The point of no return 409
James Hankins and Allen C. Guelzo … noted in the first chapter of Where Next?: Civilization at the Crossroads that “Civilization is always threatened by barbarism, and the greater threat often comes more from within than from without.”
The political philosopher James Burnham made a similar point when he argued that “Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” …
The historian Arnold Toynbee spoke in this context of the “barbarization of the dominant minority.” When a society is robust and self-confident, Toynbee suggested, cultural influence travels largely from the elites to the proletariats. The elites furnish social models to be emulated. The proletariats are “softened,” Toynbee said, by their imitation of the manners and morals of a dominant elite. But when a society begins to falter, the imitation proceeds largely in the opposite direction: the dominant elite is coarsened by its imitation of proletarian manners. Toynbee spoke in this context of a growing “sense of drift,” “truancy,” “promiscuity,” and general “vulgarization” of manners, morals, and the arts. The elites, instead of holding fast to their own standards, suddenly begin to “go native” and adopt the dress, attitudes, and behavior of the lower classes. Flip on your television, scroll through social media, look at the teens and pre-teens in your middle-class neighborhood. You will see what Toynbee meant by “barbarization of the dominant [or, rather ‘once-dominant’] minority.” One part of the impulse is summed up in the French phrase nostalgie de la boue. But it is not “mud” that is sought so much as repudiation. …
What we are talking about is the drift, the tendency of our culture. And that is to be measured not so much by what we permit or forbid as by what we unthinkingly accept as normal. This crossroads, that is to say, is part of a process, one of whose markers is the normalization of the outré. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described this development as “defining deviancy down.” It is, as the late columnist Charles Krauthammer observed, a two-way process. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” he wrote, it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant. . . . Large areas of ordinary behavior hitherto considered benign have had their threshold radically redefined up, so that once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant. Normal middle-class life then stands exposed as the true home of violence and abuse and a whole catalog of aberrant acting and thinking.”
Hilaire Belloc espied the culmination of this process in Survivals and New Arrivals (1929):
“When it is mature we shall have, not the present isolated, self-conscious insults to beauty and right living, but a positive coordination and organized affirmation of the repulsive and the vile.” …
Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints (1973) … imagines a world in which Western Civilization is overrun and destroyed by unfettered Third-World immigration. It describes an instance of wholesale cultural suicide … Conspicuous in that apocalypse is the feckless collusion of white Europeans and Americans in their own supersession. They faced an existential crossroads. They chose extinction, laced with the emotion of higher virtue, rather than survival. …
In 1994, Irving Kristol wrote an important essay called Countercultures. In it, he noted that “‘Sexual liberation’ is always near the top of a countercultural agenda—though just what form the liberation takes can and does vary, sometimes quite widely.” The costumes and rhetoric change, but the end is always the same: an assault on the defining institutions of our civilization. “Women’s liberation,” Kristol continues, “is another consistent feature of all countercultural movements—liberation from husbands, liberation from children, liberation from family. Indeed, the real object of these various sexual heterodoxies is to disestablish the family as the central institution of human society, the citadel of orthodoxy.”
In Eros and Civilization (1966), the Marxist countercultural guru Herbert Marcuse provided an illustration of Kristol’s thesis avant la lettre. Railing against “the tyranny of procreative sexuality,” Marcuse urged his followers to return to a state of “primary narcissism” and extolled the joys of “polymorphous perversity.” Are we there yet? … Marcuse sought to enlist a programmatically unfruitful sexuality in his campaign against “capitalism” and the cultural establishment: barrenness as a revolutionary desideratum. Back then, the diktat seemed radical but self-contained, another crackpot effusion from the academy. Today, it is a widespread mental health problem, accepted gospel preached by teachers, the media, and legislators across the country. As I write, the National Women’s Law Center has just taken to Twitter to declare that “People of all genders need abortions.” How many things had to go wrong for someone, presumably female, to issue that bulletin? “All genders,” indeed. I recall the observation, attributed to Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
In The Catholic Tradition and the Modern State”(1916), the historian Christopher Dawson wrote, “It is not liberty, but power which is the true note of our modern civilization. Man has gained infinitely in his control over Nature, but he has lost control over his own individual life.” I think this is true. And there is a political as well as a technical or scientific dimension to the phenomenon Dawson describes.
[It may be true, but the underlined sentence is annoyingly badly written. When “Man” is used as a generic term, “he” cannot be said to have an “individual life”. A better formulation of the idea Dawson is trying to express: Humankind has gained greatly in control over Nature, but individuals have lost control over their own lives.]
