in the technocrats’ favour, either.

Since our last Acorn bulletin came out, there have been thousands on the streets of the UK.

This has not just been in London (see this also), but also in the likes of Manchester, (plus this link and this), Bristol (this also), Liverpool (plus this), Brighton (and this), Nottingham, Edinburgh, Neath, Stroud and Bournemouth.

This video round-up from the StandUpX site shows some recent action.

All over Europe, too, people are rising up against the 0.001% and their police state.

From Rome to Leipzig (also this and this), they have been showing their dissent.

Water cannon were rolled out to attack enormous and diverse crowds in Berlin.

There have been protests in Paris (also this), Montpellier, Nice, Bordeaux and all across France.

The Italian revolt has continued in Florence, Cosenza, Reggio Calabria, Genoa, and elsewhere.

Protests have been sweeping Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and Albania.

In Ireland, freedom campaigners (or “conspiracy theorists” in the language of the corporate media!) set up big LED roadside displays across the country declaring “Covid tests are fraudulent”, and “Take off your masks!”.

There was an impressive performance protest in Austria, with people masked and dressed in full Hazmat suits, like mesmerised zombies, wearing signs saying “our breath kills”.

In the USA, protesters burned face masks as they marched through Manhattan following similar demonstrations in California, upstate New York and Minnesota.

In fact, there have been protests all across the world, from Argentina to Serbia, Australia to South Africa and Malawi.

More protests are planned in coming days and weeks, not least the big New Year’s Eve Freedom Protest street party in central London from 9pm on Thursday December 31.

Most of this dissent goes unreported by corporate media, of course, as the system struggles to keep a lid on the rebellion.

As awareness of the Great Reset agenda spreads around the world, the likes of the BBC and Wikipedia are being used to insist that it is all just “conspiracy theory”, despite it having been set out very clearly by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum.

Authorities are hurriedly drawing up new “online safety legislation” to eliminate what they define as “harmful content” from the web.

Scientists who challenge the Covid agenda are being locked up in mental hospitals and anti-vaccine campaigners are being found dead in mysterious circumstances.

The global capitalist mafia have evidently invested an enormous amount of time and resources in planning this enormous coup.

They are not willingly going to abandon it. The repression will be ratched up yet further and many of us will pay a price for our resistance.

But we have to keep going. We cannot give up. We are not mere spectactors to the unfolding of history, but active participants. We, and our actions at this time, are the future unfolding!

And we should know that if we stay strong, if we all hold our nerve in the face of everything, we will prevail!

Together, in joy and determination, we will defeat the dictatorship.

2. Naming the enemy

We badly need a new vocabulary to describe what is going on in the world today.

Under cover of Covid-19, a long-prepared and widely-orchestrated attempt is being made to enslave humankind in a hi-tech global police state.

But what do we call these people and their odious system?

Everybody seems to use a different term and bickering over which one is most appropriate distracts attention from the essential question of how we can get together and bring them down.

Many of us have been content to use the word “capitalism” to describe the combination of wealth and power behind this clique.

This term now seems increasingly inadequate, partly because not all of those who we would identify as capitalists are complicit in this coup, but mainly because some supporters of the “new normal” seem to be framing it as kind of post-capitalism.

A dictionary definition of capitalism: “An economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, characterized by the freedom of capitalists to operate or manage their property for profit in competitive conditions”.

As far as the first part of that sentence goes, we are entering deeper into capitalism, with private ownership and exploitation of everything and everyone a key aim of the Great Reset.

But the final reference to “competitive conditions” sounds less relevant when we are looking at a total monopoly imposed by global governance.

So what do we call the people behind the Covid Coup, the people laying claim to ownership of our lives, our land and our future, if we don’t call them “capitalists”?

There are some out there who think these dictators are “communists”, because of the strong element of state control involved.

This impression is reinforced by the deliberate use of “redwashing” and “wokewashing”, as well as the usual corporate greenwashing, to disguise the true nature of what is happening and thus sell it to a part of the population.

But are we really talking about what the same dictionary defines as “a classless society in which private ownership has been abolished and the means of production and subsistence belong to the community”?

No. Obviously not. We are not looking at a classless society at all, but a society divided between a tiny elite class of absolute rulers and a vast lower class of exploited serfs.

The means of production and subsistence will not even theoretically belong to us all, even via the intermediary of a state which is supposed to incarnate the interests of the community. They will remain firmly in private hands.

What we are seeing is a lot closer to the fascist model of pretending to be “socialist” in order to use the power and the resources of the state to prop up private industry.

But there are some problems in using the term “fascism”, as many people associate fascism and Nazism primarily with the specifically nationalist and racialist narrative of its original proponents, which does not apply to the new global version.

On the other hand, the rival term “globalist” is problematic because it is too vague about the nature of those it describes. We need to be clear that we are not just talking about people who think in terms of a global situation, or who have an internationalist approach, but about a class of billionaires who already own much of the world and want to stitch up the whole thing.

The term “technocrat” is pretty accurate, when you look at the history of that movement, but is often understood as meaning simply rule by experts, with the implication of some kind of political neturality.

The problem is that we have never been in this situation before, in which a conspiracy of the wealthiest people in the planet is so overtly using the lies and police-state tactics previously associated with authoritarian communist and fascist regimes.

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 dictatorship built on raw power.

We also have the added element of the twisted transhumanist ideology which seems to lurk behind these sinister neworks.

So what name can we agree to give to these powerful enemies of humanity, of freedom, of community, of nature, of friendship, of love, of everything that makes life worth living?

When we raised this question on Twitter recently, we were deluged with good suggestions.

The System
Technofeudalism
Globofascism
The Mechanicus
Mordor
The covidian cult
Techno-despotism
Techno-tyranny
Authoritarianism
Feudal Eugenicists
Autocrats
The Predator Class
Technocratic neo-feudalists
Neofeudalism
Neofeudalist biofascism
Neofeudalist technoscientism, or absolute rule by the financial oligarchy through the tools of biofascism & greenwashing
Virus spewing technofascists
Self-appointed overlords
Corporate Technocratic Fascism
Technazis
Panfeudalism
AntiHumanists
World Enslavement Forum
Totalitarian managerialism
War
The Machine
The Iron Heel

And what name will we give to ourselves as we come together to defeat them?

Wild Humans? “Los Liberados”? World Freedom Fighters? Or simply The People?

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3. Shattering illusions

Contemporary society is pure spectacle, “the superficial reign of images” as Guy Debord put it.

“All that once was directly lived has become mere representation,” he said. “What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic”.

He also wrote of efforts “to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents” and warned of the use of “provocation, infiltration, and various forms of elimination of authentic critique in favour of a false one which will have been created for this purpose”.

We already knew, before 2020 got underway, about the greenwashing falsity behind the climate capitalists’ agenda, with their astroturf rebels, their manufactured patron saint and their fake-radical promoters.

But this year has seen even more layers of deception peeled away.

The faux-green scam was brought to a much wider audience by the documentary Planet of the Humans, to the wrath of Bill McKibben of the group 350.org, who came under particular scrutiny.

And the launch of the Covid coup revealed that vast swathes of people who had appeared to be opponents of the system, even anarchists, were in fact staunch defenders of Authority and its Big Businesss sponsors.

It also transpired out that the same financial networks funding Extinction Rebellion have also been doling out money to a wide range of “activist” groups working for the Great Reset aim of ““systemic change”.

Rob Hopkins of the Transition Movement turns out to be heavily compromised by links to powerful corporate networks, adored by climate capitalist Bill McKibben and happy to regurgitate the “storytelling” slogans of the Great Reset.

Hollywood “radical” Sean Penn has been outed by UK investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley as receiving funding from Bill Gates and promoting the Great Reset.

Celebrity “communist” activist and academic Angela Davis not only publicly backed neoliberal warmonger Joe Biden in the US election but has now launched her own fashion label, helpfully plugged by The Guardian!

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.

With people increasingly clued up about the Great Reset, Klein was wheeled out on the once-interesting The Intercept site to declare that any such information was “a viral conspiracy theory” which “blends together legitimate critiques with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism”.

Yes, that’s right. She actually used the phrase “coronavirus denialism”!

It increasingly seems that all the “left-wing” and “radical” heroes that we have heard of – via the corporate media! – are not what we thought they were.

They appear instead to be gatekeeping puppets, promoted in order to place limits on our dissent and shunt it into directions that best serve corporate agendas.

One of the few exceptions to this betrayal seemed, until very recently, to be Vandana Shiva, whom we have often mentioned on this site.

She is, after all, a famous opponent of the bio-tech industry and critic of Bill Gates’ empire and even declared in a November 2020 interview: “The Great Reset is about maintaining and empowering a corporate extraction machine and the private ownership of life”.

Surely her heart is in the right place? Well, we would love to think so, but unfortunately the evidence is stacking up that there is something awry here.

Simply retweeting the ubiquitous Bill McKibben would not be a serious matter, on its own.

But we do wonder why Dr Shiva has chosen to sit on a body called the World Future Council (catchprase “Solutions for Our Common Future“).

She is pictured on their website, sitting alongside Anders Wijkman (to her right).

Wijkman is “an opinionmaker and author”, says the World Future Council. He is honorary president of the Club of Rome and has been assistant secretary-general of the United Nations and policy director of the United Nations Development Programme.

“As of March 2017 Anders is chairman of the Governing Board of Climate-KIC – the largest public-private partnership on innovation for low-carbon solutions in the EU”.

We were also alarmed to learn that Dr Shiva had writen a positive review of The Green New Deal by Jeremy Rifkin, a book published in 2019.

The other names lined up in praise of this dubious tome are in themselves cause for concern – there is Paul Polman, former Unilever boss and one of the shadowy Extinction Rebellion business backers, billionaire Richard Branson and Anne Pramaggiore of US nuclear energy giant Exelon.

As for the author himself, Rifkin is an enthusiast for the technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (which he confusingly prefers to term the Third Industrial Revolution!), in other words for AI, robots and “digital infrastructure”.

This video makes it clear that, despite all the usual lip service to the environmental crisis, his real passion is for industrialisation, economic growth and profit.

So why would a genuine environmental and anti-capitalist campaigner want to endorse his work?

Dr Shiva’s own latest book is entitled Oneness vs. the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom and now features “a new epilogue about Bill Gates’s global agenda and how we can resist the billionaires’ war on life”.

Let’s hope that her apparently laudable political position is not yet another illusion which is about to be shattered in these revealing and tumultuous times.

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4. Here comes Santa Klaus!

Do you remember the Christmases we used to have when we were young, in the good old days, way back in the 2020s?

I used to get so excited about it all when I was a kid.

I remember one year waking up in the night to see a large figure looming in the doorway of my bedroom. I was amazed! I thought it was Father Christmas himself! But it turned out, of course, that it was only the Biosecurity Police checking up that I was socially distancing from my teddy bear.

In the morning we could hardly wait to unplug ourselves from our beds, fight our way out of our plastic anti-viral protection tents and rush to check the contents of our digital stockings.

If you’d done what you were told all year long, there would be all sorts of Citizen Credits in your account, for games, films, chat. Once I’d even earned 40% of the cost of the next year’s People’s Vaccine! I was the happiest kid in town, I can tell you!

After breakfast we liked to go out for a Christmas morning stroll, so out came the treadmills and virtual reality headsets.

My mum used to like v-walking on the beach in Portugal on a spring afternoon, my dad preferred the Alps on a bright winter morning, my brother usually went for the Australian outback at night and I loved to e-stroll through the Scottish highlands on a summer evening.

But I remember my grandad telling me that he always took his v-walk around the back streets of Coulsdon on a grey and drizzly winter day, because that was what December 25 had always meant to him. Sad old duffer!

By the time lunchtime arrived, all the extended family were there. In the chatroom.

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!

Later we would all be glued to our screens to watch the traditional Christmas Day address from the Global Supreme Ruler himself.

What kind of a world would we be living in today if Santa Klaus had not come down our collective digital chimney with his generous gift of technology-driven inclusive exploitation, ensuring secure and sustainable corporate control for one and all?

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5. Jaime Semprun: an orgrad inspiration

The latest in our serious of profiles from the orgrad website.

“In the old days it was forbidden to think freely; today we have gained the right but lost the ability”

Jaime Semprun (1947-2010) was an influential anti-industrialist writer, translator and publisher.

Estranged from the mainstream left because of his rejection of the modern mindset, he warned that we lived in “an era of acceleration and falsification” (1) controlled by a “mercantile tyranny”. (2)

Semprun echoed René Guénon in judging that so-called “progress” had in fact brought about severe cultural decline amounting to “the loss of all quality”. (3)

And he was scathing about those whose semi-radical thinking left the way clear for right-wingers and fascists to recruit those with a deep-seated aversion to the industrial capitalist world.

He warned in 1993: “We mustn’t neglect people’s need to attack existing society, or simply to counter it with a new conception of the world and of the life they could lead in it. We have already seen, with fascism, the high price of allowing our enemies to fulfil this need”. (4)

Semprun worked with fellow orgrad inspirations Guy Debord and Miguel Amorós and was a great admirer of George Orwell.

After being involved in the Situationist International, he was a key figure in the Post-Situationist movement and founded the journal Encyclopédie des Nuisances, which later became a book publisher.

Semprun translated and published writing by Orwell which had not previously been available in French, along with work by Theodore Kaczynski, Jean-Marc Mandosio, René Riesel and Chuang Tzu. (5)

He was also known as a leading opponent of nuclear power in France, publishing the essay La Nucléarisation du monde in 1980.

Semprun regarded industrial capitalist society as fake in both its whole and its parts. Reforming certain aspects of it would make little difference, he argued.

“Today, demanding to eat healthy food, for example, is in itself revolutionary”, he wrote, “because in order for that demand to be met it would be necessary to abolish the totality of the social relationships under capitalism”. (6)

Like John Ruskin, William Morris and Herbert Read, Semprun felt an overwhelming aesthetic distaste for the modern industrial world, arguing that its character was made quite clear by its sheer physical ugliness. (7)

He called out those who adopted pseudo-radical postures while actually defending the assumptions of this foul system. His 1976 pamphlet Précis de récuperation targeted postmodernists like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze on this account, but Semprun identified the problem as polluting much of the so-called left.

The root problem was the general acceptance of the notion of “progress” as a means of interpreting history.

For Semprun, explains Patrick Marcolini, this notion was merely “a product of the bourgeois industrial age”. (8) For him, contemporary technology and science carried no promise of liberation – “on the contrary they form part of the structures of domination which have to be brought down”. (9)

The bourgeois-industrial concept of progress was accepted uncritically among supposed dissidents because of a state of mind that was itself a by-product of the general lowering of quality in industrial times, said Semprun.

