'The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.' Sun Tzu
Stop and think. Ignore the siren call of the media. Pay no heed to the sound bites spouted by the politicians and give no weight to the imprecations of the ‘experts’. Just look at what is happening around you and pay attention to what is patently on its way.
Wherever you are in whatever country, if you are in the West what I am about to describe has happened to your nation over the past 60 years and it is accelerating rapidly to its end state. It's been happening gradually, in cycles, slowly changing the character of your culture until there is no one around to tell you how it was; it now seems normal. There are generations who have never known anything else. See how much of this you recognize.
The beliefs that used to be predominant in the West have been dismantled. The Judeo-Christian tradition has lost steam, is being openly attacked and reduced to just another point of view. Absolute right and wrong, a la Ten Commandments, has been degraded. Instead of the truth, we have your truth and my truth; we have relativism. This is what kids are being taught now and they are not the first generation to be brainwashed with these ideas. We laugh sometimes at the supposed ignorance of today's youth and their snowflake tendencies, at talk of safe spaces and micro aggressions. Who do you think made them like that?
And it's not just in education. It's in the media, it's in the behavior of our churches who seek to pander to the prevailing attitudes in order to stay 'relevant' and, in so doing, demean what it is that they stand for. It's in revisionist history, where the societal problems of today can be traced back to the injustices of yesteryear; not merely in an academic way, but in a political fashion which seeks to destroy our cultural past. This is why younger people know so little history and have so little pride in their countries; they aren't taught anything positive.
It's in the gross expansion of the welfare state, which has eviscerated motivation. Competition has been demonized – everyone gets a certificate at Sports Day – no winner and losers, no reward for striving to improve, no hierarchy. It's in the marginalization of the nuclear family, actively via economic policies and laws which remove tax incentives and effectively promote single parent families and culturally via innumerable outlets continually talking about LGBT rights, gay marriage, the oppressive patriarchy and so forth. And it's in the frustrations that most people feel, either with each other or with the people that govern us.
If people are proud of something, they won't want to break it. If you can change an entire generation's view of cultural history through education, if you can induce revulsion, you destroy pride. You destroy societal glue, you get people to hate each other for perceived and actual historical wrongs. The past is never a foreign country; there is no forgive and move on (for anyone they choose to target, that is). It's always oppressors and victims in a never ending cycle. People grow desperate and exhausted and will tend to grasp at any idea that offers relief, no matter how flawed it is in the long run.
There has also been a relatively rapid decline in the structures of countries; the economy, the military and accountability under justice systems. We all know just how much damage has been done to the fiscal health of countries; debt expands at twice the rate if you're paying people not to work, because you're running up the national debt without being in receipt of the income tax to service it.
Even before the current self inflicted wounds, the national indebtedness of western countries had sky-rocketed, due to the last crisis in 2008-9 and profligate spending since, despite governments pleading austerity. And they aren't printing their own money; central banks are doing that and they are, without exception, privately owned. They charge interest to governments, so a large proportion of our taxes goes to service a national debt owed, effectively, to private entities. Additionally, governments have committed to spending vast sums of money to 'save the environment', and they are openly telling us that it's going to mean a very different life for us (not that we've been paying attention). The money allocated to the militaries of the west (the US being an honorable exception) by European nations has been less than their treaty commitment to NATO for a number of years now and most nations have downsized their armed forces, also. Stability is a precious commodity in short supply.
To add to our woes, we have stumbled from crisis to crisis, with little respite in between. And how many of those would you like? How about the 'Climate Crisis', the 'Covid pandemic', BLM and Antifa burning and looting their way across countries, the economic crisis of the past decade, the Capitol 'insurrection' and all the smaller, manufactured crises that keep us in a near permanent state of anxiety and disillusionment. Fearful people don't use their critical faculties. That’s the idea.
But, never fear. Even though we are struggling, there is a way out. Obviously, it needs to a comprehensive solution, not piecemeal – we need to act together. And even though we are nearly at the 'tipping point' with global warming and despite the fact the Covid is such a huge threat to our mutual well being, we can turn back from the precipice. It’s going to need some worldwide solutions to be found, by global institutions (obviously) and it's going to mean giving up some of the things we hold most dear; like freedom, personal autonomy, the ability to go where we want, associate with who we want, probably live where we want. And there will be some people who don't agree but, instead of meeting them in debate and defeating them with the power of ideas, they will have to be silenced as there is no time for the usual back and forth. It's a global emergency, you see.