In the West, what we have witnessed since the so-called “Progressive” movement of the 1910s and 1920s is the rise of a bureaucratic elite that has increasingly absorbed the prerogatives of power from legislative bodies. In the United States, for example, Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress. For many decades, however, Americans have been ruled less by laws duly enacted by their representatives in Congress and more by an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies. The members of these bodies are elected by no one; they typically work outside the purview of public scrutiny; and yet their diktats have the force of law. Already in the 1940s, James Burnham was warning about the prospect of a “managerial revolution” that would accomplish by bureaucracy what traditional politics had failed to produce. Succeeding decades have seen the extraordinary growth of this leviathan, the unchecked multiplication of its offices and powers, and the encroaching reach of its tentacles into the interstices of everyday life. We are now, to an extent difficult to calculate, ruled by this “administrative state”, the “deep state”, the “regulatory state”. …
When in September 2020 the World Economic Forum at Davos announced its blueprint for a “Great Reset” in the wake of the worldwide panic over COVID-19, a new crossroads had been uncovered. Never letting a crisis go to waste, the Davos initiative was an extensive menu of progressive, i.e., socialistic imperatives. Here at last was an opportunity to enact a worldwide tax on wealth, a far-reaching (and deeply impoverishing) “green energy” agenda, rules that would dilute national sovereignty, and various schemes to insinuate politically correct attitudes into the fabric of everyday life. All this was being promulgated for our own good, of course. But it was difficult to overlook the fact that the WEF plan involved nothing less than the absorption of liberty by the extension of bureaucratic power.
Kimball’s idea is that we are now at a point – a “crossroads”, or a fork in the road – where we have a choice to make: restore and preserve Western civilization, OR let it die.
I do not think we have that choice. “The drift, the tendency of our culture” has gone too far in the direction of “the repulsive and the vile” to be stemmed and diverted back to “right living”. Western Civilization has been “overrun and destroyed by unfettered [unobstructed] Third-World immigration”.
We are at – we have have passed the point of no return.
Jillian Becker December 12, 2022
Homo nudus 109
The naked human.
That’s the Great Idea of Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive President of the World Economic Forum, would-be Architect of the future of humankind which he describes as the Great Reset.
The richest people on earth fly their private jets up, up, to Davos on its alp. There among the clouds they dream together of how beautiful it will be when no one except themselves owns anything.
It is a dream of global totalitarian Communism with them and their heirs in power over everyone else forever.
They promise the rest of us:
“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”
“And if you dare not to be happy, we will exterminate you. Resistance is futile.”
You will be assigned food, drink, clothes, bed, transport, schooling, job, duties, leisure, sex sessions (diverse, inclusive, and equitable), health care, vacation, friends, entertainment, opinions, values, death.
Of what type, they will decide. By means of algorithms.
In my prescient book L: A Novel History (first published 2005, new edition 2012), I describe what happens when a totalitarian Communist regime – led by the eponymous hero L – that has come to power in England in the 1980s, brings about, as it must, the day when there is nothing for people to own or to eat.
Here are some passages from it:
To help us learn what many citizens must have felt at that moment when civil life broke down, we have this recollection by a tobacconist and newsagent, a Mr Bruce Waughs, a staunch Conservative by his own account, who had run his own small shop in Brixton until the revolution, and then carried on working in it when it was expropriated like all other businesses big and small, as a licensed distributor of the RED TIMES. It tells what is surely a most surprising anecdote.
My wife Stella appeared at the door, and she just stood there, looking at me with her eyes wide open and saying nothing, like someone who had just seen something happen that could not happen. I said, “What is it?” And she said, “There’s nothing! Nothing to eat. Everything’s just stopped.” It took some time for me to get the story out of her. When I did it took me even longer to grasp what it meant. Then I walked out of the shop, shut the door behind me, and was about to lock it, when Stella said, “What are you doing that for? Who are you going to lock it against?” And then it really came home to me. Well, I pushed the door open again and left it gaping wide, and I took her hand – something I hadn’t done for years − and we started walking along the street. And suddenly I felt − terribly, terribly happy. I can’t explain it. I can only say that I had never felt so happy in my whole life, not even when I was a child. And at that moment I looked at Stella, and she looked at me, and we began to laugh, and we couldn’t stop, we walked along the street laughing and laughing, and then we joined hands and began to dance, skipping round, like children, and if anybody had asked us what we were laughing at we couldn’t for the life of us have told them, not then. And all at once we weren’t alone, not alone in the street and not alone in our happiness, there were others, several others, many others, and then hundreds of others, the streets were full, and everyone was laughing, and dancing, we had seen nothing like it since the day we stood outside Buckingham Palace in July 1981 and cheered the Prince of Wales and his bride. And that was the same month our shop had been broken into and our stock looted by a mob in a riot, and Stella had cried. And I think the royal wedding had been a tonic for us, and Stella felt much better afterwards. But now what were we celebrating? The moment when we knew we might starve? It was only afterwards I could put a name to that feeling. Freedom. Somehow, in the twinkling of an eye, we had been set free. Free of what, you might say, when we were living under a tyranny, and had no notion of how we were going to go on living at all. Exactly. It was irrational. But somehow it happened. It wasn’t just having no more living to earn, no more mortgage to pay, no more bills, no more saving and budgeting, no more being told how much better Stella’s brother was doing with his furniture stores and garages than I was with my corner shop – all those sorts of worries had been lifted one by one when the revolution came eight months before, and other worries had come to replace them, heavier too, by far. Worries about the grandchildren and were they getting enough to eat, and about Stella’s mother who not only had her teeth taken away but even her wheelchair so that she just stayed indoors and we had to carry her from the bed to the chair and back again, and generally worries about whether life would ever again be comfortable and pleasant – as it had been when we had only the mortgage and things like that to worry about. And so what kind of happiness was this, what kind of freedom was it? I can tell you now – it was freedom from hope! Stella and I and all those other people made a strange discovery that day. We discovered that when you truly despair − there’s nothing to do but laugh.