He condemned “amnesia, identification with modernity and the hatred of critical thinking”, (10) commenting: “In the old days it was forbidden to think freely; today we have gained the right but lost the ability”. (11)

In Dialogues sur l’achèvement des temps modernes he has his character Ziffel declare: “What we are most missing today is individuals. Marxism told us that man is only the product of the social conditions in which he lives and that his individual conscience is a mere illusion, his freedom a sleight-of-hand and so on. And voilà, just through writing such horrible stuff, it ends up coming true”. (12)

Semprun shared Orwell’s distaste for conformist groupthink, and condemned modern followers of so-called democracy with their “remote-controlled indignation, their way of expressing all together and to order their hatred of those denounced to them as totalitarians, fanatics, or as racists, terrorists, in short as lunatics putting progress itself in danger”. (13)

The left-wing identification with modernity had lent a strange meaninglessness to terms such as “reactionary”, used to attack anyone who opposed the contemporary industrial capitalist machine.

“Everyone is so caught up in what they call progress that you could go as far as to say that if there were today any consistent reactionaries, they would certainly be mistaken for revolutionaries”, (14) wrote Semprun, but not without stressing that “criticism of the modern world is something too important to be left to reactionaries and nostalgists”. (15)

In common with other organic radicals and the anti-capitalist romantics identified by Michael Löwy, Semprun saw nothing wrong with looking to the past for inspiration as to how we might imagine another, non-capitalist, world, referring in a posthumously-published essay to “a past which was still filled with a future that we can imagine could have been, which could still be”. (16)

He was one of the first to expose the emptiness of the now-dominant strand of “environmentalism” which remains firmly embedded within the modern mindset and seeks “solutions” to environmental crisis in the development and production of yet more industrial technology.

He warned, with Riesel, that “precisely the same intellectual and material means used to build this world threatened with ruin, this teetering edifice, are now being deployed to diagnose the problem and recommend a remedy” (17) – which did not augur well for a successful outcome.

Semprun died in 2010, before “climate capitalism” raised the art of greenwashing to new levels of duplicity, but had astutely predicted that “the illusion-merchants have happy days ahead of them. During the disaster, the selling goes on”. (18)

As a genuine revolutionary, he of course completely discounted any possibility of ever creating a better world by reforming or adapting the very industrial capitalism which got us into this mess in the first place.

In Dialogues, the two characters discuss the difficulties in fighting a dominant system whose processes of production, distribution and domination, whose economic and social relationships and whose ideologies are so tightly and inextricably intertwined. Remarks Kalle: “You know full well how to deal with Gordian knots”. (19)

For those not familiar with the legends surrounding Alexander the Great, he is said to have sliced the knot in two with one powerful stroke of his mighty sword.

1. Jaime Semprun, Dialogues sur l’achèvement des temps modernes (Paris: Éditions de l’Encyclopédie, 1993), p. 44.
2. Jaime Semprun, L’Abîme se repeuple (Paris: Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances, 1997), p. 54.
3. Semprun, Dialogues, p. 46.
4. Semprun, Dialogues, p. 86.
5. www.oeuvresouvertes.net/IMG/pdf/Communique_EdN_9_aout_2010-2.pdf
6. Semprun, Dialogues, pp. 122-23.
7. Jaime Semprun et René Riesel, Catastrophisme, administration du désastre et soumission durable (Paris: Éditions de l’Encyclopédie, 2008), IX.
8. Patrick Marcolini, ‘Jaime Semprun’, Aux origines de la décroissance, co-ordonné par Cédric Bagini, David Murray, Pierre Thiesset (Paris: L’Échappée, 2017), p 279.
9. Marcolini, Aux origines de la décroissance, p. 278.
10. Semprun, L’Abîme se repeuple, p. 29.
11. Semprun, Dialogues, p. 133.
12. Semprun, Dialogues, p. 31.
13. Semprun, L’Abîme se repeuple, p. 14.
14. Semprun, Dialogues, p. 34.
15. Semprun, Dialogues, p 37.
16. Jaime Semprun, Andromaque, je pense à vous, suivi de fragments retrouvés (Paris: Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances, 2011), p. 18.
17. Semprun et Riesel, Catastrophisme, administration du désastre et soumission durable, X.
18. Semprun, Dialogues, p. 59.
19. Semprun, Dialogues, p. 93.

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6. Acorninfo

The Great Reset (aka Build Back Better, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the New Normal or the New Deal for Nature) is an attempted global capitalist coup on a scale never before imagined. The more that people are aware of what this vile billionaire elite are really up to, the less chance they have of getting away with it, so we have set up a Great Reset page, an ever-expanding collection of resources to help spread awareness and, therefore, resistance!

* * *

A timely bundle of in-depth reports and analysis on the anti-lockdown revolts spreading across Europe has been published by Crimethinc. In particular, it demolishes the divisive claim that the protests are “right-wing” and should therefore be snubbed by anarchists and the left, noting: “Like the Gilets Jaunes movement in France, most of the protests across southern Europe involve a contradictory mix of people”.

* * *

“They’re looking at an operating system for the world. It’s essentially as if the world were remade by the CIA to profit hedge funds. How does capital circulate if nobody is making any money and everyone’s in debt? You create a new game where the poor can be gambled on as investment commodities”. Crucial insights into the Great Reset agenda from Alison McDowell in this video talk.

* * *

“The truth is that your life and how you live it is over, unless you do something about it – now!”. In this important short video, the Books of Ours team warn about the merger of state and business to create 21st century global fascist feudalism.

* * *

“Can you see what’s happening? Anywhere people can meet up to be sociable and entertained is under threat. As things currently stand it feels like there will be no end to this. We face a more atomised, lonely and fearful future. One where an increasing amount of our interactions will be digital rather than face to face. A depressing future where many of us will be merely existing rather than truly living”. A powerful warning from South Essex Radical Media.

* * *

Make no mistake, for all the greenwashing around the 5G-enabled Fourth Industrial Revolution, it spells further disaster for the natural world, as a new report into 5G from the US state of New Hampshire concluded. Meanwhile, Plymouth Sound, a stretch of sea off southern England, is to be home to “the world’s first 5G ocean-based marine testbed”, according to reports. This “will enable ultrafast download speeds and low-latency 5G connectivity to support the development of new marine technology”. Did anyone consult the fish?

* * *

Did you know that there is an international campaign focused on stopping the so-called New Deal For Nature, the corporate coup of the commons under the guise of protecting and restoring nature? Check out the No Deal for Nature site here and its informative Twitter account here.

* * *

New propaganda techniques being used in 2020 are analysed by Cory Morningstar, Hiroyuki Hamada and Varun Mathur in this superb December 7 video panel discussion with Jason Bosch, ‘Purpose Messaging for Compliance and Social Engineering‘.

* * *

A riddle for you all. What is it that links Hitler’s SS with Al-Qaeda? Why, it’s NATO and the CIA, of course! An enlightening talk with Hugo Turner.

* * *

Acorn quote:

“There is an undeniable glory in the thought that an indelible temporal bond links us, not only with our ancestors and our descendants, but above all also with the whole rest of the organic world”.

Constantin von Monakow

(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)

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The Acorn 15

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The Acorn – 61

Posted on October 28, 2020October 28, 2020 by winter oak

acorn 2019b Number 61

In this issue:

Libertà, libertà, libertà!
Us against them
To the humans who refuse to disappear!
England is a prison
William Blake: an orgrad inspiration
Acorninfo

1. Libertà, libertà, libertà!

A61 napoli2

“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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

A61 london

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!

2. Us against them

Ingsoc rally

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.

alwaysantifascist copy 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…

we-are-the-99-percent1 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!

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3. To the humans who refuse to disappear!

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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.

macron facho

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

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4. England is a prison

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?

Boris Johnson youth

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.

Gerrard Winstanley3

“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)

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5. William Blake: an orgrad inspiration

The latest in our serious of profiles from the orgrad website.

William Blake1

“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.

Industrial revolution 18C

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 newton — Blake’s depiction of Newton

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)

Blake London

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.

Blake - Urizen.jpg

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)

blake comus 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.

blake - what is man.jpg

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).

blake the glad day.jpg 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.

blake the ecchoing green 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)

william-blake2

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.

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6. Acorninfo

“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.

wrench in the gears

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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.

mask pollution

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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”.

vandana-shiva

* * *

“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.

hybrid war

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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”.

belgian doctors

* * *

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”.

assange-g

* * *

“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.

child in mask

* * *

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.

Reiner Fuellmich

* * *

“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…

million-mask-march1

* * *

Acorn quote:

“Technological optimism is the snake oil of urban-industrialism”.

Theodore Roszak

technology3

(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)

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The Acorn 15

Follow Winter Oak on Twitter at @WinterOakPress

We are the 99%!

Posted on September 27, 2020September 28, 2020 by winter oak

acorn 2019b Special photo report by Max Hogster

sep26d

“The new normal is not normal, it’s no kind of normal at all”.

So declares rock legend Van Morrison in “Born to Be Free“, a protest song against the nighmare global police state which the ruling elite are trying to impose on us all.

And another protest song was ringing out in London’s Trafalgar Square on Saturday September 26.

“We are the 99%!” sang tens of thousands of people who have seen through the lies and propaganda with which they have been besieged. “You can stick your new world order up your arse!”

This was another big day for the fast-growing UK revolt against the totalitarian Covid coup.

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“We are born free!” declared one placard, echoing Van Morrison’s song.

“Peace, truth, freedom” and “You will not steal our freedom”, read others.

The message was clear: “No Vax, No Trax, No Masks”, “How much did Bill pay you, Boris?”,

“Quarantine is sick people being locked up. Tyranny is healthy people being locked up”.

“The reason why the UK is getting a second wave is because it fits the political agenda and narrative”.

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The system’s propaganda was neatly turned around and used against it: “If someone asks you why you don’t wear a facemask, tell them you don’t believe in conspiracy theories”.

“There is an increase in Covid 19 cases because there has been an increase in testing. If more people took IQ tests, there would be an increase in idiots too”.

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Apart from the spray from the fountains on a windy day, and difficulties in hearing the speakers from long range, the mood was good and all was going well until the police turned up…

They had been spotted moving in to the sides of crowd in front of the National Gallery and most people followed the suggestion to sit down in defiance.

At this point the cops started wading into the crowd and attacking people, including women.

As usual the authorities tried to suggest that the aggression had come from the protesters.

But this video footage makes it quite clear that the Met police attacked a calm and good-natured gathering.

This is our rulers’ age-old tactic, of course. Attack protests and then claim via their tame media that the protesters are “violent”, thus frightening off potential supporters.

Indeed, the Met Police themselves did not even claim that they were intervening because of any disorder among protesters but instead justified their assault on the basis that the authorised “risk assessment” had been breached and “The Virus” was at risk of being spread.

They seemed blissfully unaware of any irony in weighing in with truncheons to attack perfectly safe and healthy people under the pretext of protecting “health and safety”!

After the police assault, people were not sure what to do, but word went round to go to Hyde Park.

Protesters flooded out of the square into busy traffic and snaked their way through streets to Green Park.

Lots of cars were hooting support and police seemed to be wrong-footed by this spontaneous wildcat march.

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The protest then headed over Park Lane to Hyde Park, where thousands congregated near Speakers’ Corner.

Again police moved in to stop this unauthorised display of dissent and some scuffles broke out as people stood up to the masked thugs-in-blue.

Long lines of police, spread out across the park, started moving towards the crowd, so people headed back through the gate across Park Lane, into side streets, and back towards Trafalgar Square.

‘Territorial Support’ vans were spotted frantically speeding around the ends of roads as the protesters advanced.

The spontaneous ‘cat and mouse’ nature of the protest meant police couldn’t anticipate where to deploy, despite the helicopter hovering overhead.

For details of upcoming protests, keep an eye on the StandUpX website. But, just as importantly, spread the flame of revolt wherever you live.

Together, we can see off this fascist coup!

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See also:

The Uprising Has Begun

The Acorn 60

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The Acorn 15

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The Acorn – 60

Posted on September 17, 2020September 21, 2020 by winter oak

acorn 2019b Number 60

In this issue:

Resisting global fascism
“We are not dupes!”
‘Anarchists’ join the Government in the fight against nature and the stripping of our rights
Intoxicated with technology
Bharatan Kumarappa: an orgrad inspiration
Acorninfo

1. Resisting global fascism

From Belgrade to Montreal, from Dublin to Warsaw, from Auckland to Hull, thousands upon thousands of people are saying ‘no’ to the capitalo-fascist new world normal.

We are delighted to report that so many protests are breaking out, that we can hardly keep up any more, but here are a few highlights…

Huge crowds protested two weeks ago in Croatia against the Covid-based dictatorship.

Banners included: “Take off the mask, turn off the TV, live life to the fullest”, “Covid is a lie, we’re not all covidiots” and “Better the grave than to be a slave”.

On September 12 a crowd of at least 1,000 gathered outside the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, demanding the lifting of Covid-19 restrictions.

Said one media report: “Protesters booed the World Health Organization (WHO), which has its headquarters in Geneva, and criticised the global health body for its efforts to find a Covid-19 vaccine. Some accused the WHO of being controlled by outside interests”.

Parents and schoolchildren in Utah, USA, have been making headlines for protesting against compulsory masks.

“Freedom is essential, rights are essential!” was the message at a massive anti-lockdown Freedom Rally in Vancouver, Canada, on September 13.

On September 14 a crowd of anti-mask protesters walked through a supermarket in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA, shouting “take your masks off!” and “we’re not going to take it any more!”.

In the UK, there are signs that the government’s new “rule of six” restrictions could prove to be the final straw that broke the Covid camel’s back.

“We’re winning!” declared Brian Gerrish of stalwartly anti-lockdown UK Column on September 14.

Even previously unquestioning individuals are now noticing that there is an agenda behind all of this, which has absolutely nothing to do with protecting people from a virus.

Some well-known figures are also starting to speak up. Noel Gallagher of rock group Oasis said on September 14 that he refuses to wear a mask, adding: “The whole thing’s bollocks. You’re supposed to wear them in Selfridges, yet you can f*cking go down the pub and be surrounded by every fucking c*nt. Do you know what I mean? There’s too many fucking liberties being taken away… I just think it’s a piss take”.

Ian Brown, erstwhile lead singer with the Stone Roses, pointed out on the same day that “conspiracy theorist” is “a term invented by the lame stream media to discredit those who can smell and see through the government/media lies and propaganda”.

Alongside general flouting of the police-state rules and increasing contempt for the system which is imposing it, demonstrations are also being staged around the country. See the StandUpX site for latest details.

Two more big protests are coming up in London, with mass gatherings being advertised for 12 noon in Trafalgar Square on both Saturday September 19 and Saturday September 26.

We are again calling for Acorn readers to take an active part in these protests, not least in order to influence other rebels in a healthily radical political direction.

Our pdf version of ‘Resist the Fourth Industrial Repression’ is designed to be handed out at events like these, for example (hint, hint).

The freedom-loving anarchists at The South Essex Heckler put it this way: “While we’ve made it pretty clear we have no brief for the organisers of these protests and some of the dubious speakers they invite, we would urge anarchists and radicals to leave their comfort zones and try to engage with those who choose to attend.

“There are two reasons for this. Firstly to offer an alternative pole of attraction to the alt right elements who are sniffing round the fringes and seeking to capitalise on people’s growing anger at the imposition of the ‘new normal’.