It's familiar, isn't it? You may not be old enough to relate to the Judeo-Christian references, but the rest of it may well have happened within your own lifetimes, albeit sometimes hidden from public scrutiny. None of it is an accident; it's taken from the Marxist play-book and it's worked time and again around the world in the past century and it's happening in the US and the UK, France, Germany and other European nations. It's happened in micro cycles within one macro cycle and we are very close to the endgame. Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis and Normalization.
And, of course, Marxism itself is said to be on the march. The New Normal, which is increasingly being referenced, is going to resemble some drab, Marxist utopia of the sort that has failed the world over every time it's been attempted; in the end. But this time, it could be different. The Evil Empire, or the Soviet block if you prefer, collapsed (at least in part) due to the vehement opposition of the other world superpower, the United States. Since then, of the ostensibly communist nations, China has become ascendant. What if the US were to join them, to renounce its free market traditions and embrace Marxism? Who would machinate against them? Who would stand in opposition? The EU? I think not. And if no-one opposes them, offering a constant reminder that there is another way, change is much more difficult in the short term and, in the long term, the people forget that there was ever anything different.
But, whether it can be said to matter if your rights are going to disappear anyway, this is not a Marxist takeover. Yes, the tactics being employed are from the Communist manual and some of the protagonists profess to be Socialist or Marxist, but they aren't the ones calling the shots, no matter how much it appears that they are. Allow me to elucidate.
“..the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; ...the history of these class struggles form a series of evolution in which, now-a-days, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without, at the same time, and once and for all emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class-distinctions and class-struggles.”(1)
So says Frederick Engels in the introduction to The Communist Manifesto. Leaving aside the analysis as to the history of mankind (for now), does it feel like we, if we are to recognize ourselves as the oppressed, are about to 'emancipate society at large'? Does it feel as if the people are about to rise up and throw off the yoke of oppression? I don't think so. The New Normal is not something that the proletariat is pushing. How about this:
“Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society: all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.”(2)
Or this:
“The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”(3)
You can love him or loathe him, disagree with the fundamentals of his analysis, accuse him of writing a treatise for the losers of society. You can say that it's the politics of envy, for those who don't have the ability to succeed on merit, but you cannot deny that he is fundamentally for the little guy; the robber barons, the bourgeoisie are the sworn enemy.
Certainly, some of what has been termed 'Cultural Marxism' draws itself from his writings. He saw religion, law and morality as constructs of the ruling class, which they used to subjugate the masses. Marx viewed even the family as a bourgeois invention, based on capital. He saw it as an institution that would wither away of its own accord when capital was no longer a private joy, but instead was owned by the people in the guise of the state. He wasn't advocating for its active dismemberment.
At the other end of the scale, the Communists certainly did intend to intervene in education “to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”(4) The educational model of the past few decades accurately reflects Marx's framing of past history as a class battle between the oppressor and the oppressed; victim culture, identity politics, racial politics, reparations...all of these movements can find their source in the Manifesto.
Furthermore, the words of the infamous World Economic Forum video, telling us what 2030 will look like - “You will own nothing and you will be happy” - are pretty much a direct lift from Marx's treatise. The Manifesto was an expression of Marx and Engels’ philosophy in largely economic terms and private property was certainly going to be abolished. But the reasoning as to why is interesting:
“...in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.”(5)
So private property was to be dispensed with because it was all in the hands of the 10% of society that made up the bourgeoisie; it wasn't mandated in order to remove it from the workers. In Marx's day, the masses didn't own property. I imagine that, if they had, it would have been celebrated by Marx, as an (albeit partial) correction of the status quo.
Ironically, even in the 1840s, the globalist nature of the oligarchy was apparent and Marx bemoaned its influence on the individuality of different countries:
“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.”(6)
He also criticized the speed of progress, the constant changes wrought by the 'haves'; “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”.(7) The environmental, back to basics, everything was better when we lived in mud huts brigade can certainly trace their roots to Marx – he pined for the simplicity of the past, albeit in the context of the exploitation of the workers. In the same way, the cultural terrorists who have chipped away at Western cultures and traditions since the mid 1950s, can find their inspiration here. And they did – they just called themselves Post Modernists instead.
In between, we had the much referenced Frankfurt School of the 1950s.In Marxism, the working class rises up. But in Frankfurt School theory, the supposed genesis of modern Marxism, the people aren't a social force. The state's intervention in the free market had abolished the tension between the haves and have nots, by taking the edge off the brutality of dog eat dog, all out competition. In the absence of this motivation, they could not see what would cause the lower classes to rise up and break down capitalism. The School espoused Critical Theory, which reads like the cultural version of Marx's economic critique; for the Communists, the working man's lack of influence was mostly explained by the absence of capital due to exploitation by the bourgeoisie. Critical Theory expanded, of necessity, on the notion that cultural oppression was of equal importance.