It is perfectly true that on that day many people danced in the street. The New Police, mounted and on foot, descended on crowds wherever they found them, and broke them apart and sent them home. They rode or marched up, thinking that these must be the beginnings of the first genuine and justified demonstrations against a government since the 1930s, after all these years, even before the revolution, of groups playing at protest, playing at suffering, playing at reaction to pretended oppression and pretended deprivation. And the New Police were themselves so surprised at the carnival mood they found in borough after borough, that they were caught by the television cameras smiling, chatting to people in a friendly way, as they asked rather than ordered them to get off the streets. …
Bruce Waughs, the man who had laughed the day civilization stopped, was to write, in after years, this evaluation of L’s “precious gift of anarchy and dissolution”:
I soon enough found that this was not “freedom” after all. It was the extremest form of slavery – slavery of your entire being to the labour of keeping alive, supplying the simplest and most fundamental needs of life, exhausting the body and soul to keep body and soul together, in constant fear of starvation, dread of your fellow man, and a desperate urge to seize and devour whatever you can, by whatever means. For a hunk of meat you would happily kill any man or woman who stood in your way. We descended lower than savages. We became beasts.
*
Citizens’ lives had been getting increasingly difficult for some time before the day of hunger arrived.
At first the Winsomes had rejoiced in the revolution. It was what they had hoped for, worked for, and, as long as they could, voted for. “I don’t mind not owning my own house if nobody else does,” Ted Winsome had written cheerfully in his Revolution Issue of the NEW WORKER* (which came out six weeks after Republic Day, as his paper, like most others, had been ordered to suspend publication until all newspapers that were to continue had been nationalized, and permits granted to their editors). Had not his wife, in her capacity as Housing Committee chairperson on Islington Borough Council set an example, by compulsorily purchasing more private houses for local government ownership than anyone before or after her (until the revolution made purchase unnecessary)? He was proud that she had been an active pioneer, one of the avant-garde of the socialist revolution.
However, he was less pleased when three families were quartered in his house. And then another was sent by the Chief Social Worker (a sort of district commandant) when his own children, delighted to drop out of school, had left home to join a WSP [Workers Socialist Party] group and vent righteous indignation on landlords, capitalists, individualists, racists and speculators. All of his fellow lodgers were, in his view, “problem-families” – drunken, noisy, filthy, careless, inconsiderate and rude. (“That,” said the Gauleiter, “is why they were chased out of their last lodgings by angry co-residents on a former Council estate.” She had thought the Winsomes would be “more tolerant”.) Before he could hand over his stereophonic record-player to the local community centre – as he assured those he complained to that he had fully intended to do – one of the problem-children broke it, threw his classical records away, and also deliberately smashed his high-speed Japanese camera. His furniture was soon broken too. Precious antiques which he had restored with his own hands in hours of patient labour, were treated like fruit-boxes, to be stood on, and spilt on, and thrown about. When cups and glasses were smashed, it was he who had to replace them if he was to have anything to eat or drink out of; which meant recourse to the black market, against which he had so often fulminated in his editorials in the NEW WORKER. He started hiding things away in his room, taking special care to keep his carpentry and joinery tools from the hands of those who would not understand how he had cared for them, valued them, kept them sharp, adapted some of them to his particular needs. One of the problem-fathers accused him of “hoarding private property”, and threatened to go to the New Police with the complaint, or call in “some RI people” [Righteous Indignation – a violent Antifa-type group].