“Secondly, if these protests are broken up with some degree of force and followed up with numerous prosecutions, bear in mind that it could well be us next in line for this treatment”.

As another anarchist, Paul Cudenec, recently wrote on his blog: “Our resistance needs to come from our hearts. We need to shake off worries about the consequences of speaking up and fighting back – we need to go with what we feel is right.

“We need to tap into the energies of solidarity, belonging and togetherness that have always played a huge role in human society but which are being deliberately destroyed by those who would control us”.

We also echo the words of Alan Hamilton, in a September 16 piece on the Off-Guardian site: “My personal opinion is that the global program of lockdowns is a mechanism for reorganizing societies around the world along the lines of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda and all that this entails”.

“The only way we will arrest and/or reverse this trend is if we all take direct, non-violent, physical (not digital) action to exercise our civic and democratic rights at every opportunity we can. The time to speak up and stand up is now. It will be too late tomorrow”.

See also: The uprising has begun!

2. “We are not dupes!”

France and England are only 21 miles apart at the closest point, but in the political realm the distance can feel a lot more substantial.

At a moment when people across the world are rebelling against the global Covid-coup dictatorship (see above), France has a bit of a head-start.

It already has an well-organised autonomous grassroots street movement opposed to authoritarian global neoliberalism, which knows full well that the mass media pump out pro-system propaganda, that the police are violent thugs sent out to crush dissent and that western “democracy” is a hollow illusion hiding a corrupt and murderous tyranny!

The Gilets Jaunes were back in action on Saturday September 12, with big turn-outs in Paris and all over the country reminding the Macronist regime that they are still a force to be reckoned with.

The regional protest in the southern city of Montpellier attracted an impressive crowd despite inevitably being banned by the authorities.

The march got under way in almost comic circumstances, after riot cops turned up in the Place de la Comédie and tried to encircle the hundreds who were gathering.

But the roles were quickly reversed and the police found themselves surrounded by a ring of protesters.

This obviously made them feel uncomfortable and they retreated to the edge of the square, leaving the way clear for the protest to head off up the road from which the cops had initially emerged, setting off a yellow flare in celebration.

The march was feisty, up-beat and of all ages, animated by the usual songs about Macron and the fight for “a better world” and by chants of “a-, anti-, anti-capitalista” and “révolution!”.

“We are not dupes!” declared one placard. “They are not corrupt, they are the corruption!” said another.

The protest wound through little alleys in the medieval city centre, occasionally breaking into smaller groups and largely succeeding in avoiding the cops, although some protesters were confronted with tear gas.

The Gilets Jaunes’ message remains the same as before the Covid crisis and the movement as a whole is not explicitly anti-mask or Covid-sceptic.

But leaflets were going around on the Montpellier demo with a specifically anti-mask message and voices challenging the Covid narrative were certainly not shouted down or confronted by fellow protesters. There is clearly, at the very least, an overlap.

The big difference with the UK is that there is no need in France for those rebelling against the New Normal to form a new movement, because the Gilets Jaunes are already there.

When the movement emerged in November 2018, it was regarded with suspicion by many on the left, because it included nationalist and far right elements.

But, because of its fundamental anti-state and anti-capitalist position, the new movement quickly found its identity as a broad anti-system alliance untainted either by the racism of the right or the more absurd ultraliberal dogma of the left.

In other words, it already has the strength and maturity to take on board criticism of newnormalist totalitarianism without running scared of ideological contamination from a fetishized “diametric opposite”.

UK anti-capitalists please take note.

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3. ‘Anarchists’ join the Government in the fight against nature and the stripping of our rights

by Marion (anarchist since 1982)

I wonder when the left started being in favour of the (police?) state. I wonder when people stopped thinking for themselves and started blindly believing the media. I wonder when people who believed in natural remedies started believing the pharmaceutical giants instead. I’m sure they haven’t always done that.

I wonder when anarchism stopped meaning people taking charge of their life and started meaning submitting to whatever the authorities decide is right. In fact I remember a time when the majority (not even just anarchists and the left) started to realise the government and the media were telling porkies. Suddenly, because of a virus, all that seems to have changed with some people.

Yes, we were all saying at first (and still are saying) that wet markets should be abolished. Of course they do; but isn’t that difficult to campaign about from the UK (except for the UK ones)? While wet markets continue, there will be viruses and we need to be able to deal (naturally) with those viruses while they are around. Of course, the virus may have come from a laboratory instead, accidentally or deliberately, but either way viruses should not be manufactured whether for biological warfare or to develop strategies against pathogens; it’s dangerous! But for a lot of anarchists, lefties and animal rights people this hasn’t appeared to move on to questioning how a virus could be dealt with or to advocating living in more natural ways.

Authorities know that they can control people either through fear or by telling people they are saving lives. Because anarchists tend to protect the underdog, the vulnerable, the disabled etc, this has worked superbly with them. They believe that the extreme measures in this crazy new world is protecting those people. Yet lockdown, social distancing and cancelling everything that isn’t to do with Covid makes many vulnerable people’s lives more difficult – a shame that needs to be said as it is really so obvious; elderly people not allowed to see their families or sit with others, elderly and disabled having to queue and use stairs because lifts are not in use, people dying because of cancelled operations, the stress of not being able to get through to services and organisations. And ‘containing’ the virus means keeping it.

In early March people were carrying on with their activities as normal; these were not all reckless and selfish people; they included mindful types; martial arts enthusiasts, drama groups, yoga teachers and herbalists. We agreed that sick or vulnerable people should avoid public places wherever possible – so far fine. We were helping people with compromised immune systems by leaving shopping and remedies outside their houses. Then lockdown.

Some anarchists say they were locking down, masking up etc before actual lockdown began but I’m sure it was not long before; the first case of the virus in the UK was in January yet those anarchists were not distancing for a long time unless they were sick or vulnerable. Then the fear and the idea of ‘responsibility’ seeped in, fuelled by propaganda and media hysteria and, after advice and then orders from the Government, they stopped their activities. This was not just because they were furloughed or paid by the Government; some moved them online (as if we don’t already use computers more than is good for us).

Some, bizarrely, stopped talking about vitamins, herbs, good diet, exercise. Neal’s Yard closed its shop (apparently through lack of customers). After a while some thought any group activities to be dangerous and that ‘not hugging’ is a loving act (rather than hugging actually improving the immune system).

Nearly six months after the first case of Covid-19 in the UK, we are being told to wear masks and still to social distance, yet at the beginning of the crisis, pandemic or whatever you want to call it and even in the worst part of it, there were very few people wearing them. Masks only actually protect other people, not the person wearing it, for whom it’s quite bad for their health and uncomfortable, unless you’re just wearing a scarf around your face.

During every flu epidemic, Swineflu etc, have people even discussed social distancing, locking down, wearing masks, mass vaccination of the population? Certainly we should be careful during those times, look after our health, perhaps not go to places that are too crowded etc and being responsible is a good thing if it is well-thought-out with good reasoning. But we have never before gone to these extremes, shutting everything down, distancing etc, and if you look at the facts and the science, CV-19 is no worse than any other disease we have had.*

As for vaccination, which everything seems to be moving towards and some anarchists and even animal rights people are actually wanting, well, we have natural immune systems; vaccinations tamper with them and actually make us less immune to viruses in general, and sometimes worse (brain damage etc).

Is this compliance by anarchists also because of not wanting to be associated with the Alt Right? That right-wing libertarians (including Trump) believe in freedom (or say they do), therefore the left want absolutely nothing to do with freedom? Even though the Freedom organisation is still called that!

Of course, we know that Trump and Bolsanaro and Johnson and libertarian capitalists don’t really agree with freedom, or only for themselves, not for poor people. There is a hatred of ‘conspiracy theories’ among the left. This is despite most anarchists believing in at least some of them; the facts that GM crops are bad news and that vaccinations sometimes have detrimental effects are actually classed by some as conspiracy theories. Many of those theories have quickly become facts, such as there are no WMDs hidden in Iraq.

Now many anarchists seem to disbelieve and ridicule the fact that natural remedies and herbs can often cure diseases. They identify conspiracy theories with right wing (and I think aligning conspiracy theory with right wing ideology is a conspiracy itself, by those that control us). I’m sure the ‘alternative’ people didn’t use to believe everything the medical profession and Big Pharma told them. What is right wing about a belief in natural cures and preventions?!

It’s also because they have been caught up by the old Divide and Rule tactic. The rulers (governments, Deep State, multinationals, Bilderberg or whoever) do that to people all the time; anarchists should know that, yet many of them are being duped by it. They really should know better. I guess those in power must be clever. They did Divide and Rule very well with Brexit, they’ve always done it in condemning people, via the media, who are taking strike action, and with countless other issues. We need to be cleverer; that involves thinking for ourselves more, a lot more.

Some anarchists and lefties are doing that, the ones who don’t blindly follow the pack but have questioning minds and independent views. We need to stop complying with what the government says but instead do what we think is right; if enough people do that the state(s) will have no power.

So why can’t we reclaim the concept of freedom from the ‘alt right’? Instead, a lot of anarchists are renouncing everything about freedom and self-governance, saying that actually anarchism is about mutual aid. Yes of course mutual aid comes into the anarchist ideology but the actual definition of anarchism is ‘without government’. It does not allow for coercion in any way – either by laws, physical coercion or guilt-tripping (which I have heard a lot of).

Another thing that has been happening is that some anarchists are accusing the anti-lockdowners of being selfish. Yet in reality there is selfishness and selflessness on both sides. Many anti-lockdowners are empathic about people losing their jobs and possibly their homes, about other people living on their own, people who have no garden. And many who believe lockdown was/is the right thing to do are in a situation where they are not affected by it, being paid for not having to work (and so they should be, especially in this situation), taking the opportunity to do creative or educational things, so it seems to me that some of them like lockdown because it is personally good for them.

And of course some anti-lockdowners are that mainly for selfish reasons and some who are pro lockdown are not benefitting from it but believe in some way that it is saving others. There are also a lot of people (all of us?) who contradict ourselves, eg, one minute we say it’s tragic that the elderly are on their own at the end of their life and then say it has to be done.

Whether you are pro or anti lockdown is really not about selfish or unselfish; I believe it is about behaving sanely in an insane world. It is about working with nature rather than fighting against it (and with the government and the pharmaceutical industry). It is about thinking for yourself, rather than going along with what your friends or comrades are saying or what the WHO, NHS, media and government is saying.

Actually this new normal is not that new really; a lot of things have been leading up to this point, such as new regulations against alternative remedies being brought in, extreme health and safety rules, increasingly severe anti-union laws, the criminalisation of squatting and increased surveillance.

Apart from all of this, it is so obvious that what the authorities are doing has nothing to do with a virus, so either there was a conspiracy from the beginning or they are using the situation to control us and bring in new rules and systems. It may be governments doing it but I think more likely it is a group of world technocrats making governments do it (Johnson etc being puppets).

Here are just ten of the reasons for thinking there is a hidden agenda:

1. No lockdown or social distancing was done during all other epidemics or pandemics, except perhaps in China and some other far eastern countries.
2. Quarantines when coming into the UK from other countries were not brought in until June, five months after the first case.
3. Elderly put into care homes after discharge from hospital, including those who possibly had CV-19.
4. If they really wanted to end the virus they would test for antibodies, a far more effective way of controlling a virus and stopping it spreading.
5. Doctors are being made to put CV-19 as cause of death when it was not: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53443724
6. CV-19 cases are being counted twice (admitted by the mainstream media now such as Sky News).
7. Masks have become mandatory six months after the first CV-19 case, why not before?
8. New lockdowns have been brought in when there are very few new cases and deaths, even if they were really all Covid deaths, eg. 5 new CV deaths per day in the whole of Spain, 7 new deaths in Victoria, Australia.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-53627038
9. The World Health Organisation itself has said that children do not pass covid to adults. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/children-don-e2-80-99t-pass-covid-19-to-adults-report-indicates/ar-BB13psyK
10. Bill Gates has said he wants to vaccinate the entire world! https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2020/04/23/good-morning-coronazombies-diary-of-a-bio-political-crisis-event/

There are many more. Everyone knows about the multitude of contradictions in the information about the virus and in the rules; some recent ones are ferry companies saying passengers are now not allowed to stay in their vehicles and that medical prescriptions must now be ordered by coming to the health centre while the clinics are at the same time saying they are trying to minimise visits to those clinics.

If anyone thinks this is all just ignorance and incompetence on the part of the governments and big business, no it cannot be, they are not that stupid! The answer to all of this is that the agenda is not to control the virus; that is not why they are doing all these things. But I’m not going to tell you why they’re doing it because I’d be guessing (though it could be because the pharmaceutical industry and others want to make more money, because the authorities want to control us because they’re worried we’re questioning governments too much, because they’re doing all this as a step before doing something else bigger and even more controlling, because they want to ‘re-set’, because they want to bring in a new world order); that’s for everyone to find out.

* https://www.globalresearch.ca/manufactured-pandemic-testing-people-any-strain-coronavirus-not-specifically-covid-19/5707781
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/490006-death-certificates-covid-19-do-not-trust/?fbclid=IwAR35QpanoT3JTVphvW3xaVF5-ahpblv6hrIkhQcNBRmENaUtqWFSlBFsBeo
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/04/26/er-doctor-claims-covid-19-is-being-made-to-look-worse-than-it-really-is/

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4. Intoxicated with technology

by Ronan

Intoxicated by our technology
Some so smitten
They wish to merge it with their biology
Eyeing up parts of their anatomy
Being human is just
Not enough for me
I swear I was born to be a God
I feel so restricted by my human form
Once I’m done
I’ll stalk the earth like Magog
it’s all perfectly natural
It’s Darwinian progress see
It’s not that I don’t like being human
Or that I’m envious of machines
and what we can do with them
I just honestly think it’s a good idea
To change my natural frequency
So I can become a superman
and live in a permanent delinquency
After all, what has the Human form done for me
I want to be like those superheroes they have on the big screens
Transhumanism is the future human you see
Some geek guy said that on a curved TV
He must be right as he has a PhD
But wait a minute what about our friends the Military
Oh those guys are just 50 steps ahead
Always have our best interests
At the forefront of their intent
They’re slowly showing us what’s behind their curtain
A twisted form of humanity they envisage
Of this, you can be certain
A cyborg soldier will never disobey
Retreat or show combat dismay
Have we really exhausted all of our potential and capabilities
Tapped every brain cell explored every possibility
Obviously, this thing will never get abused
As they’ve got a computer program
To make sure I don’t get con”fused”
Oh it’s so lucky they’ve thought of everything
The fourth industrial age is aimed at us
Inside and outside
This technological economic bubble
Will never go bust
As a human being can be conditioned to want more
In this, you can trust.
Edward Bernays proved that without any fuss
Once we’re told we can upgrade ourselves
Then I’ll know we’ve turned paradise into hell
I’m suspicious as fuck about all of this
Technological implants ain’t for me
I’ll take my chances with my faults and flaws
As they’re an intrinsic part of who I’m meant to be
Overcoming these things is the path to real personal growth
understanding what you are and are not
Is probably more important than both
Are we really standing at a possible Cyborg future
If we are I might start shooting
I’ll tell them I thought it was a giant malfunctioning toaster
But no doubt the judge will be a robot
Humans can’t be trusted it seems
But I’m more worried about some of our ideas
Once that is they’re allowed to roam free

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5. Bharatan Kumarappa: an orgrad inspiration

The latest in our serious of profiles from the orgrad website.