And the Post Modernists? They harbored a particular disdain for objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science or social progress. All the ills of modern society can be explained with reference to the past, a recipe for politicizing social problems by holding that it is oppressive hierarchies which have caused the damage; the oppressors and oppressed, with more emphasis on culture as the causative agent.
In the modern era, it has become a corrupted force, focusing on minorities and special interest groups and lumping the majority of the working class into the role of oppressors, especially if they are white and straight. While people can get very attached to labels and to the academic distinctions between different philosophical tribes (especially the practitioners), it does, nonetheless, seem clear that there is a shared lineage, a family tree that features all three entities; classical Marxism, the Frankfurt School and Post Modernism.
In time, the adherents of these orthodoxies came to define themselves as Progressives, a misnomer if ever there was one. Marx and Engels harked back to a time that never existed, chafing against hierarchies and mechanization. They gave every impression of disliking change, unless it was change that went backwards. The modern day versions are no different.
They're not inventing anything; they're creating division and squandering resources in the service of a vision that subjugates the majority in favor of the minority. That's change, but it's not progress; when did the urge to tear everything down present as progress? The Left has been playing the long game – they realized that the proletariat wasn't going to rise up, unprimed. The working class don't feel it like the Progressives, the visionaries who know what's best for them.
So, to bring us back to the present; it's not as if the Demoralization and Destabilization phases that we've experienced aren’t hot-wired into the Marxist/Post-Modernist theory; the sweeping away of truth, tradition, pride in one's nation, the promotion of educational revisionism and so forth are methods that can be readily identified: they are the tactical expression of the strategic aims. But who is intended to benefit? Not who was intended to benefit? After all, theories are one thing – the real world is a rather different place. If the origin of the movement is in the service of the proletariat, who is benefiting now? Well,
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws...”(8)
It’s a shame, really. All that work, all that thinking. And who is actually calling the shots when the end is in sight? The people with the money, not the philosophers and not us. Not even the genuine Marxists. It's a power grab, pure and simple, by the elites. They have hijacked Marxist methodologies, they have jumped on the back of a genuine post-modernist movement and used it for their own ends. They've hidden behind a smokescreen of ideology and the likes of BLM and Antifa have played, and are playing, the role of useful idiots. They are using the Marxist play-book – but they're not Marxists. They don't believe in an ideology – they believe in power and money. It's still going to be a hierarchy, but it'll be the same hierarchy in perpetuity, with them at the top.
And it's not a recent hijacking; big money has been investing in totalitarian regimes for over a century. Wall Street banks helped to finance the 1917 Russian Revolution and loaned large sums of money to the Nazis; one of the banking luminaries shared the box with Hitler at the 1936 Munich Games. The banks like to back both sides of a deal; profit, not ethics is the only important metric and national allegiance is non-existent.
It might not even be the first attempt at precipitating the final crisis. You could make a good circumstantial case for 2008/09; a global financial crisis (initiated by greed and corruption in US banking institutions), the ever looming Global Warming catastrophe and the sudden appearance of Swine Flu. Eerily similar, don't you think? There are well founded suspicions about that virus; and there was a vaccine then, also. The UK bought 90 million doses, Germany and France 60 million a piece, only the epidemic didn't gain enough traction to become a true pandemic.
Furthermore, by the time 2016 rolled around and if you were in the business of planning a takeover, you might be feeling that time was getting short. After all, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as well as conservative party gains in Europe could indicate that the people were waking up from their torpor and, just perhaps, that it might be best to get on with it.
Don't believe me? Who is it that is talking about a Great Reset? Is it Marxist firebrands, rising up from the working class? Or is it the likes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Soros, the Wall Street banks, presidents and prime ministers, the UN, WHO and so forth? Do they sound like Marxists to you? Does Biden hang out with BLM leaders? Or with Bernie Sanders? Do any of the Democrats? Does Boris hobnob with Corbyn? No.