He confided to a woman journalist at his office how he had begun to suspect that “when a thing belongs to everybody, it belongs to nobody”. And he even went so far as to suggest that “as people only vandalize things they don’t own themselves, there is something to be said for private ownership after all”.
*
All industry failed after a few months of central communist management.
The bewildering fact was that the first country in the world to have become industrialized, the very home of the Industrial Revolution, the country which had once led the world in manufacturing industry, the erstwhile hub of the greatest empire in history, had become one of the poorest states in the world; a people surrounded not by wild tracts of unused land, with isolated constructions which signify the first frantic efforts to build mills, factories and mines in undeveloped countries, but by the decaying ruins of industrial might, of mills and mines and factories fallen into disuse and decay, rusting machinery, the vast wreckage of a once great industrial civilization, dilapidated monuments of human ingenuity and at the same time to human idiocy; acres of towns and cities deserted, tumbling into rubble, and all this devastation brought about not by war, not by any external enemy, but by a faction among the people treacherous out of intellectual blindness, guilty of a shallow moralistic idealism and economic folly; of a desire to be good, and a failure to be intelligent.
For it was those who had freedom and decried it, pretending they were oppressed; those who had material plenty and despised it, pretending they were poor; those who thus secreted a worm in their own hearts, and so at the heart of civilization – envy: the amazing unforeseen and unforeseeable envy, by the free and comfortable, of the unfree and wretched of the earth: it was these self-deceiving, would-be lovers of mankind, the Ted and Marjorie Winsomes, the affluent children who squatted in the communes and protested against freedom calling it “repressive tolerance”, and those they elected, who were caught in the trap of their own lies, and brought an end to liberty in the name of liberation; an end to plenty in the name of humanitarianism; and an end to the impersonality of the law before which all were equal, and the impersonality of the market in which all were equal, and created legal discrimination and class elitism, in the name of equality.
Jillian Becker October 12, 2021
Oligarchy 174
The Supreme Court has no way of enforcing its rulings.
It depends totally on the legislative and executive branches of government to enforce them.
If, as now, a party takes power (“takes”, not “wins”, being the right word for how the Democratic Party has come to have it) over both the legislative and executive branches and chooses not to obey the Supreme Court, there is nothing that can be done about it. Nothing.
The Framers of the Constitution never imagined it could happen.
Now the Democrats in power know that they need not go to the trouble of packing the Supreme Court, they can simply disobey it. Ignore it. And that’s what they’re doing.
The Court ruled that a moratorium forbidding eviction for non-payment of rent is illegal – but the “Biden” administration went ahead with it.
The period of the moratorium was due to end about now, but the administration has decided to extend it. Again the Court has declared that it is illegal. Again the administration has imposed it.
Imposed it how? Not even by administrative order of “President Biden”. A woman, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who heads the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued the order. And the administration gladly enforces the rulings of the CDC.
Landlords may not demand rent from tenants. But they must continue to pay property taxes and maintenance costs.
One of the few journalists who have chosen to tell the public about this is John Daniel Davidson who writes (in part) at The Federalist:
An astonishing thing happened this week in Washington that didn’t get much critical coverage from a media establishment loath to criticize President Biden. At the behest of congressional Democrats, Biden flouted the Constitution and broke his oath of office by issuing a ban on evictions that he and his advisers know to be illegal.
By “ban on evictions” I mean the president issued a blatantly unconstitutional decree that renters all across America don’t have to pay rent. If landlords try to evict tenants for not paying rent, they could face criminal penalties including fines and imprisonment.
The eviction moratorium is one of the most important stories of the COVID-19 lockdowns but also one of the least covered, because the left doesn’t want to draw undue attention to its evisceration of property rights under the guise of public health.
Nationwide nearly half of the landlords are people who own a second house or apartment that they rent out. Many of these people have gone a year without receiving any rent, yet they’re still liable for taxes, upkeep, and mortgage payments. Landlords are supposed to be able to survive because of a $46.5 billion federal government rental relief fund. The problem is, the money isn’t being used. With trillions of government aide already creating incentives for people not to return to work, the eviction moratorium creates an incentive not to pay rent.
The way all this has gone down illustrates a deeply disturbing reality about the Democrats running the pandemic response in Washington: They’re lawless, and as the pandemic drags on, they’re becoming bolder about it.
The background here is that a nationwide ban on evictions expired on Saturday. Since then, Democrats in Congress have been agitating for an extension of the ban despite a determination by the U.S. Supreme Court in June that the CDC has no legal authority to do that, as anyone with a passing familiarity of the U.S. Constitution could tell you.
The utter contempt for the rule of law shown in all of this is simply staggering.