“Unless something radical is done to Capitalism, it would seem that through it humanity is likely to be wiped out”

Bharatan Kumarappa (1896-1957) was a scholar, writer and activist close to Mohandas Gandhi and, like him, strongly opposed to industrial-capitalist imperialism.

The younger brother of J. C. Kumarappa, he was the Indian editor of Gandhi’s collected works.

He wrote the book Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism, published in 1946, while a political prisoner of the British occupying regime.

Gandhi, in his foreword to this work, credits Kumarappa with coining the word “villagism” to describe their shared vision of a decentralised community-based way of living built on traditional crafts and culture.

traditional indian life

Kumarappa aimed the book at Indian village workers, rather than at intellectuals and used it to convey a powerful anti-capitalist message.

He declared: “Unless something radical is done to Capitalism, it would seem that through it humanity is likely to be wiped out”. (1)

Kumarappa said that capitalism’s cult of uncontrolled selfishness was the worst possible basis for any civilization and had created societies “where men in their greed for gain become worse than brutes and compete with each other in fraud, deception, inhuman cruelties and world-wide exploitation and destruction”. (2)

In the religious language of the Bhagavad Gita, he said, capitalism had in fact led “to the establishment of a world of demons”. (3)

In common with Gandhi and other thinkers who inspire organic radicalism, Kumarappa insisted that complete rejection of capitalism must go deeper than the surface of its political presence and address the physical existence of its centralised industrial infrastructures.

india train

He wrote: “The instinct of the anarchist is right when he wants to do away with the tyranny of organisation. But, as we have already pointed out, this can be no more than a dream so long as large-scale production and distribution are adopted”. (4)

An advocate of what would today be termed “degrowth”, Kumarappa challenged the dominant definition of progress, warning that it should not be taken as meaning “a multitude of goods”. (5)

He explained: “If it is realised that progress is not so much a matter of the material environment as a growth in the intelligence, character and artistic sense of the individual, it would seem that it is only under a decentralised economic order that true progress will be possible.

“On the other hand, today, under the centralised economic order, we appear to be descending below the level of the beast, hating, exploiting and destroying each other on a world scale, and reducing the average man to a standardised automaton incapable of thinking and acting for himself”. (6)

Indian money 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”.

He asked: “Why should not a man who is eager to give his labour or his produce have direct access to the commodities he wants without first having to change them into money?” (7)

Kumarappa said that however much an economic system might succeed in bringing riches, it would be unstable and prove a failure if in the process it caused human suffering, or in any way hindered people from a full life.

He added: “And, conversely, even if an economic system secures only a subsistence, it will prove stable and adequate if it tends to promote the well-being of all”. (8)

This alternative Gandhian system, villagism, was rooted in ancient pre-capitalist ways of living and was not directly drawn from the Western socialist tradition, he explained.

“The idea of social ownership of production and sharing of things in common was not original to Socialism. Such an arrangement existed in some form or other even in early times, when a whole community or village held land and other property in common and distributed wealth among its members”. (9)

soviet state Indeed, Kumarappa was highly critical of orthodox socialism for its dependence on a central state to manage its supposedly egalitarian society.

He warned: “As Capitalism took away wealth which rightly belonged to the people and accumulated it in the hands of the capitalist, Socialism takes away the power which rightly belongs to the people and concentrates it in the State.

“And concentration of power is not less dangerous than concentration of wealth; for men get intoxicated with power and can use it with disastrous effect against those who disagree with them”. (10)

A decentralised village-orientated way of life was a bulwark against all concentrations of power, on the national and international level: “We must not think of Villagism therefore as only a matter of economic arrangement but as a social order aiming at ridding the world of imperialism and war”. (11)

Ramanuja 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)

To do this, he focused on the teaching of his Tamil predecessor, Ramanuja, the medieval Hindu theologian and philosopher of the Sri Vaishnavism tradition, as opposed to the earlier theology of Adis Shankara or Samkara

Kumarappa said some in the West seemed to imagine that Hinduism regarded the world of experience, the world of life and activity, as unreal.

He objected: “Even if such a criticism be true of Samkara’s philosophy, it certainly cannot claim to be true of all Hindu philosophy.

“Ramanuja, at any rate, repudiates at every turn the doctrine of the illusoriness of the material world and the finite self, and postulates that ultimate Reality is one in which the material world and finite self find a necessary place.

“Nay more, he claims that the ideals by which we live – the perfections of truth, goodness and love – are rooted in the very heart of the Eternal”. (13)

B Kumarappa book2

1. Bharatan Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism (Madras: Shakti Press, 1946), p. 11.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism, p. 104.
5. Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism, p. 193.
6. Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism, pp. 193-94.
7. Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism, p. 153.
8. Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism, p. 112.
9. Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism, p. 58.
10. Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism, p. 105.
11. Kumarappa, Capitalism, Socialism or Villagism, p. 192.
12. Bharatan Kumarappa, The Hindu Conception of the Deity: As Culminating in Ramanuja (Luzak & Co, 1934), p. xiv.
13. Kumarappa, The Hindu Conception of the Deity, p.xiii.

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6. Acorninfo

Hinduism is the world’s largest nature-based religion, recognising the sacred in the living world around us, writes Viva Kermani in this enlightening article. She continues: “It views the earth as our Mother, and hence, advocates that it should not be exploited. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse, and the exploitation of the earth and its resources”.

* * *

“Our country is being run by a real-life mafia, comprised of a small group who has assumed a powerful form of global authority. These mafia heads have many minions who populate the pharmaceutical industry and government leadership and regulatory positions. These mafia underlings then have their many minions which include elected officials, university and education system officials, the mainstream media, and public health officials. And as of late, this despotic mafia has succeeded in enlisting citizens to ‘police’ one another, both voluntarily and for pay, via snitch lines, social media shaming, contact tracers, informants who report violations, and non-police enforcers of mask wearing and physical distancing”. Powerful stuff from Laura Hayes in ‘The Catastrophic Costs of Complying‘.

* * *

“We are now taking this Corona investigation into our own hands because we can no longer wait” says Dr. Heiko Schöning of the recently-launched international Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee. With the shocking absence of any scrutiny of the many dubious aspects of the Covid coup, this is a much-needed initiative.

* * *

Scientists have created a new type of robot which they claim is “literally alive”. Says this report: “Xenobots are a scientific and technological breakthrough — a living organism that is fully programmable, capable of changing form and function essentially on command”. Coincidentally, that also seems to be the preferred destiny for what were once free human beings…

* * *

“Foundations often collaborate closely with the CIA, but it would be incorrect to say that the foundations are controlled by the CIA. It is rather that same people who control the foundations, also control the government – including the CIA”, explains Gregory Sinaisky in ‘Fabricating a Pandemic – Who Could Organize It and Why‘. He adds: “The plutocrats have huge resources and many thousands of trained professionals to perform these tasks. Therefore, they are very likely to have the appropriate tools required to create a false pandemic”.

* * *

As the rhetoric of racial division increasingly eclipses the reality of a shared suffering under the rule of the global capitalist elite, a timely analysis of ‘Fascism and the Deadlock of Race‘ has been produced by Rhyd Wildermuth. He writes: “It benefits the capitalist class – and only truly the capitalist class – to reproduce and maintain race as a identity category”.

* * *

“This New Model robs children of their childhood. It will lead them to a life of debt and servitude”. ‘Lifelong Learning‘ is a superb video exposé created by the Book of Ours team, examining the chilling way in which the newnormalist elite regard other people’s children as nothing more than “human capital” to be controlled and exploited at their sociopathic leisure.

* * *

COVID-19: Evidence of Fraud, Medical Malpractice, Acts of Domestic Terrorism and Breaches of Human Rights is a very thorough and detailed report from Andrew Johnson, a “citizen of good conscience”. He explains: “This document submission brings together COVID-19 related evidence which most or all authorities seem to either be unaware of, or have decided to ignore. It is presented in an attempt to reverse this situation”.

* * *

Acorn quote: “Capitalism can only function if the mass of the population have no choice but to be part of its pyramid of exploitation. It cannot tolerate anyone opting out of its system and is always prepared to use violence to bring people under its economic control”.

Paul Cudenec

(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)

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Back Issues

The Acorn 15

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Resisting in the real world

Posted on September 3, 2020September 3, 2020 by winter oak

We have produced a printable pdf version of Resist the Fourth Industrial Repression! for distribution in the real world.

Let’s all spread the word about the nightmare future being imposed on us all by the technocratic capitalist elite!

Whether you leave one single copy in the local laundrette or hand out a few hundred on the next anti-lockdown protest – thank you!

The pdf can be downloaded here.

The uprising has begun!

Posted on August 30, 2020August 31, 2020 by winter oak

acorn 2019b Special report

Aug 29 photo 8 — Trafalgar Square, London, August 29, 2020

These last six months have been lonely and often desperate ones for those of us who have not swallowed the Covid agenda.

Not only have we seen our basic freedoms come under attack, but we have done so in the full and bitter knowledge that these draconian measures are not in the least bit necessary and not at all about “protecting” ourselves and our fellow citizens.

We have been assuaged with unrelenting fear-mongering propaganda that we know to be just that: even if we steer clear of corporate-state media, this is blasted out at us in the form of endless announcements, posters and notices and also mirrored grotesquely in the muzzled and cowed submission of those around us.

newnorrmalist grey world

We have had to be braced for constant conflict with the state’s officials and eager vigilantes out to impose compliance with the humiliating collective punishments of “lockdown”, “social distancing” and masks.

We have had to think twice about voicing our opinions, for fear of inviting not just disagreement, but outright hostility, abuse, insult, contempt and rejection, even from those to whom we imagined we were personally or politically closest.

And we haven’t been able to look forward to any happier years ahead of us, because all that we once hoped for has been swept aside by a chilling nightmare vision of faceless robotic slavery under the ruthless jackboot of the Fourth Industrial Repression.

But now, at the end of the 2020 summer, something has changed.

The massive demonstrations that took place in several European cities on Saturday August 29, notably London and Berlin, have broken us out of our solitary confinement.

We can see plainly now that there are others out there thinking the same way as us. Thousands upon thousands of others!

Trafalgar Square in London was packed full of protesters, with estimates of as many as 35,000 or 40,000 people, who later moved on to fill Whitehall.

aug291338

They managed to turn up through their own initiative, without party political, trade union or NGO organising, without fleets of hired coaches, promoted hashtags or XR-style media hype.

Of course, where the protest wasn’t simply ignored, it was always going to be smeared.

The “conspiracy theory” tag wasn’t hard to attach, given that David Icke was making a guest appearance, but that wasn’t enough of an insult for some.

So-called “leftists” and “anarchists” scrambled to share the same photo of a couple of men on the outer fringes of the square displaying (momentarily perhaps) a flag which apparently relates to the late and unlamented British Union of Fascists (disbanded 1940).

For these critics this single image was somehow triumphant proof that all the tens of thousands of people present were either “fascists” or being manipulated by fascists.

aug291380

These clowns are unwilling or (more charitably) unable to grasp that we are witnessing a historic reshaping of the essential political divide, as foreshadowed in France by the Gilets Jaunes since 2018.

This is now, quite simply, about ordinary people standing up to the exploitative dictatorship of the global capitalist technocratic elite.

At this moment of enormous existential crisis for the freedom and well-being of humankind, all certainties around previous political classifications have been thrown out of the window.

As one participant put it: “We are left, we are right, we are young, old, black, white, we are the working class. And our eyes are open. Don’t believe the hype. The Unite For Freedom march was very diverse. We cannot afford to be divided any longer”.

aug291368

This new 2020s wave of revolt is all about resisting the power of both big business and the state, with an understanding that these forces have now effectively merged.

Combined with its instinctive defence of freedom and real democracy, this makes it eminently compatible with common-sense anarchism of the old-fashioned variety, to which we subscribe.

If contemporary anarchists want to turn this potential into something more solid, then they are going to have to take off their protective mind-blinkers, brave the risk of political contamination from the Great Ideologically Unwashed, and get involved with the broad front.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, JFK’s nephew, addressed the same issue in Berlin, where the authorities (both of state and of ideological correctness) have slapped a “far right” label on the whole broad-based protest movement on the basis of minority nationalist involvement.

Robert F Kennedy Jr Berlin He told a massive freedom rally that the US media would accuse him of having come to Germany to address thousands of “Nazis”, but declared that what he was seeing before him was “the opposite of Nazism”.

“I see people who love democracy, people who want open government, people who want leaders who are not going to lie to them. People who want leaders who will not make up arbitrary rules and regulations to orchestrate obedience of the population.

“We want health officials who don’t want financial entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry, who are working for us and not Big Pharma.

“We want officials who care about our children’s health and not about pharmaceutical profits or government control”.

aug291360

It felt clear to us, when we wrote in advance about this weekend (see Acorn 59), that it was going to be huge and important. And so it has proved.

But what next? Various local demos are planned across England (for the latest info see the StandUpX website) and, north of the border, there will be a ‘Saving Scotland’ March on Holyrood.

The meet-up is near the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh at 1pm on Saturday September 5.

Saturday September 26 is being mentioned as the date of the next big protest in London.

As our comrades at the South Essex Heckler point out, though, large-scale set-piece demonstrations are not the be-all-and-end-all.

They write: “Sure, there’s a place for intelligently organised street protests and actions but more than that, there’s always a place for dispersed, sustained action that aims to sabotage and eventually bring down the existing order.

“We favour long term, dispersed action that will eventually crash the new (ab)normal. We’ve frequently posted about building the new world we want inside the shell of the increasingly dystopian one we’re forced to endure – now is the time to grab the opportunity to do just that”.

aug1361

Delighted though we are at the numbers now expressing their opposition to the totalitarian New World Normal, we don’t want to create any false sense of complacency.

What we are witnessing is just the start of a worldwide uprising.

aug291371 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.

If ignoring and smearing the protest movement does not successfully quell resistance, then we can expect other forms of repression to be deployed.

Outright police-state brutality is a real possibility, as the people of Melbourne, Australia, have been experiencing.

But this will always be a double-edged sword for the authorities, which is why they haven’t immediately leapt into that mode everywhere.

If it becomes blatantly obvious that opposition to their “Great Reset” is being crushed by force, they will start to lose the majority consent which they have been so careful to build up with their propaganda.

The cat will be out of the bag and they will risk stirring up the anger of huge swathes of the population, particularly if the resistance can remain untainted by “right” or “left” labels.

So we can probably expect lots more propaganda, divide-and-rule and other classic British “counter-insurgency” tactics to be deployed, and fail, before the state feels it needs to play its final violent card.

aug29xx

There is a tough struggle ahead of us, that’s for sure, with no guarantee that we will succeed in seeing off and bringing down the dark forces of corporate transhumanist dictatorship.