Because they're not Marxists; they're totalitarians. Whilst those two categories of people share some policies and characteristics, they are fundamentally dissimilar, even though some of them may actually believe Critical Theory. But, primarily, these people are arrogant, they're the elite and they know best. They don't think the proletariat is downtrodden enough. Think of the play-book as a strategy to effect change – it's just not going to result in a Marxist utopia, not that it ever would have and, in any event, the role of the state in Marxism has been usurped by those higher up the food chain:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex – the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”(9)
That was 1961; as time has passed you can add the banks, Big Pharma, Big Tech and all the unelected supranational organisations that have proliferated and which form another level of governance over and above elected governments. And the same people move between all of these spheres; from private business, to government, to the likes of the UN or the World Bank and back again.
Is the state moving to nationalise transport or to control the means of production on behalf of the people? I think not. The state is the tool of the elites. If, by 2030, we will own nothing, then other people will own everything. And it's obviously not going to be the state. Big business pays politicians and governments as they would employees. Furthermore, instead of the state owning all property and means of production, on behalf of the people, the state is mortgaged up to the eyeballs to central banks which are privately owned by the same group of people who own the media, the Wall Street banks and the big corporations. What have the people got to do with any of this?
An example – the policies being implemented by the Biden administration are not majority approved, even by Democrat voters. Some of them, such as on abortion, are opposed by upwards of 80% of Americans. They may lie about the true nature of legislation in order to gain a measure of popular support, but buyer's remorse is setting in already. The Democrats have 21 months in which to wreak havoc and to ensure that they rig the system sufficiently so as to ensure a de facto one party state. The people won't have a share in anything.
It's not that Marxism and Post Modernism aren't responsible for the undermining of Western society – they are. And despite bemoaning globalized business, it wasn't that Marx was against a supranational movement (of the right stripe), after all:
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!”(10)
But the growing totalitarianism that is infecting our lives is being used against the workers, not on their behalf. And the definition of the proletariat has expanded to include everyone who isn't in the elite, which would mean you and me, too. The 'long march through the institutions', subsequently characterized as a way of hollowing out western culture, was not coined with that end in mind. It was supposed to subvert institutions that worked for the oppressors against the people. That's not the way it's turned out.
There are precedents for what we are experiencing now. Currents events are a necessary prelude to a totalitarian takeover; it doesn't have to be ideologically driven, it just has to be top down. Think the Reichstag Fire, states of emergency, Kristallnacht, the Burning of the Books, the marking out of the opposition and SA bully boys running wild with the government's tacit blessing. False flag operations, crises, censorship both on social media and in publishing, BLM and Antifa and vaccine passports; not much in the way of difference there.
You may think that example unwarranted. I use it as a warning – not that the West is about to indulge itself in all the same excesses as the Nazis, but to demonstrate that the tactics used to consolidate control in 1930s Germany are strikingly similar to those being used by Western governments in the here and now.
The next phase will be normalization. A calm period, a chance to draw breath, but not like before; we have been programmed to be so relieved by a dimming of the tumult that we will accept what is offered rather than willingly plunge ourselves back into conflict; a New Normal. We will settle for less, as a way of avoiding more turbulence in the future. We have been worn down and we will be further divided into the vaccinated and the non vaccinated; as I write this, our rights as citizens are already different, depending on which group we belong to.
The elites want us all in one boat, obedient and cowed. If we were genuinely being given free choice, it wouldn't be this way. If you're vaccinated and you think it works (after all, why would you get vaccinated if you thought it didn't?), what difference does it make if somebody else isn't? Surely, that's their lookout and none of your business. But that's not how it is, is it?
So, there's more to it and they are not making a secret of it. Go to the World Economic Forum website, read about UN Agenda 21, try and force yourself through leftist diatribes about The Great Reset, by those who seek to be the architects of it. It's all there, either explicitly or in its effects if you think it through. And it has to happen now. They have to leverage this 'crisis', which is another fact that they're not shy about.
The pressure is going to build this year. In autumn and winter we will see more lock-downs, more fear porn about variants, more regulation, mandatory vaccines for certain workers and new 'top-up' vaccines. Private business will do the bidding of government, which it already is and they will combine to force the 'hesitant' to comply. There won't be many holdouts by this time next year.
If this was Marxism, we would expect the state to wither away, eventually, as Communism triumphs over human nature. The state may well die, but not in the way envisioned. We'll get unelected global governance instead, funded and controlled by banks and business. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what we call it; it's still totalitarianism.
But right now, it does matter because we're taking aim at the wrong target, we're allowing ourselves to be deceived by the sleight of hand. It's not the ideology, the true Marxists who may still believe that they are going to realize their goal. They are being used, just as much as we are. They will just be cogs in the wheel. It's the elites that are pulling the strings.
Citations
Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.
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Mayer Rothschild
Dwight D Eisenhower
Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.