The notion that a federal agency tasked with the control and prevention of infectious diseases could simply by fiat impose an “eviction moratorium” on the entire country, effectively nationalizing housing, is shocking and outrageous. Biden himself knows this. At a press conference on Tuesday, he said “The bulk of the constitutional scholars say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”
It sure isn’t. But later that same day he did it anyway.
*
What all this means is that America is no longer a democracy, no longer a free republic. It is a dictatorship.
This country is now governed dictatorially.
The power to dictate is in the hands of an oligarchy.
The oligarchs are the very rich. The richest men who have ever lived. They are technocrats who own the means of mass communication, newspapers, television news media, the “social” media. They own the politicians through whom they will transform the world.
So it is a plutocratic oligarchy.
The plutocrats are almost all men. Their executive consists increasingly of women: women governors, public prosecutors, mayors, police chiefs, member of congress, cabinet members, directors of government agencies. Lifted into office by the oligarchs, one could reasonably call them the dictators’ “temps” – the Grand Temps of the American oligarchy.
And there is nothing that can be done to bring the dictators down.
Vote them out of power? Can we really believe that there will be fair elections ever again? If a (constitutionally required) election is held at all, it will be rigged. On the excuse that there is a dangerous virus threatening the nation so that voters must keep far apart from each other – which, the CDC will assure them, they must do to survive – elections will be by mail and “drop box” only. Staff under the Grand Temps will collect the ballot sheets, count them in closed offices, and announce the result: a huge majority (why not 100%?) for the re-election of the oligarchs’ chosen executors.
It is more than likely that the position of Oligarch will become hereditary. Then it will be an aristocratic oligarchy. Who knows but there may even be a monarch?
The dictators of the twentieth century – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe, Chavez – became rich by becoming dictators.
The new American oligarchic dictators became rich first, then became dictators.
They will not be satisfied with dictatorial power over America. They are “globalists”. They desire global power. Plutocrats from everywhere on earth meet at Davos, and it was there, in the small Swiss town on a mountain, that the decision was taken to “reset” the way human beings will live and how they will be governed.
The world they intend to create is very different from the world we have known.
There will be no nation states. No borders. The impoverished peoples of what was once called the Third World will continue for a time to move in vast numbers into what used to be called the First World. It does not matter to the oligarchs where people settle. The oligarchic power will extend over them all wherever they may be.
Individuals, other than the oligarchs, will own nothing. No house, no money, no clothes, no car … Not even an electric car. Not even a bicycle. Everything will be provided for them by the Global Oligarchy. What they “need” will be decided by their masters.
They will be allowed the temporary use of things – clothes, maybe a bicycle.
They will be housed, each in a tiny apartment in a vast building. (Herding people together is useful for the spreading of disease when population needs to be reduced.) They will be fed communally. There will be no families. Breeding will be controlled. Children will be raised by staff of the Oligarchy.
Only some children will be taught to read and write and reckon. All will be taught obedience to the authorities.
Adults will be assigned jobs. The product of their labors will be distributed by the authorities.
A permanent aristocracy will rule over a world of slaves.
Marxism-Schwabism: or the dictatorship of the tycoons 196
The silly-billy tyranny exerted shamelessly now by the Obama-Pelosi gang through a puppet president, nasty as it is, may be short-lived because nonsense cannot endure. But the real power, the serious power, lies elsewhere, with the financial institutions.
They have an agenda to reduce us all to serfdom.
We summarize an article by Justin Haskins at Townhall:
In June 2020, elites from around the world announced [from a “virtual Davos meeting”] the launch of a plan to “reset” the entire global economy.
Every country, from the United States to China, must participate in the Great Reset, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. So wrote Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum.
Although Great Reset supporters call for dramatic expansions of government welfare programs, including job guarantees, government-provided health care, etc.,the heart of the Great Reset is something called environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics. Those include how “green” a company is, its “right” ratio of minorities, whether a business is involved in politically disfavored industries such as gun manufacturing and sales. According to its ESG metrics, a company is accorded a rating.
Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo – the six largest banks in the United States – have announced their commitment to the Great Reset. (So has Mastercard.)
Individuals should also expect to be “rated” by these financial institutions. If you want a loan from one of those banks in the future, you’d better toe the globalist line on climate change.
If banks are allowed to collectively decide to stop financing any group of people they want, based not on financial concerns but ideological considerations, then banks and their Great Reset allies will have, in effect, near-total control over society.
In January 2021, the Trump-era Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a finalized Fair Access to Financial Services regulation that would have made it illegal for large banks to engage in that sort of discrimination. But just one week after entering the White House, President Joe Biden “paused” the rule’s implementation, signaling his clear intention to eliminate the rule before it ever has a chance to be published in the Federal Register. No surprise. The Biden administration’s “climate czar” John Kerry is an ardent supporter of the Great Reset.