But at least we have those images of the August 29 protest in our heads, images of people, all kinds of people, united by their capacity to grasp what is going on and their courage to stand up and oppose it.

People with different worldviews, from various backgrounds and all with their personal faults and failings, no doubt.

But also people with faces. People with minds of their own. People with principles.

Real people. Living people. People like us.

Now we all know that we are not alone!

aug291376

aug291333

aug291355

Photos by Max Hogster

(except top and Robert. F. Kennedy Jr)

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The Acorn back issues

The Acorn 15

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The Acorn – 59

Posted on August 21, 2020August 26, 2020 by winter oak

acorn 2019b Number 59

In this issue:

Stand up to tyranny!
The Great Battle for the Future
Smart means dead
Tracksuits, traumas and class traitors
Henry David Thoreau: an orgrad inspiration
Acorninfo

1. Stand up to tyranny!

AUG 29 POSTER

Hope is rising that people are finally seeing through the neoliberal corona-lies and are ready to stand up to the 21st century tyranny of newnormalism.

With so many sold-out phoney rebels on the “left” openly backing the new totalitarianism, other people, from a wide range of backgrounds, have had to step forward and urge resistance to the nightmarish global dictatorship.

Many of these are rallying behind the banner of StandUpX (see Resistance Update and Acorn 58) which, as this article explains, has seen numbers on its protests shoot up from dozens to thousands. “The numbers are continuing to increase rapidly – hence why more events are taking place all across the UK”.

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.

“Forced, coerced and mandated vaccinations violate the principles of the Nuremberg Code which states ‘any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned.’

“Humanity will be a mass science experiment profiting billions for pharmaceutical companies and their partners including Bill Gates.

“Tracking & Tracing is a total violation of personal privacy and freedom to associate. It is a digital Gestapo.

“To add to this oppression, the government is proposing a Health Passport, which is designed to track your health records, purchases and public activities including travel. It will not be temporary. It is the preliminary step to 24/7 tracking via an implantable chip.

“5G is necessary for the infrastructure of 24/7 Surveillance Tracking & Implantable Microchips. This is why our roads are currently being dug up to install the fibre cable network necessary for 5G. This is why trees, which block 5G signals (and help us breathe) are being chopped all over our cities. 5G is lethal to privacy as well as to health. We have no reason to believe 5G is safe”.

The imposition of mask wearing, at a time when the virus has all but disappeared, has already opened a lot of folk’s eyes to the fact that they are being conned.

The fact that masks seem to be intended as a permanent “new normal”, plus the threat of compulsory vaccination and further lockdowns, may prove enough to push thousands of others over the edge and into rebellion.

aug 29 poster2

A big bank holiday weekend of protest is coming up in London.

On Saturday August 29, 12 noon at Trafalgar Square, a huge protest and march is planned by a broad coalition of freedom lovers.

The event is due to be addressed by a number of high-profile doctors who have courageously challenged the official propaganda narrative, including Dr Adil, Professor Dolores Cahill, Dr Andrew Kaufman (live video link) and Dr Kevin Corbet.

Natural nurse Kate Shemirani and Jeremey Corbyn’s brother Piers Corbyn are also lined up to speak.

There will be a video link with the latest mass protest in Germany, where earlier this month as many as a million people took to the streets of Berlin to defy newnormalism.

The very next day, Sunday August 30, a protest has been called for Notting Hill during the famous carnival – 12 noon at Portobello Road.

aug 30 protest

Sunday August 30 will also see a Stop New Normal protest in Bristol, in Castle Park from 12 noon.

Before then, there will be a ‘Protest to Protect our Children’ in Manchester on Saturday August 22, 1pm at Piccadilly Gardens and a Picnic in the Park n Leeds on Sunday August 23, 2pm in Hyde Park.

leeds protest aug 23

A week after the big weekend in the UK capital, on Saturday September 5, there will be a ‘Stand Up for the Children’ protest starting in Hyde Park, London, at 1pm and marching to the BBC studios.

Smaller weekly StandUpX events are currently being held in Bedford (every Saturday, 3pm, Russell Park), Bournemouth (every Saturday, 2-5pm, Bournemouth Town Hall), Norwich (every Saturday, 1pm, Eaton Park, Chapperfield Gardens) and Sheffield (every Saturday, 12pm, Town Hall Peace Gardens).

For latest info see the StandUpX website at https://www.standupx.info/

North of the border, there will be a ‘Saving Scotland’ March on Holyrood: meet-up near the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh at 1pm on Saturday September 5.

Say organisers: “Deliberate media-managed panic, fear and propaganda made the ‘virus’ seem like it could kill us all. It was a lie!

“End the illegal Coronavirus Act 2020 Tyranny. Scotland is being destroyed! Return our civil liberties”.

march on holyrood

Germany remains the epicentre of the revolt against dictatorship (perhaps because historical memories are still relatively fresh), with even a chief inspector of police speaking out against the global big business coup.

But there have also been reports of signficant protests in Madrid (3,000), the Canary Islands (several hundred) Warsaw (25,000) and Montreal (“thousands”).

madrid protest

A ‘Mask Se Azaadi’ campaign now also seems to be underway in India, with one protester declaring: “We are burning the masks. We will not wear any masks and neither will pay any fines. Because wearing masks leads to the spread of diseases. We are being made to wear masks to shut us up”.

We urge Acorn readers, wherever they are, to cast aside their fears and their ideological insecurities, take the plunge and get involved in the resistance to the newnormalist dictatorship.

As C.J. Hopkins says in an excellent piece on the Off_Guardian site: “It is your responsibility to speak up, and to do whatever else you can, to stop the New Normal future from becoming a reality.

“You will not be rewarded for it. You will be ridiculed and castigated for it. Your New Normal friends will hate you for it. Your New Normal family will forsake you for it. The New Normal police might arrest you for it. It is your responsibility to do it anyway”.

Berlin protest — Every day should be freedom day

2. The Great Battle for the Future

peasant revolt

In the Middle Ages, with the outright slavery of the Roman Empire left behind, medieval rebels saw ahead of them a better future, one based on social justice, freedom and local autonomy.

They were on the path leading towards the light, towards genuine social progress rather than to the fake “progress” of technological sophistication and profusion.

But this didn’t go down well with the ruling class, who feared that their power and privilege would be lost for ever.

Instead of escaping from slavery into freedom, our ancestors therefore found themselves engaged in a Great Battle for the Future with the dark forces of tyranny.

Capitalism – the new form taken by malevolent ruling class domination – subjugated our ancestors by cutting them off from their sources of subsistence and autonomy.

Common land was confiscated – enclosed – making self-sufficiency impossible. Food could no longer be freely gathered or hunted, rivers could no longer be fished, wood for fuel could no longer be picked up in the privatised forests.

People were forced into the money system, forced to earn “wages” just to live, forced into factories and workhouses, reduced to craven dependency on the capitalist system.

In her book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici describes the period as one of “relentless class struggle” in which “the medieval village was the theater of daily warfare”.

“Everywhere masses of people resisted the destruction of their former ways of existence, fighting against land privatization, the abolition of customary rights, the imposition of new taxes, wage-dependence, and the continuous presence of armies in their neighbourhoods, which was so hated that people rushed to close the gates of their towns to prevent soldiers from settling among them”.

In order to impose the New Normal of capitalism on the unwilling people, the power elite used what Federici terms “social enclosure”, a precursor of today’s “social distancing”.

Pubs-closed 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”.

“Taverns were closed, along with public baths. Nakedness was penalized, as were many other ‘unproductive’ forms of sexuality and sociality. It was forbidden to drink, swear, curse”.

In another striking parallel with the 2020s (and indeed the 1920s/1930s) the elite tried to create “a new type of individual” – a servile, malleable and thus profitable type.

The primary tool used by the ultra-rich minority to oppress the majority was, of course, the state.

Far from representing some kind of benign collective self-interest, as some absurdly persist in maintaining, the modern state emerged in the 14th century “as the only agency capable of confronting a working class that was regionally unified, armed and no longer confined in its demands to the political economy of the manor”.

Inquisition

Whether claiming to be fighting “heresy”, “witchcraft” or disorder, the ruling elite deployed all the violence and propaganda of its inquisitions, wars and laws to bring the population to heel. And, as we all know to our cost, it won that Great Battle for the Future.

But because its socipathic greed knows no end, because its “growth” is based on ever-increasing profit for the ultra-rich, it can never stop treading us further and further into the toxic industrial dust of its total control.

Today we have reached another key moment in history, when the ruling elite – under the feeble pretext of combatting a flu virus – hopes to essentially return us to the slave status we escaped a thousand years ago.

All its liberal pretence at “democracy” is going out of the window as the brutal reality of elite power becomes clear to those who have eyes to see.

There will be resistance, you can be sure of that, even if the advance disabling of certain potential sources of dissent means it may take a while for rebels to regroup and find their common voice.

Those of us who do resist will be embarking on another Great Battle for the Future.

(The full article can be read here)

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3. Smart means dead

This is our DIY translation of an article which appears in the July/August 2020 edition of the French-language print journal anarchie! under the title ‘Qui a peur de la mort?‘

5G mast

The radiant and gleaming future presented to us by the promoters of 5G, ‘a world of infinite possibilities’, has finally revealed itself for what it is: while everyone was locked up in their homes and all dissent was set aside in the name of biopolitics, masts went up all over the place to deliver a new infrastructure with which the powers-that-be aim to do nothing less than transform the whole of society.

5G’s forced entry into our lives cruelly illustrates the fact that neither in conception nor design is it meant to contribute to the well-being of the vast majority who consume it, but that it is instead intended to increase the power of the tiny minority who produce it.

Moreover, if we look back over our shoulders; hasn’t it been the same thing with every new technological advance? From the first weaving looms to motor cars and nuclear energy, how many of these would never have happened if their indisputable necessity for our lives hadn’t been forced on us?

4IR

Considering the enormous means at the disposal of the telecommunicatios industry, which in recent years has come to dominate the political narrative in every corner of the world, you get the impression that every day a war is taking place on the stage of our refusal. Precisely because 5G logically comes across as a negative thing in the eyes of the exploited, since the future it is there to build is that of the dominant class, the system tries to resolve the contradiction by using propaganda, so that people welcome the decisions made for them. But they can’t make people feel satisfied with their lot unless they reduce them to the status of insignficant cogs in a phenomenon over which they have no say.

We are already aware (even if only intuitively) of the effects on our lives of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ invoked by the most enthusiastic experts: they are with us every day in latent form, bursting into reality each time that we catch a glimpse of another, still bigger, slice of nature eaten up by bulldozers. Each time that we realise that we have got used to the sight of a pylon or a nuclear power station. Each time that we notice to what extent the environment in which we live in is artificial and planned.

Awareness is spreading wider and wider of the fact that a technological future cannot halt the ongoing disaster, but is instead aimed at prolonging it.

masked shoppers 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.

You’d imagine the myth of ‘progress’ would today be riddled with cutting doubts… but no amount of televisual good faith can now stop people seeing the pile of corpses spat out every day on the other side of the world by the capitalist machine. And in the great cities of the ‘advanced’ (sic) world, the end result of two centuries of unquestionable progress has been an existence which is more locked-down, artificial and desperate than we have ever known before.

Only those who have totally surrendered to misery could contemplate without a feeling of dread the technological cages known as ‘smart homes’, the multiplication of ‘sensing systems’ to watch and record every detail of our movements or the alienation of lives directed by the algorithms of ‘virtual assistants’.

At the end of the day it is not just about 5G or the umpteenth new threat from technology. It is about totally refusing a world based on dominating others, that’s to say on war, on environmental destruction, on paid labour and other abominations, of which technology has become one of the cornerstones.

In truth, all of that – the bombarding of cities and spirits, the extinction both of the wild outdoors and of surges of spontaneity in our domestic lives, the state’s administration of its subjects, or the biopolitical lockdown of an entire population – all of that will only be possible if the internet is available everywhere.

5G connect

That is why their emphasis on ‘connectivity’, both between individuals and between individuals and their environment, can only be understood as reinforcement of domination in every domain.

When they tell us to get closer together online, it is really business and the state that are coming closer to human experience: each interraction that takes place on their network is owned by their economy and power. We are obliged to live our everyday lives as if remotely, via more and more technological intermediaries, which put up a sort of screen between us and reality, dictating to us a certain rhythm, a certain behaviour and above all a certain pre-determined relationship with the world.

What is really at stake here, with the way we are being pushed in the direction in which things are going, even more so with the current acceleration of this process by 5G, is our very capacity to think and act autonomously.

Even as technology imposes itself as universal mediation, it paradoxically distances us from the world, in the sense that it derpives us of the moral and material means to understand it, reinvent it and affect it with our own direct, conscious action.

Indeed, the ‘smart’ concept is nothing other than the paradigm of a city, or dwelling-place, where human beings simply follow the directions provided by algorithms, without feeling the need to interrupt this with their own ideas or spontaneous actions born of their own free will… in other words a completely dead intelligence. An intelligence with no conscience.

robot skull

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4. Tracksuits, traumas and class traitors

Jan Goodey reviews D. Hunter’s new book, Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors, published by the Classwork Project (2020)

tracksuits

On the back of D. Hunter’s first book, Chav Solidarity (Active 2019), which looked at life on the margins of working class Britain, this latest goes further and adds an additional layer of academic analysis into the, at times harrowing, bargain.

The series of ten essays with academic framing, plus a main narrative section, offer insights into queer methodologies; carceral abolition; class analysis; and auto-ethnography which as a terrain is a good fit for this work: “evocative, emotional, dialoguing and engaging writing…[which is]…closer to literature and art than to science”.

At times there is the temptation to rush the analysis which is interspersed and then rush back to the narrative, don’t, the two are integral.

Hunter’s early years could come straight out of an Alan Clarke drama and bear comparison to books like Alexander Masters’ biography, Stuart a Life Backwards; visceral, tortuous, no-holds barred, real life staring you squarely in the face. Muggings, ultra-violence, rape, robbery, incest, are laid bare and borne in occasionally beautiful, positive and counter-intuitive ways.

In this book, one of Hunter’s aims is to do more justice to the lives he dealt with in the first, which honed in on ‘marginalised’ communities. “I focus on the blood and bone of poor and working class people, and the ways in which the social and cultural context reproduces forms of class power… My writing is in a small way a form of activism.”

This honing down is to a ‘poverty class’ as something “distinctly less than the working class; something made of a group of people who should be stripped of their humanity, undeserving of basic dignity. The people who raised me, the people who I grew up around, the imprisoned, the sectioned, the house-less, the traumatised, those who worked in the illegal economies of sex and drugs, the white trash, and the black and brown inner-city youth”.

fans

The often shocking acts of violence that are documented throughout Tracksuits, Traumas and Class Traitors – acts which are carried out by the author, against him and he as witness – are viewed with recognition of the political, economic and social systems in which they occur – a vital sequitur.

That he’s been given “the space, care and time to focus on recovering, that my behaviours have been anything close to the result of conscious decisions. But it’s this experience that leads me to feel compassion towards the person who has caused me the greatest harm, the legacy of which it’s doubtful I’ll ever recover”.

Here he refers to the patriarch of the family, his grandfather. And it is here we look to the restorative powers of transformative justice (TJ) and its liberatory approach to violence; seeking safety and accountability within families and communities and not alienation, punishment, state violence of prison and policing without. The bitter fruits of industrial capitalism.

Bay Area TJ

We are brought to The Bay Area TJ collective in Oakland California where a pod approach is practised within the community while seeking safety and accountability front, left and centre.

These anarchistic, positive, grassroots, small scale initiatives are all about “entering into dialogues that engage with the inequity in our networks. [It] is vital in our attempts to end the reproduction of carceral and capitalist logics. If we do this, we will be able to create spaces which encourage openness and intimacy, from which we can build deep solidarity with one another”.

A deep solidarity he had rarely with his own father and more often with neighbours: the one rare moment of filial connection, playing football…”he was playing with a desperation to connect with me, to find that paternal bond; instead I imagine he was beating people, he was beating other men in a socially approved way, in a manner that those watching could not take away from him easily. I was playing for that bond, the desperation that coursed through my veins then, that wanted the world and its dog to see us together playing, moving in synchronicity with one another. I wanted that synchronicity, that connection, to last forever. It did not make it past the afternoon”.

And then we get to hear of extraordinary acts of kindness towards D and his family from neighbours– “the man who ran the Jamaican takeaway that gave me the fried chicken… For over four years, he supplied us with fried chicken, hot, rice ‘n’ peas, and many, many dumplings. I could go over there at any point during their opening times and he would supply me with a bag of food to take back to the flat”.

The book’s final segment looks at social work: “As Loïc Wacquant has pointed out,
government programmes, which set out to address poverty or more accurately address the poor, working class, have as their primary function the marking of the poor as pathological, enabling the state to criminalise poverty and the bodies of the poor. This process plays a key role in the stigmatisation of poor and working class people”.

This stigmatisation breeds new exploitation with new forms of media-manufactured class differentiation and antagonism.

Through all of this Hunter’s heart stays embedded in his working class roots and he selflessly seeks “to connect some dots and ensure that everyone who had asked for some cash [from the fruits of his first book] received some, and in some cases, set up regular payments for the duration of the social shutdown. I don’t say this to big myself up, I was in a fortunate position to have enough social capital to connect those with plenty to those with not enough”.

(Jan Goodey is a regular contributor to the Ecologist online)

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5. Henry David Thoreau: an orgrad inspiration

The latest in our serious of profiles from the orgrad website.

Thoreau

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a writer and philosopher who sought and recommended a simple natural life and who spoke out against modern civilization and the violence of the state.

He influenced many political thinkers, including Henry Salt, Edward Carpenter, Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi.

Thoreau’s best-known work is Walden, a description of his attempt to put his thinking into practice by living for more than two years in the woods of his native Massachusetts, USA.

thoreau sign 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)

Part of the appeal for him was undoubtedly to be alone, to escape the crowds and babble of the modern world, for which a certain loss of comfort was a price well worth paying: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion”. (2)

Thoreau frequently stressed the importance of living unencumbered by the trappings of the modern world – “Simplify, simplify”, (3) he urged. “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” (4)

It was not just that we did not need these trappings of wealth, but that they were actually bad for us.

He wrote in Walden that most of the luxuries and so-called comforts of life were not at all necessary, but were in fact “positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind” (5) and he added in ‘Civil Disobedience’: “Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue”. (6)

Adi_Shankara 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.

“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically”. (7)

On the other hand, the rich had “accumulated dross”, did not know how to get rid of it and had thus “forged their own golden or silver fetters”. (8)

Thoreau was interested in Hindu philosophy and also, in Walden, cites the Taoist wisdom of Chuang Tzu.

He pre-empted René Guénon in his view that the modern world represented a reign of quantity where quality, particularly inner quality, was completely neglected. He noted: “While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them”. (9)

Contemporary America “lives too fast” (10) he said. Commerce, communication and transport were all regarded as essential issues, but people were less interested in “whether we should live like baboons or like men”. (11)

railroad 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)

He added: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate”. (13)

The much-heralded cable under the Atlantic would, he suggested, only succeed in bringing Americans worthless gossip such as news of the latest illnesses affecting the British Royal Family.

“As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly… the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages”. (14)

Twenty years later, John Ruskin was to make the same point when he described the new railway allowing the people of Buxton and Bakewell to rush from one town to the other and back in record time and for no apparent purpose.

railroad workers2

Thoreau was also acutely aware of the human cost of industrialism, including the thousands of human lives lost in the building of the railways, the first major infrastructure of American capitalism.

He wrote: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them”. (15)

An outspoken opponent of the American institution of slavery, which was not formally abolished until after his death, Thoreau also turned his fire on the “factory system” that had been imported across the Atlantic.

He wrote: “The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English, and it cannot be wondered at since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched”. (16)

Against this world of money-greed and exploitation, Thoreau proposed a modest and inward-looking life in the bosom of nature.

The dust that accumulates on any object inside a house symbolised for him the choking effect of modern life on human beings and he declared: “I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground”. (17)

Thoreau’s belief in the importance of being close to nature implied that our very thinking should emerge from that nature and effectively amount to a continuation of its unspoken wisdom.

He wrote in ‘A Natural History of Massachusetts’: “To him who contemplates a trait of natural beauty no harm or disappointment can come. The doctrines of despair, of spiritual or political tyranny or servitude, were never taught by such as shared the serenity of nature”. (18)

hoar frost crystals 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.

He wrote: “It struck me that these ghost leaves, and the green ones whose forms they assume, were the creatures of but one law; that in obedience to the same law the vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf, on the one hand, and the crystalline particles troop to their standard in the same order, on the other.

“As if the material were indifferent, but the law one and invariable, and every plant in the spring but pushed up into and filled a permanent and eternal mould, which, summer and winter forever, is waiting to be filled”. (19)

He added: “Vegetation has been made the type of all growth; but as in crystals the law is more obvious, their material being more simple, and for the most part more transient and fleeting, would it not be as philosophical as convenient to consider all growth, all filling up within the limits of nature, but a crystallisation more or less rapid?” (20)

Here he raises one of the key elements of organic radical thinking: that there is an implicit order within nature as a whole and all its parts, including humans, which emerges from within and steers our development.

Thoreau wrote: “I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man”. (21)

thoreau book This realisation, drawn from his observation of plants and frost, formed a nature-sourced philosophical basis for his libertarian political views.

If people were not able to live according to their nature in the contemporary world, it was because of the state and its laws.

Thoreau wrote, in ‘Civil Disobedience’: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

“Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also I believe – ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have”. (22)

He observed: “Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice”. (23)

Thoreau had direct experience of the power of the state, which jailed him for refusing to pay his poll tax for six years, and was struck by the “foolishness” of the thick walls and doors with which it countered his principled stance.

pillory 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)

When Thoreau insisted that “the only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think is right”, (25) this may sound simply like rugged individualism.

But the use of the term ‘right’ indicated that he was in fact referencing a collective sense of right and wrong, one sourced from his inner human nature.

Like the anarchist psychoanalyst Otto Gross, Thoreau saw how a person who tried to live according to that nature, who remained true to their innate moral compass, was bound to come into conflict with an outside civilization founded on power, money and lies.

Our duty was to allow the sense of rightness that swelled within us to overcome the demands and expectations of a world become corrupt and not to find cowardly excuses to avoid doing so.

He wrote: “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now”. (26)

He urged us to follow the obligation deep within us to be true to ourselves and the natural world of which we are part: “Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine”. (27)

Video link: Talking with Thoreau (31 mins)

thoreau art

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, with an introduction by Richard Whiteing (London: The Gresham Publishing Company, n/d), p. 109.
2. Thoreau, Walden, p. 42.
3. Thoreau, Walden, p. 110.
4. Thoreau, Walden, p. 111.
5. Thoreau, Walden, p. 15.
6. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, The Portable Thoreau: Revised Edition, ed. Carl Bode (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 123.
7. Thoreau, Walden, pp. 15-16.
8. Thoreau, Walden, p. 17.
9. Thoreau, Walden, p. 39.
10. Thoreau, Walden, pp. 110-11.
11. Ibid.
12. Thoreau, Walden, p. 61.
13. Ibid.
14. Thoreau, Walden, pp. 61-62.
15. Thoreau, Walden, p. 111.
16. Thoreau, Walden, p. 30.
17. Thoreau, Walden, p. 42.
18. Henry David Thoreau, ‘A Natural History of Massachusetts’, The Portable Thoreau, p. 33.
19. Henry David Thoreau, ‘A Natural History of Massachusetts’, The Portable Thoreau, pp. 52-53.
20. Thoreau, ‘A Natural History of Massachusetts’, The Portable Thoreau, pp. 53-54.
21. Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, The Portable Thoreau, p. 127.
22. Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, The Portable Thoreau, p. 109.
23. Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, The Portable Thoreau, p. 111.
24. Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, The Portable Thoreau, p. 127.
25. Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, The Portable Thoreau, p. 111.
26. Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, The Portable Thoreau, p. 113.
27. Thoreau, ‘Civil Disobedience’, The Portable Thoreau, p. 120.

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6. Acorninfo

Resistance continues against the disastrous HS2 rail line between London and Birmingham. Says the HS2 Rebellion website: “HS2 is one of the largest and most damaging infrastructure projects our country has ever seen and is representative of everything we are seeking to change within this toxic system”. For info on protest camp locations and how to help go to https://hs2rebellion.earth/camp-locations/

HS2 protest

* * *

Wangan and Jagalingou Tribal Warriors in Australia have served mining giant Adani with an eviction notice for illegally trespassing on their land with its Carmichael Coal Mine. They say: “This eviction notice marks the start of a new phase of our resistance to Adani’s destruction of land, water and culture”.

WJWarriors

* * *

This Spanish TV interview with a doctor went horribly wrong for the corporate propagandists, as the interviewee tore holes into the official smearmongering and its blatant vaccine-profiteering agenda. A real breath of fresh air!

Spanish doctor on TV

* * *

“It will be done in a barbaric fashion using draconian methods and this global holocaust will probably come out from under the flag of the UN… Wake up now!” So says a character in One By One, the last ever film to feature the late Rik Mayall. Meanwhile the latest Plandemic film has been getting a lot of attention. Note that one of these is labelled fiction and the other not, but we will let readers decide for themselves how that works out!

Rik Mayall in One by One

* * *

“This is the essence of the biosecurity state, in which the citizen no longer has the right to life (familial, social, economic, political), but in which the state has absolute power over the biopolitical body of the subject”. Another hugely impressive article by Simon Elmer
of Architects for Social Housing can be read here.

police state masks

* * *

A warning against the Big Pharma vaccine agenda has been issued in Cyprus. Says the author: “The so-called ‘cases’ of healthy people are exactly what each community needs to cope with the crisis. But the ‘scientific team’ is trying to reduce this natural immunity that the community is now building, because – they have made it very clear – they prefer to pursue mass vaccination”.

DIY.Masks.3.cropped

* * *

The dystopia of the Fourth Industrial Repression is arriving faster than any of us could imagine. In Basildon, Essex, for instance, the council has announced it will be starting a six-month trial of the use of drones to help with planning enforcement. Local activists’ fears of “mission creep” are supported by news from Melbourne, Australia, where the increasingly fascistic cops are already using drones to spy on citizens to make sure they don’t break “lockdown” rules. Will people start developing DIY anti-drone devices in response? Jamming the frequencies? Using catapults even?

drone surveillance

* * *

Canadian constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati is taking out a lawsuit against his government, describing the COVID measures as “the biggest example of misinformation and lies on a global scale that we’ve seen”.

Rocco Galati

* * *

Another glorious triumph for technological Progress has been announced, with scientists apparently having discovered a “ground-breaking” bio-synthetic material that they claim can be used to merge artificial intelligence with the human brain. This “breakthrough” is described as “a major step towards integrating electronics with the body to create part human, part robotic ‘cyborg’ beings”. Marvellous news for life haters everywhere.

cyborg nightmare

* * *

The next phase in the global techno-fascist coup, particularly if resistance picks some momentum, is likely to be full-out censorship of dissident views. We are still very much present on Twitter, but with some anti-establishment groups already being expelled from social media, we have created a back-up account on Mastodon, which can be found here.

* * *

Acorn quote: “The great ability of those who are in control in the modern world lies in making the people believe that they are governing themselves”.

René Guénon

vote poster

(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)

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Back Issues

The Acorn 15

Follow Winter Oak on Twitter at @WinterOakPress

The Acorn – 58

Posted on July 21, 2020July 22, 2020 by winter oak

acorn 2019b Number 58

In this issue:

Where do we go from here?
Protection racket
Exposing the lies
The Outsider: an interview with Colin Wilson
Aldous Huxley: an orgrad inspiration
Acorninfo

1. Where do we go from here?

anti-mask protest

These are not easy times in which to be alive if, like us, you cherish freedom and truth.

The last few months have seen us dragged into a nightmarish totalitarian world.

No sooner had “lockdown” been lifted, than masks were imposed. The spectre of a compulsory “vaccine” hovers darkly on the horizon.

All this symbolism of submission, of craven conformism and dehumanised obedience, would be hard to take at the best of times.

But when all of this naked authoritarianism is justified by blatant lies, the situation becomes still more outlandlish.

The “science” behind this medical strategy of tension is so flimsy that one would imagine that all but the dullest of TV-addicted sofa spuds would see right through it.

But, for many, believing the official version seems to have become an article of faith, a central part of their initiation into the sinister “new normal”.

In order for this psychological surrender to authority to be effective, maybe the message had to be obviously false, in the same way that Winston Smith’s torturer in Nineteen Eighty-Four is obviously holding up four fingers rather than five.

What is important for our rulers is that obedient goodthinking citizens believe anything they are told, no matter how absurd.

A further twist of the knife has come from the way that people we assumed we knew, people we imagined shared our basic ideals, have turned out to be something else.

Liberty-loving rebels, long-term opponents of the capitalist system, have suddenly become authoritarian robots, mindlessly repeating the lies and demands of the system.

Worse still, they turn on those of us who have remained consistent in our principles and accuse us of having somehow drifted into unacceptable political territory!

It comes as no comfort to have seen much of this coming, whether in the shape of the increasing authoritarianism of the neoliberal system or the dangerous narrowing of political thinking on the left.

mask citizen — Political correctness 2020

In truth, the scale and speed of what has happened has left us gasping for breath.

Where do we go from here?

We can all, of course, keep on resisting the dictatorship in hundreds of small ways, most importantly by sharing our views and analysis with others in the virtual and real worlds.

But we can also start thinking about what our long-term resistance is going to look like, what kind of movement might emerge to fight the new white-coated fascism and the Fourth Industrial Repression it has unleashed on us.

In thinking about this future movement, we can all help to create and shape it.

To this effect, we invite Acorn readers to share their thoughts with us, not so much in the form of articles for publication (though we also welcome those!), as in an informal way.