The time has come for a massive populist revolt against the Great Reset. The fate of the free world depends on it.
The Great Reset 68
The World Economic Forum is now (January 25-29, 2021) enjoying its 51st session.
It is about to change our world forever. Or hopes to. If we let it.
Its main purpose this year is to promote the implementation of the Great Reset.
The Great Reset is, according to its admirers:
A project to bring the world’s best minds together to seek a better, fairer, greener, healthier planet as we rebuild from the pandemic.
The first thing to know about the World Economic Forum, which meets annually at Davos in Switzerland, is that it is a voluntary luxury parliament of billionaires and politicians and billionaire-politicians.
The next thing to know is: what is it for, what do these people aim at, what do they want? And the answer, with no exaggeration, is: they want to rule the world.
The Covid-19 world-wide epidemic provides the would-be world rulers with their best opportunity yet for claiming that “world solutions” are needed.
So now again an arrogance of theorists [collective noun; singular verb] wants to organize the rest of us, or as many of the rest of us as can be raked in and arranged into a pattern of existence they know to be beautiful. Their aim is only to do us good. Theirs is a kindly plan for putting human affairs right and making the whole world nice, and they alone can do it. That is their conviction, their unshakable belief.
They call their plan the “Great Reset”. They will gather into their own hands all the wealth of the world (now don’t go asking what that is or how such a thing can be done!) and redistribute it equally so each gets the same share as everyone else. (No, shush, don’t ask whether they will put their own wealth in the pool for redistribution. That’s another inappropriate question. Please try not to be hostile. Please be co-operative, neighborly, communitarian, declare that you are concerned above all else for the wretched of the earth, and you will already be helping to accomplish the Great Reset.)
This economic equalizing of all – leading, they say, inevitably to the social equalizing of all (though not of course making us all equal in power with them, the rulers themselves) – is NOT to be called or thought of as Communism, or Marxism, or neo-Marxism, or even Socialism. It is “a better form of capitalism”, aka “stake-holder’s capitalism”. It is the gift to humanity of Big Business.
The Great Reset has been made gloriously implementable right now by the Covid pandemic. Universal lockdown has forced people everywhere to change the pattern of their lives. The old ways have had to go. What an opportunity this is for shaping the new ways as they ideally ought to be! For directing the arc of history the way it ought to bend!
The World Economic Forum will turn a nasty disease into a boon for humankind.
There might have been difficulties put in the way by the United States of America if Donald Trump had been re-elected president in November 2020. He was a nuisance to the would-be world rulers for three years, and would have gone on holding them back for a while yet had not Covid-19 burst upon the political scene and forced even him to accept unprecedented change.
A billionaire himself but like no other, he is a man incapable of formulating a grand theory of any sort; one who personally knows people who build things with mortar and metal, actually standing among them and listening to them, sometimes wearing a hard hat himself! That man wants each of those workers to have a say in how he [generic masculine pronoun] is ruled! He wants each of them to keep the money he earns for himself and his dependents! That man would acknowledge no world crisis needing a “world solution” (not even global warming) – until he was confronted by Covid-19. That one man could have stood in the way of the Davos plan for years to come, and perhaps even destroyed it forever!
They did their best to traduce him in the eyes of the millions of deplorable Americans who voted for him. They accused him of all the worst sins they could think of, calling him racist, xenophobe, Islamophobe, homophobe, transgenderphobe, misogynist, narcissist, climate change denier, liar, Nazi, Hitler. They tried to impress on the electorate that his face was orange, his hands too small, his hair too … too … They said he had two scoops of ice-cream when everyone else had only one. They explained why his wife and children were beneath their contempt. They did all that, and did everything they could think of to relieve the country of his leadership – and it made no difference. The deplorables continued to cheer him on, fanatically. Tens of millions of them. They said the accusations were not true. And then he actually got more votes in that November 2020 election than any other Republican candidate for the presidency had ever got before him!
Fortunately, somehow, even more votes were cast for his opponent Joe Biden, a man who loves the plan of Davos.
How can the visionaries of Davos not be grateful to the Covid virus for falling upon the world; grateful to China from where it emanated; grateful to the United Nation’s World Health Organization for promoting the great change in everyday life that nothing else could have accomplished?
You too must learn to love the vision and the plan.
Here is the face and the message of Davos. See it, hear it, learn it, obey it.
The face is that of Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum. He is introduced by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission (the EU).
And here’s CNN, at highest sycophantic pitch, interviewing Klaus Schwab in 2020, when he and his like-thinkers were still trying to use “climate change” as the urgent disaster from which the world needed saving by them, before the happy advent of the Covid pandemic.