Our email address is winteroak(at)greenmail.net and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

2. Protection racket

WWF-funded guards

Protecting the environment has surely got to be A Good Thing.

Creating “protected areas” for nature in various parts of the world might therefore seem to be a positive move.

However, when these areas are being promoted by the same capitalist system which brought nature to her knees in the first place, the alarm lights start flashing!

“Protected Areas” are in fact one aspect of the global capitalist scam being sold to us under the label of the ‘New Deal for Nature’.

Because, in typical capitalist style, this scam has been wrapped up in shiny green packaging and promoted by the well-known WWF, the New Deal for Nature initially attracted little opposition.

But in recent weeks, thanks to the truth-spreading efforts of the No Deal for Nature campaign and its supporters, support has been slipping away.

The human rights charity Survival International has been doing a great job of blowing the whistle on what is nothing other than a new phase of industrial capitalist imperialism, aiming to displace indigenous peoples and further exploit Mother Nature for the profit of the usual tiny and greedy elite.

Warns Survival director Stephen Corry: “The latest idea to be heavily promoted by big conservation NGOs is doubling the world’s so-called ‘Protected Areas’ (PAs) so that they cover thirty percent of the globe’s lands and oceans.

View at Medium.com

‘Protected’ zones are anything but protection for the Baka. This is Dede on what @WWF gets up-to in the Congo:

“We don’t hunt elephants. We just suffer these terrible beatings, when we haven’t done anything… They beat us with machetes.”

Via @Survival #WWFfundsabuse @wmnjoya pic.twitter.com/2EGktpPtPL

— Stephen Corry (@StephenCorrySvl) March 3, 2020

“This is now their main rallying cry and response to two of the world’s biggest problems — climate chaos and loss of biodiversity.

“It’s a marketing gimmick designed to funnel even more money to those who have for decades demonstrated their failure to mitigate either climate change or biodiversity loss.

“Many PAs aren’t really protected at all. They include industrial exploitation — mining, logging, plantations, trophy hunting concessions, or extensive, usually high-end, tourist infrastructure.

“The locals are thrown out as the land is grabbed by one or other industry, partnering with one or other big conservation NGO.

“It’s a new colonialism, the world’s biggest land grab, supposedly ‘green’ and supposedly to save the world — a really big lie. As Odette, a Baka woman from Congo, says of such imposed conservation projects which don’t work, ‘We’ve had enough of this talk of ‘boundaries’ in the forest. The forest is ours’.”

The alert is also being sounded via the World Rainforest Movement, notably in a statement entitled “Protected Areas feed corporate profiting and destruction”.

This explains: “PAs are heavily promoted by conservation NGOs, governments and corporations. The NGOs want as much money as possible to maintain their dominance over more and more of the world’s surface, which they see as threatened by locals.

“Governments hate self-sufficient people who are difficult to tax and control and who tend to be sceptical about the state’s claim to override the community. Corporations look for more consumers, and to extract more raw materials, often from ‘wilderness’. They need places where they can claim to ‘offset’ carbon, to greenwash their image as much as possible.

“The result is that billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money are funnelled into conservation areas that ignore all checks about upholding human rights, which are routinely violated there. Most such projects are run by NGOs, profit-making private companies, or both. They are established in collaboration with logging, extractive industries, trophy hunting, tourism concessions, and agribusiness.

“They take the land which has long sustained a way of life for local people and refashioned it to churn out profit for a few outsiders. In some areas, there is a clear overlap of, for example, mining concessions with protected areas.

“Conservation NGOs are, at least in part, controlled by the corporate bosses who sit on their boards, partner with, and fund them, why expect anything different?”

We urge readers to support the No Deal for Nature campaign in any way they can.

Their site is here and they are on Twitter here, where they work closely with Boycott WWF.

The New Deal For Nature was due to be finalised as part of the post-2020 biodiversity framework at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference to be held China in October 2020.

Thanks to the resistance, however, this event has now been postponed to May 17-30, 2021, according to a press release from the Convention on Biological Diversity on July 15.

An international day of action against the New Deal for Nature is being mooted for this autumn – we are happy to help put people and groups in touch with each other to ensure this happens.

WWF corporate links

3. Exposing the lies

germanarticles1

As English speakers, we have access to a wide range of material to inform our analysis of the Coronavirus situation.

But this privilege sometimes allows us to forget the important contributions to the discussion made in other languages.

We are grateful to the friends who have shared with us their translations of several German-language articles, which we have made available via this site.

The first document calls for an immediate end to all Corona measures and a committee of inquiry to uncover all errors and deception.

It looks at why masks are harmful, useless and degrading and why all “protective measures” were – and are – senseless from the outset.

“The lockdown has more dead people on its conscience than Covid-19!”, it adds.

corona tv 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”.

And it includes this nice line: “This killer virus is very special and is mainly transmitted by television, radio and newspapers”.

‘The Science Fraud by Prof. Christian Drosten‘ focuses on the high-profile German virologist and also assesses his UK counterpart: “Neil Ferguson is the ghost in the machine. The machine is the World Health Organization and the CDC. The man behind the ghost is Bill Gates”.

This analysis by Dr. Stefan Lanka also takes Prof Dorsten to task. “Neither he, nor the virologists of the CCDC, nor others have demonstrably carried out these necessary control experiments to date and if they have, they have not published them… The moment this attempt is carried out and published, the Corona crisis is immediately over”.

Finally, this July 4 article, originally from Diamenten magazine (“for freedom and a self-determined life”), says that leading Corona researchers admit that they have no scientific proof of the existence of a specific virus. “Rumours and lies have created a pandemic, although there was no evidence!”

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4. The Outsider: an interview with Colin Wilson

“For the Outsider, the world into which he has been born is always a world without values. Compared to his own appetite for a purpose and a direction, the way most men live is not living at all; it is drifting. This is the Outsider’s wretchedness, for all men have a herd instinct that leads them to believe that what the majority does must be right. Unless he can evolve a set of values that will correspond to his own higher intensity of purpose, he may as well throw himself under a bus, for he will always be an outcast and a misfit”. So wrote Colin Wilson in his important and best-selling 1956 book The Outsider. Wilson died seven years ago, but not until Acorn contributor Jan Goodey had secured an interview with him, which we are pleased to feature here.

Colin_Wilson

When interviewed in 2001, original angry young man and all-round iconoclast Colin Wilson had lost none of the bite that made his name back in the Fifties and Sixties.

A simple throwaway comment on Aleister Crowley was seized upon with acerbic relish, “He was a shit and one of the only people I wrote about who I would not have wanted to meet.”

In his seventies then, Wilson was happily ensconced in Cornwall which became his haven when the media glare became all too much back in the days when the papers would call him ‘a genius’ and run a story on him being spotted outside a cinema, all in the same day. “Well who the fuck cares” his comment relating to the latter.

On a day in 1956 Wilson woke up and found himself lauded and a best-seller. His book The Outsider had come out in the same week as John Osbourne’s play Look Back In Anger. The book featured chapters on various writers, including Herman Hesse, outside the mainstream and influenced by great, arcane Eastern mysticism.

colin wilson the outsider 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.

It was a break for a working class lad who’d never been to university, always been broke, worked in factories and coffee houses and even slept out on Hampstead Heath to save rent. “My ‘success’ itself was an absurd paradox;” he later wrote, “I was being rewarded for telling society how much I detested it.”

The English press’s long-held reputation of building people up to knock ’em down again was something Wilson soon found out about – close quarters. The feeling of destestation could be more than reciprocated.

One of the first to wield the knife was fellow philosopher AJ Ayer who did “a filthy stinking review of The Outsider,” said Wilson. Others followed suit, taken aback that a provincial hick could turn the London literary scene upside down with his first book.

With the Beats espousing stream of consciousness bacchanalia and the Existentialists, alienation, Wilson was neither one nor the other, and eventually sought sanctuary, first in France then Cornwall: “I suppose it’s like this girl Anne Robinson (UK celeb/news journalist) who was initially very highly regarded, but now is attacked by a lot of people maybe because she’s too famous. I went to Paris to meet Camus. He was going to do an introduction to my second book but was then killed in a car crash.”

Wilson saw himself following in the tradition of Sartre and Camus, and took up a position he described as New Existentialism, proceeding from many of their assumptions but rejecting alienation in favour of a life-affirming view: the individual free to forge meaning for him/herself: “Someone once called me our only home grown existentialist. At the time when people like Ayer were saying that questions about the meaning of life were meaningless I was feeling that they’re the only questions worth answering. What the hell are we doing here?”

The answer wasn’t Christianity, although he was tempted by Catholicism until he took instruction and discovered it to be “a lot of shit”. Wilson on Jesus is interesting in itself: “I don’t believe that Jesus died on the Cross for the sin of Adam. We know pretty certainly that Jesus himself didn’t think so, that he was a member of a reformist group. and this was so hated a group by Jews and Romans that he got crucified. He would have been shocked by the notion that he was the Son of God.”

No, the answer for Wilson lay partly in the occult – he believes we are on the verge of an evolutionary leap to a higher stage,- about to come something more than man/woman. In essence a positive outlook and it was in keeping with his view of himself as the first genuine optomistic philosopher in the Western tradition.

And if you ever catch yourself asking from where the New Age interest in all things mystical, springs: “In a word me, I started it all,” said Wilson, ever so slightly mischievious.

Colin Wilson2

Colin Wilson (1931-2013)

(Jan Goodey is a regular contributor to the Ecologist online)

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5. Aldous Huxley: an orgrad inspiration

The latest in our serious of profiles from the orgrad website.

Aldous Huxley smoking, circa 1946

“Modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power”

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a philosopher and writer who consistently opposed the industrial and commercial thinking of Western capitalism.

He is best known for his 1931 novel Brave New World, which depicts a dystopic future society built on American-style consumerism.Writing to his brother Julian in August 1918, Huxley predicted that one of the most deplorable consequences of the First World War would be “the inevitable acceleration of American world domination” and warned repeatedly in the 1920s that “the future of America is the future of the world”. (1)

David Bradshaw writes that the “World State” of Brave New World was clearly conceived “as a satire on the global diffusion of the American way of life”. (2)

Huxley’s future hell does not need the machineries of a violent police state to keep its population under control, because its domination reaches deep inside people’s heads.

As he remarked: “A really efficient totalitarian state would be the one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

“To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and school teachers”. (3)

In Huxley’s dystopia, as in our own industrial capitalist world, everything is judged according to its contribution to “economic growth”.

He explains in the novel that at a previous stage of the Brave New World the lower castes of society had been conditioned to like wild flowers and nature – for a very specific reason: “The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every available opportunity, and to compel them to consume transport”. (4)

But this conditioning had been dropped because landscapes and flowers lay outside the all-important economy: “A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes”. (5) huxley brave new world

The same productivist mentality inspires the imaginary society’s love of games and sports involving lots of complicated equipment.

Reflects one character: “Strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness”. (6)

The consumer impulse is etched into each new generation’s minds by recorded voices played over and over again to children in their nurseries: “The voices were adapting future demands to future industrial supply. ‘I do love flying,’ they whispered. ‘ I do love flying. I do love having new clothes’… ‘But old clothes are beastly,’ continued the untiring whisper. ‘We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…’” (7)

This brainwashing takes on a more obviously ideological shape for teenagers, as revealed when the character Lenina insists that “progress is lovely, isn’t it?” and Bernard remarks wearliy: “Five hundred repetitions once a week from thirteen to seventeen”. (8)

For most people in contemporary Western capitalist society, even those who consider themselves dissidents, it seems likewise to be a deeply conditioned self-evident truth that “progress is lovely”.

Those same people often share another of the basic convictions of the Brave New World: that there is no underlying human nature which could allow us to develop freely without the lifelong tight control of authority.

The character Mustapha Mond declares: “As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them”. (9)

Although Huxley’s dystopia is often contrasted with the one put forward by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, deep-down they are not as different as all that – and a hatred of “oldthink” is common to both nightmare regimes.

Huxley imagines a “campaign against the Past” that had involved “the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years’ War); by the suppression of all books published before AF. 150”. (10) The Brave New World, like the Western industrial-capitalist society which it mocks, is generally opposed to too much thinking and reading. After all: “You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books”. (11)

Books and ideas are regarded as particularly dangerous if they are “old” – that is to say, if they come from an intellectual world beyond the narrow bubble of its own cretinous consumer-conformism.

At one point in the novel, a leader of this society is asked why the work of William Shakespeare has been banned.“The Controller shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because it’s old; that’s the chief reason. We haven’t any use for old things here’. ‘Even when they’re beautiful?’. ‘Particularly when they’re beautiful. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones’”. (12)

Huxley went on to deepen his anti-Western, anti-capitalist philosophy by exploring the “old” philosophies cast aside by the modern world. At the end of the Second World War he explicitly identified himself with the Perennialist movement which had been formed by René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon and others.

The title of his 1945 work The Perennial Philosophy made this clear enough, and Huxley listed no fewer than three books by Guénon in his bibliography. huxley perennial

As well as exploring the roots of this philosophy, particularly in the East, Huxley applied its ethos to the modern world around him and, unsurprisingly, found that contemporary “wisdom” represented pretty much the opposite of all that is considered of value by the inherited wisdom of humankind.

The cult of technology came under specific attack: “Technological idolatry is the religion whose doctrines are promulgated, explicitly or by implication, in the advertisement pages of our newspapers and magazines – the source, we may add parenthetically, from which millions of men, women and children in the capitalist countries derive their working philosophy of life…

“So whole-hearted is the modern faith in technological idols that (despite all the lessons of mechanized warfare) it is impossible to discover in the popular thinking of our time any trace of the ancient and profoundly realistic doctrine of hubris and inevitable nemesis.

“There is a very general belief that, where gadgets are concerned, we can get something for nothing – can enjoy all the advantages of an elaborate, top-heavy and constantly advancing technology without having to pay for them by any compensating disadvantages”. (13)

For Huxley, as for the tradition he espoused, there was no essential difference between the everyday life of the human being and the cultural or spiritual atmosphere in which he or she lives. He could see the lack of spirituality in the contemporary world not simply in terms of an abstract over-view, but on an individual level: “The industrial worker at his fool-proof and grace-proof machine does his job in a man-made universe of punctual automata – a universe that lies entirely beyond the pale of Tao on any level, brutal, human or spiritual”. (14)

Huxley urged his readers to turn their backs on the empty folly of modern life and reconnect with a tradition that would be our natural birthright, were it not hidden away from us by those who fear its force: “The reign of violence will never come to an end until, first, most human beings accept the same, true, philosophy of life; until, second, this Perennial Philosophy is recognized as the highest factor common to all the world religions”. (15)

Huxley continued his philosophical assault on industrial civilization in a follow-up commentary on Brave New World published in 1959.In Brave New World Revisited, he highlighted the dire consequences of continuing on our current course of endless multiplication and economic “growth”, with the spiralling levels of population required to make this possible.