And here is Klaus Schwab talking about what he calls the fourth industrial revolution – the digital revolution – and how it requires globalization and social equalization.
And here he explains his “new definition of capitalism”.
And here is an appreciative article about the World Economic Forum put out for the occasion of this 51st. session. It is by Jonathan Michie, Professor of Innovation & Knowledge Exchange, University of Oxford, He writes at The Conversation:
The 51st World Economic Forum starts on January 25 …
Inevitably, the event … aims to respond to the apocalyptic events of the past 12 months. “A crucial year to rebuild trust” is the theme, built around the “great reset” that World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab and Prince Charles launched last year.
The event will be accompanied by virtual events in 430 cities across the world, to emphasise the fact that we face global challenges that require global solutions and action.
This recognises that the effects of the pandemic are likely to be increasingly compounded by other major global threats, including the climate crisis, financial crises, and social and economic inequality. To give just one example, the COVID-19 mortality rate in England in December was over twice as high in the most deprived areas than the least deprived.
See? Pure philanthropy drives the WEF.
So how successful is the WEF’s mission likely to be?
This is not the first time that global crises have required global action, but there have been mixed results in the past. After the first world war, the UK played a pivotal role in forming the League of Nations on the international stage. But this ultimately failed to deliver, with the UK’s insistence on post-war reparations undermining Germany’s economic recovery and political stability.
So the failure of the League of Nations – and therefore the outbreak of the second world war? – was Britain’s fault.
Professor Michie does his best to make the idea of an international forum managing the world’s economy nothing to be feared; rather something already tried and tested:
When the world next sought to prevent future conflicts towards the end of the second world war, the lessons were to some extent learned from last time around. The allies met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the US in 1944 to develop policies for economic stability.
This led to a new system of interlinked exchange rates organised around a gold-backed US dollar, as well as new institutions to help manage it, including the International Monetary Fund and what later became the World Bank. This was followed in the next couple of years by the United Nations and the forerunner to the World Trade Organization. The Bretton Woods system endured until the early 1970s when the US came off the gold standard, but much of the system created in the 1940s survives in one form or another today.
And who dares say that the creation of the United Nations and the World Trade Organization was a bad thing?
The 2007-09 financial crisis, which involved the first global recession since the 1930s, led to many calls for action to prevent similar crises in future. There was some tightening of regulation, but the threat of instability remains due to excessive debts and too much speculation.
With only the 1940s seeing a really adequate response to global crises, what will make the difference this time?
The WEF’s vision of a “great reset” recognises that what is needed to tackle these crises goes far beyond economic reforms, or climate measures, or tackling a pandemic – it is all of these combined, and more. It is the idea that global action needs to be underpinned by a mission to change society, to make it more inclusive and cohesive; to match environmental sustainability with social sustainability. It follows their call to “build back better” – one echoed by many around the world.
The WEF seeks action across seven key themes: environmental sustainability; fairer economies; “tech for good”; the future of work and the need for reskilling; better business; healthy futures with fair access for all; and “beyond geopolitics” – national governments collaborating globally.
The WEF says the key is reestablishing public trust, which is “being eroded, in part due to the perceived mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic”. But this may prove difficult, given there is little change in corporate or government leadership.
The big hope is 78-year-old Joe Biden, who was US vice president for eight years during which many of these problems were mounting, not being solved.
Sadly, the main cause for optimism is the fact that today’s crises are so great that they may provoke action. Future financial crises look likely. The climate crisis is increasingly accepted to be an existential threat. And now the pandemic is a huge economic and human disaster, with further such pandemics recognised as likely because of everything from the explosion in global travel to the effects of climate change.
A key question for this year’s conference … is whether a new form of globalisation will be developed. …
A new era is required, building on the Paris Agreement to limit climate change now that the Americans are joining again – with more support of a Green New Deal geared towards achieving net zero emissions and making the global economy truly sustainable.
We need bold initiatives to tackle the threat of future pandemics; financial speculation, tax evasion and avoidance, and the threat of financial crises; and to reduce the unsustainable inequalities of wealth, income and power across the globe.
So tax avoidance is now considered morally wrong or possibly criminal. We must arrange our financial affairs so that we pay the greatest amount of tax that we possibly can.
Will corporate and political decision-makers rise to the challenge? There needs to be sufficient popular pressure – from citizens, voters, consumers, workers, educators and activists – to push governments and business to change course fundamentally.
The professor names the forerunners of this new globalist movement:
These past few years have witnessed the Occupy movement, the Me Too Movement, Black Lives Matter and countless climate crisis groups.