He warned that “this fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be taking place on a planet whose most desirable and productive areas are already densely populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic efforts of bad farmers to raise more food, and whose easily available mineral capital is being squandered with the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor getting rid of his accumulated pay”. (16) Huxley Brave New World Revisited

Huxley pointed out that our apparently democratic societies were in fact ruled by a “Power Elite” (17) – “modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power”. (18)

He also explained how the apparent physical liberty of the individual in contemporary society could be an illusion. Not only were people fooled into accepting their enslavement, but the meaning of the word “freedom” was twisted so far that it came to mean that same enslavement.

Huxley wrote: “It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison, and yet not free – to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation, wants him to think, feel and act… The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free”. (19)

He warned of a possible future in which “democracy” and “freedom” would remain the catchwords of the status quo, but in which at the same time “the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained élite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit”. (20)

To prevent this happening, Huxley suggested we should “break up modern society’s vast, machine-like collectives into self-governing, voluntarily co-operating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government”. (21)

Looking back, in 1946, on his best-known novel, he said if he were to write it again he would provide the protagonists with another choice of society: “In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative.

“Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them”. (22)

Video link: Illustrated summary of Huxley’s Brave New World.

aldous-huxley2

1. David Bradshaw, ‘Introduction’, Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Flamingo, 1994).
2. Ibid.
3. Aldous Huxley, 1946 Foreword, Brave New World.
4. Huxley, Brave New World, p. 19.
5. Ibid.
6. Huxley, Brave New World, p. 26.
7. Huxley, Brave New World, p. 43.
8. Huxley, Brave New World, p. 50.
9. Huxley, Brave New World, p. 214.
10. Huxley, Brave New World, p. 45.
11. Huxley, Brave New World, p. 44.
12. Huxley, Brave New World, pp. 199-200.
13. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980), p. 288.
14. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 197.
15. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 229.
16. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), p. 17.
17. Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p. 34.
18. Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p. 35.
19. Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p. 154.
20. Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p. 156.
21. Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p. 159.
22. Huxley, 1946 Foreword, Brave New World.

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6. Acorninfo

“Confronted with the accelerated totalitarianisation of the UK being implemented under a de facto State of Emergency, we have chosen to listen to the lies of the Government and its media telling us exactly what to do and for how long, rather than hear a truth on which we will have to think and act for ourselves”. So writes Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing in a recent article in his excellent series on the Coronavirus situation. He warns that we are entering “a Britain of fully privatised public services and even greater economic and social inequality in a population ruled by emergency legislation, managed by the surveillance state and governed under a permanent state of exception”.

elmer art

* * *

Issue 10 of UK anarcho-zine DIY Culture is now online, with the theme of ‘the anarchist revolution – then and now’. Articles include ‘A Study of the Revolution in Spain, 1936-1937’ by Stuart Christie, ‘Anarchy From The Ruins’ by Paul Cudenec and ‘This Is Anarchy – Eight Ways the Black Lives Matter and Justice for George Floyd Uprisings Reflect Anarchist Ideas in Action’.

DIY 10

* * *

Journalist Peter Hitchens continues to put most liberals and leftists to shame with his defiance of Covid-1984 totalitarianism. In an article in Standpoint mag, he insists: “The freedom to leave your house when you wish to and go where you will is not a civil liberty or a political liberty. It is part of being a free man or woman”. And writing about masks, he adds: “The truth is that the muzzle policy is all about power and fear. The Government began its wild, disproportionate shutdown of the country by spreading fear of a devastating plague that would destroy the NHS and kill untold thousands. Now, as many people find that Covid-19 is, in fact, nothing of the kind, new ways have to be found to keep up the alarm levels”.

masks on tube

* * *

“It is a fact that techniques of manipulation are part and parcel of contemporary liberal democracies,” writes Dr Piers Robinson. “Although such persuasion activities can involve consensual techniques, they also frequently include less consensual techniques, involving forms of deception, incentivization and coercion”.

BBC corona

* * *

The call has gone out to physically oppose the EU-China Summit being held in Leipzig in September. Says an online statement: “More than anything else, the EU-China Summit means a further escalation of the top-down struggle. Poverty and prosperity are to be further redistributed in favour of the economy and ruling elites. We will not stand idly by and we will attack and fight the summit to the best of our ability. Despite short preparation time, despite the Corona pandemic and all the narrowness it brings with it: We call on all of you to come to Leipzig from September 13th to 15th and attack the summit with us! No rest for the rulers – not here in Leipzig and not elsewhere! No to the EU-China Summit!”

Leipzig poster

* * *

A rally against the World Health Organisation is being held in London on Wednesday July 22. Meet 12.30pm at St James park tube for a protest at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s London office in Victoria Street from 1pm. StandUpX is also staging a protest in the UK capital on Saturday August 1, at 2pm, with a rally at Speaker’s Corner, Hyde Park, followed by a march to Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square. For info on these and their regional protests see https://www.standupx.info/

* * *

A useful list of articles about the Covid crisis has been published by our comrades at The South Essex Heckler. Some of them will already be familiar to Acorn readers, but the resource is well worth checking out.

South Essex Heckler

* * *

“The idea that society should suddenly be ‘reimagined’ by a handful of billionaires simply due to a pandemic is the opposite of freedom and self-determination”. This timely warning against the threat of “smart” cities – designed to form a key part of the totalitarian “new normal” – comes from the Liberty Blitzkrieg site in the USA.

smart city toronto

* * *

The Gilets Jaunes have been back in the news, after their longstanding uprising against neoliberalism was derailed by the Covid clampdown. A group of them who had been demonstrating in Paris on July 14 bumped into their arch-enemy Emmanuel Macron in the garden of the Tuileries (see video). There followed a heated exchange in which the French president was treated to a rendition of the Yellow Vest anthem On est là (Here we are, here we are, even if Macron doesn’t want it, here we are). Meanwhile, an excellent collection of English-language articles on this historically significant movement can be found here.

macron tuileries

* * *

Acorn quote: “The worker’s liberty, so much exalted by the economists, jurists, and bourgeois republicans, is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realization, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom – voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense – broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery”.

Mikhail Bakunin

factory-worker

(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)

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The Acorn 15

Follow Winter Oak on Twitter at @WinterOakPress

We will be victorious!

Posted on May 31, 2020 by winter oak

acorn 2019b May 31 2020

Another political fault line has been opened up by the rapidly spiralling events of 2020.

As we wrote yesterday, the Covid scare has found us sharing the anti-authoritarian analysis of people beyond the usual anarchic spheres, while many supposed comrades are bizarrely supportive of the official state narrative.

However, the current street uprisings across the USA, sparked by the murder of George Floyd, have revealed a peculiar limit to some people’s opposition to the nascent global police state.

Unlike us, they have not found hope in the sight of thousands upon thousands of people of all races reclaiming the streets of dozens of cities, overturning police cars, setting on fire the buildings used to oppress them.

US6

They apparently don’t think that it is reasonable, or helpful, to come together and physically resist the state and its hired thugs!

In taking this stance, they reveal that they have understood nothing about the system which has controlled and exploited us for so long, and which is now dropping its liberal mask to reveal its true totalitarian nature.

They have not grasped that its so-called “democracy” is fake, that the “reforms” it sometimes offers us are illusory, that the avenues it provides for us to try and change things are all time-wasting dead-ends.

Most of all, they have failed to see that the whole of the system’s control of us is built on violence.

US5

As this article explains: “The capitalist state was created by violence, is maintained by violence and is always prepared to resort to all the forms of violence at its disposal to resist challenges to its power.

“The ‘law’ itself, that foundation of its control over the population, is the flag of convenience under which this violence is carried out.

“Physically attacking someone is violence, even if you happen to be dressed up in some fancy clothes provided by the state.

“Physically confining someone in a locked space, with the constant use and threat of force, is also violence, even if you put on a stupid wig to announce what you are going to do to them.

“Bombing someone is violence, as is shooting them, torturing them, spraying them with chemicals.

“Wearing down someone’s resistance, forcing them to follow your rules, to live the way you tell them to, by means of a permanent, lifelong threat of violence if they step out of line is also, needless to say, violence”.

US9

We cannot hope to win our freedom by obediently playing by the rules the system has written to protect itself from us.

We have to break through the barriers it has built to keep us in our place, not least the psychological ones.

One of these barriers is the idea that it is “wrong” to resist state oppression, that “the law” must be respected.

This deeply conditioned response even leads some to assume that breaking the law to fight the system must necessarily be some kind of cunning trap into which we must diligently refuse to fall!

The biggest barrier of all is the notion, implanted in our minds virtually from birth, that we can never defeat the system.

US2 Resistance is futile, they tell us. There is no alternative, another world is completely impossible. There is nothing you can do about this. Stay home, shut up, submit.

But this is a complete lie! If it was true, why would they invest so much effort into policing us, surveilling us, imprisoning us, constantly devising new laws and techniques to chain us?

It is because the tiny ultrarich elite, who run the system for their own selfish benefit, are very aware that they are hopelessly unnumbered. They are scared of us!

They know full well that if ever we broke through the barriers of fear and disempowerment with which they surround us, if ever we overcame the divisions with which they separate us, we would be able to bring their capitalist prison-world crashing down.

We are many, they are few. We will be victorious!

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Uniting against the dictatorship!

Posted on May 30, 2020July 4, 2020 by winter oak

acorn 2019b May 30 2020

Early on in the Covid crisis we noticed that something very strange was happening in the world of anarchism.

In our April 3 article ‘Anarchists and the Coronavirus‘, we warned: “Because they accept at face value the narrative around coronavirus being pumped out by the corporate media, too many anarchists end up reinforcing and amplifying the fearmongering message”.

Since then we have featured several articles addressing this issue (see here, here and here).

We have not yet conducted a second in-depth analysis of anarchist reactions to the health scare and the lockdown because, frankly, the material is too depressing to read!

Freedom-1950 — This is what anarchism is supposed to be about

But the UK anarchist scene’s response to what has been happening has surely reached rock bottom with the inane comment piece published by Freedom paper of London on May 27.

This article, by an academic called Jonathan Bigger, says that although “we” have until recently been “ideologically opposed to government”, the pandemic “is helping us see things in a different light”.

Unbelievable! In other words, the personnel of the UK’s best-known anarchist institution have apparently given up on anarchism!

It gets worse. While all across the country, people are waking up to the totalitarian horror of what is being imposed on them under the pretext of the virus, it seems that for Freedom’s writer the house-arrest fascist lockdown is not the issue at all.

freedombanner The problem for him, as for any good state-worshipping control freak, is “the damage of incompetent government”.

And he claims, with evident pride: “It was anarchists who led the way in terms of wanting a lockdown and being prepared for it”.

Freedom have recent form for this sort of stupidity. Well before the start of the Covid crisis, on January 6, they roundly castigated and “muted” us on Twitter.

The Freedom representative (on this occasion “zb”) was not at all interested in our perfectly polite recommendation that they dip into our online climate capitalists library to find out more about the green capitalism scam.

Instead they tweeted: “Sorry but I have very little time for conspiracy theorists, and you have proven time after time that you are one. Will give you a mute now, can’t see why I should bother any further”.

Freedom 1910 In addition to the climate capitalist issue, there had been a brief and polite exchange about the lack of anarchist voices condemning US imperialist aggression against Iran.

It seemed incredible a few months ago that Freedom might object to us opposing capitalism and imperialism, but now these “anarchists” are also calling for a strong and competent state!

In all seriousness, Freedom should not only drop any pretence at being anarchist, but in order to avoid confusion, should also very quickly change its name to something more appropriate.

The abject failure of so much of the anarchist movement to stand up to actual real-life fascism, after all those years of anti-fascist politicking, has been traumatic for many of us who feel part of the tradition.

Because of the dearth of anarchist voices condemning dictatorship and defending freedom, we have been forced to spread the net wider than usual in a desperate search for common sense.

We have come to greatly appreciate the video news bulletins put out by UK Column, for example, and the articles written by Peter Hitchens.

There is a growing sense that a realignment is taking place, in which the pro-lockdown anarcho-authoritarians are very much on the other side of the barricades to us.

anti-authority As OffGuardian tweeted: “The #CoronavirusLockdown has thrown into sharp relief that left vs right is no longer the dynamic. The only fight that really matters now is authoritarians vs anti-authoritarians”.

A welcome contribution to this debate has now come from our anarchist comrades at The South Essex Heckler.

In their May 29 article ‘The emerging political divide‘, they address the way that so many anarchists have apparently been duped by the state’s “psychological warfare, also known more colloquially as psyops”.

They add: “What is also going on is what seems to be a profound reformulation of political and social divides.

“The labels left and right are starting to become less relevant. What is starting to emerge in the ongoing confusion and chaos is a divide between those of us who value personal and collective autonomy at the grassroots on the one hand and on the other, those who look to the state to provide ‘solutions’ to problems, regardless of how totalitarian those ‘solutions’ may turn out to be.

“As old political definitions and divides become redundant while new ones emerge, we’ll find ourselves with some strange bedfellows. Some may end up as firm allies, some may eventually end up as opponents or enemies.

“The point is that we have to remain open minded and flexible during this ever evolving and often confusing situation. We’re not always going to get it right and yes, if we get through this, in a few years time we may well look back and ask ourselves why the heck did we align ourselves with these particular people?!

“To come to some kind of conclusion, given that our personal and collective autonomy is on the line, it’s better to remain open minded and willing to experiment with new alliances.

“A rigid adherence to a particular line, a refusal to countenance new alliances and condemnation of those of us who are open minded and willing to experiment will inadvertently usher in a techno totalitarian future”.

essex resistance poster — Artwork from The South Essex Heckler

The issue of how far any of us can be open to “new alliances” is obviously a thorny one.

For instance, most anarchists have no problem in siding with oppressed sectors of the population who rise up against authority, whether in the USA, France or anywhere else.

Any reluctance is likely to be from these rebels themselves, suspicious of outside activists parachuting opportunistically into their struggles with little knowledge of the long-term problems they have been facing.

But there is an enormous taboo in anarchist circles about being seen to be anything less than violently hostile to anyone who could possibly be imagined to have anything to do with “the right”.

This issue has already been confronted in France, when anarchists and leftists found themselves on the same Gilets Jaunes protests as flag-waving patriots.

There was a mixture of reactions, ranging from physical fights to a mutual adaptation of political positions in the interests of a common front.

GJ en colere

What seems to have emerged is a kind of “populist” anti-system consensus, which rejects Macron and his neoliberal world, detests the brutal police sent to attack their revolt, distrusts corporate media, despises the smug upper classes and strongly champions social justice, protection of the environment and participative democracy.

It is also worth noting that the Gilets Jaunes remain very popular among working-class French people, despite the non-stop venom that has been spat at them by the Establishment and its media since November 2018.

Could this sort of grassroots anti-authoritarian alliance emerge in the UK, in the face of the massive and unprecedented threat to our lives we are currently facing?

Can anarchist ideals provide the vital spirit to energise a massive uprising against the would-be techno-dictatorship?

In a topsy-turvey world where puffed-up self-professed anarchists turn out to be nothing of the sort, could it be that the actual anarchists out there are only now about to discover that this is what they really are?

virus of freedom2

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