Who could have predicted that all those billionaires, many of them from Wall Street, would find reason to honor and adopt the agenda of the Occupy Wall Street movement?
Yes. And BLM – a self-declared Marxist movement – will work in perfect harmony with the new capitalism and Big Business.
Calls for action have been coming from business leaders at Davos and elsewhere for years.
The hope is that this time, the scale of the emergency will finally make radical change unavoidable.
Unavoidable, the radical change that Klaus Schwab, and Prince Charles, and Bill Gates, and George Soros, and Joe Biden will manage. We have no choice but to let it happen.
And why should we not be happy about it? It will improve the world forever. Guaranteed.
Government by the stupid for the stupid 194
… but not of the stupid.
Paul Joseph Watson is on to them.
He shows some of the ways Big Virtue tries to discombobulate us.
Davos goes down 108
Have those arrogant globalist elites trying to rule the world been stopped at last?
Have the nationalists, slowly awaking from their passivity and apathy to vote for Brexit and Donald Trump, to put on yellow vests and shout angrily in the streets of their Western cities, stopped them?
We quote Michael Barone writing at Investor’s Business Daily on 2/1/2019:
Turnout at Davos was lousy this year. President Trump, preoccupied by the government shutdown, was a no-show at last week’s World Economic Forum there. So were British Prime Minister Theresa May (Brexit) and French President Emanuel Macron (“gilets jaunes”). Chinese President Xi Jinping, Davos’ 2018 star, and Russian President Vladimir Putin weren’t there either. Neither were some of the usual financial and media big names.
From all of this, you might get the impression that the world’s political, financial and media elites have lost much of their prestige these days, which, of course, they have.
It’s an enormous contrast with elites’ sunny confidence, over much of the quarter century after the fall of the Soviet Union, that they could remake the world …
Consider Mexico. The NAFTA trade agreement was proposed by the Reagan administration, negotiated by the Bush administration and ratified by the Clinton administration, with plenty of support from both parties, especially Texans (Lloyd Bentsen, the Bushes) close to the border. They hoped to make Mexico more like the United States, and to regularize Mexican immigration.
There has been some convergence, with life in much of Mexico resembling Texas, but also with large parts of California resembling Mexico. Illegal immigration surged up until the 2007 economic crisis.
Even more ambitious was the bipartisan elites’ project of bringing China into the world trading system. The hope was that an increasingly prosperous Chinese populace would demand more freedom and democracy. That hasn’t happened; instead, Xi Jinping has regressed toward one-man rule.
Meanwhile, serious academic studies have substantiated non-elite charges that Chinese imports have cost America hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. In return, American consumers have been able to buy clothes, toys and gadgets at increasingly low prices. But for many, it is at the cost of the dignity and sense of self-worth achieved by earning a paycheck.
The chief project of European elites, the “ever-closer” European Union, has arguably worked out worse. The Euro currency that was supposed to tie Europe together has instead (as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher predicted) widened the rift between the Mediterranean countries and an increasingly dominant Germany. Britain voted for Brexit — leaving the EU — in 2016, and elites, despite astonishing contempt for voters, have so far failed to reverse that verdict. …
In each case, these elites have underestimated the force and persistence of national cultures …
Perhaps the success of American military leaders in transforming post-World War II Germany and Japan turned out to be misleading. Those two countries drew on ethical and parliamentary traditions rooted in those societies and not wholly destroyed by short periods of dominance by Nazi thugs and murderous militarists. Mexico and China have different traditions, and there is no vital tradition of European unity.
Elites are impatient with people they regard as their inferiors. If you question Eurocrats’ undemocratic drive for an “ever-closer Union”, you are told that without the EU, France and Germany would once again go to war — obvious nonsense. If you advise more respect for nationalist traditions, you are told that all nationalists are Nazis — obvious nonsense again.
If you say that competition from low-wage workers in Mexico and China might cause substantial job loss in the United States, you are told what every college grad learns in Economics 101 (but what sounds counterintuitive to non-college grads), that free trade benefits both importers and exporters. You can argue that Mexican immigration and Chinese job competition peaked before 2007, but they still obviously rankle many voters.
So the political, financial and media elites have taken beatings at the ballot box … Their failures to make course corrections and their lack of respect for decent nationalism have been costly. Something to talk about if they slink back to Davos next year.
“Slink back” is good!
But to answer our opening questions: No, there is still many a battle ahead before Merkel, Macron and May – probably never accepting that they were wrong – are driven from power. The rickety EU is not yet about to be pushed over to explode in a cloud of dust. And in the US, because badly educated 18-24 year olds who have no stake in the economy are allowed to vote, there is a real danger of socialist environmentalist race-obsessed feminist globalists coming to power in the next decade.
