- Targeting the enemy
- Growing revolt against smart tyranny
- Who are the real “extremists”?
- Mikhail Bakunin: an organic radical inspiration
- Acorninfo
from thefreeonline on 12th April 2023 by Winter Oak and Paul Cudenec
Number 82 In this issue
1. Targeting the enemy
The invasion of BlackRock HQ in Paris on April 6 by a crowd of angry protesters and strikers revealed to the world that something very important is happening in France.
From a long distance, it may look like just another trade-union-led fightback against an increase in the retirement age.
From a closer distance, it might be evident that more general grievances against the Macron regime have temporarily amplified that union-led struggle.
But, in reality, it goes a lot deeper than that.
The revolt is a continuation, in fact, of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) uprising, which began in November 2018 and only came to an end with the Covid clamp-down.
Many Gilets Jaunes, unlike the top-down sold-out left, were involved in the massive wave of protest against vaccine passports that swept across the country in 2021.
Although the GJ uprising could itself be seen as continuation of previous struggles, such as those against the Loi Travail or in support of the ZAD at Notre-Dame des Landes, it represented a significant shift, which alarmed the authorities.
The movement was essentially uncontrollable, accepting no leadership or centralised structure, and also broke through the usual left-right divide, being a generalised revolt against the system.
The response of the Macron regime to the revolt only deepened the split between government and people.
The contempt, smears and brutal police violence unleashed against the GJs by the ruling clique, together with a refusal to take their demands seriously, shocked a large part of the French public.
This didn’t look like the kind of modern “Western” government that we are all used to, which likes to pretend to represent the people and to respond to their concerns.
Instead, Macron came across as a nasty tin-pot dictator, throwing his weight around with arrogant impunity.
Exactly the same thing has been happening in 2023. The government ignored weeks of massive and peaceful protesting, forced the law through parliament without a vote and then started banning demonstrations and mutilating protesters with military-style repression.
This looks less like a “liberal democracy” than a colonial government of occupation, determined to “put down the natives” at any cost.
And this, of course, is exactly what it is!
France is not run by representatives of the French people, but by representatives of the global money power, the criminal gang which owns pretty much everything, everywhere.
This power has decided to ditch the pretence at democracy so as to accelerate its control, under the pretext of various “emergencies”, whether Covid or climate.
Having bought up the mainstream media, it was confident that the overall picture could never be seen by the ordinary men and women it so despises.
But it is being seen.
All across the world, people are grasping that their local political chiefs are pawns of the WEF.
They know, as well, that the WEF is just one part of a global institutional network including the likes of the UN, the WHO, and Commonwealth.
They are fast finding out that these bodies are entwined with financial organisations such as the IMF, the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements.
These entities, like pretty much every single multi-national corporation, are controlled by the financial nexus built around BlackRock and Vanguard.
This is the entity that rules France, as it rules almost every other country.
It has managed to grab this chilling and unprecedented degree of global power by stealth, by hiding its existence behind front after front after front.
But now, in its impatience, it has made itself visible to the extent that striking rail workers in Paris know exactly where to find it.
The game has changed. The emperor is known to be naked and the people are turning on him in disgust and in anger.
2. Growing revolt against smart tyranny
Rebellion is also in the air in the UK, a country in which the social movement against neoliberalism was pretty much destroyed during the Thatcherite 1980s.
Here, instead, people are reacting to the severe loss of freedom darkening the horizon of the near future.
Lockdown authoritarianism tipped people off to the system’s sinister technocratic agenda, with the result that they are resisting the thin end of the totalitarian fake-green “smart city” wedge.
The Daily Mail describes “a growing revolt” across the UK against 15-minute cities and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, with “fuming locals” setting fire to the planters being used to close roads.
Some 300 local schemes are being set up and the newspaper reports popular resistance in Rochdale, Oxford, Hereford, Brighton, Bath, St Andrews, Jesmond, Warrington, Southsea and Leith.
It says the government is “under pressure” to scrap what is in fact the preliminary stage of 5G-based Fourth Industrial Revolution geofencing.
People are speaking out all over the place, from Thetford to Glastonbury, and momentum is building for what now is clearly the priority focus for pro-freedom campaigners.
Concern is being increased by the co-ordinated way in which various strands of the same authoritarian agenda are being ushered in at the same time, while anyone who makes a connection between them is immediately dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist”.
For instance, the scrapping of pay-and-display parking machines, in favour of apps, is another step into a future in which smart phones, or more invasive forms of “connectivity”, are essentially compulsory for everyday life.
And people have been horrified to discover that thousands of trees are being felled, under various pretences, because they block the 5G signals needed to run the Internet of Things, the Internet of Bodies and everything else in the planned “smart” (“Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology”) digital concentration camps.
In Plymouth, for example, more than 100 trees were chopped down under cover of night, despite what the city council itself admitted was “overwhelming” public opposition, with a court injunction coming too late to halt the worst destruction.
Council bureaucrat Giles Perritt gave the game away when he told the BBC they had to “get on with this scheme” because “our core priority has to be creating a smart, business-friendly, attractive, city centre”.
The terms “smart” and “business-friendly” speak for themselves, while presumably Perritt’s aim is to make the city “attractive” to impact investors and other global financial parasites, rather to the human beings (and birds!) who actually live there.
With similar measures being imposed across the world, it has become obvious to growing numbers that we are up against the next phase of the Great Reset, the system’s acceleration of its monopolistic control through 4IR technology.
Opposition to the technocrats’ Trojan Horse was a key element of the successful March 25 Real Left conference in London, where the whole city, including its suburbs, is due to be enclosed within an expanded Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez).
To avoid being fined, residents are invited to sign up for the “Auto Pay” scheme which will helpfully “bill you automatically for the number of charging days your vehicle travels within the Congestion Charge area and, if it doesn’t meet the standards, the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) and Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ)”.
Authorities have already admitted that Ulez number-plate-reading cameras could be used to impose “per-mile” charging across London.
Transport for London is using the Ulez expansion as the excuse to install a further 2,750 cameras.
With “smart stations” on the London Underground being trialled by the same body, you don’t have to be the reincarnation of George Orwell to see what sort of dystopian future is being lined up for us all.
A “No 2 ULEZ” rally is being being held in London’s Trafalfar Square on Saturday April 15, from 12 noon to 3pm.
Meanwhile, others prefer to cut the cables on the surveillance cameras that are intended to police the restrictions!
3. Who are the real “extremists”?
by Paul Cudenec
After a few decades, you can get quite used to your opinions being perpetually categorised as “extremist”.
You watch what you say to work colleagues and certain family members, you express yourself anonymously or pseudonymously, you seek refuge with like-branded individuals and mentally set yourself apart from society as a whole.
This, of course, is what the label is intended to achieve: the marginalisation, stigmatisation and, eventually, criminalisation of dissenting views.
I have long been aware of the nature of this device and have sometimes sought to turn it into a badge of honour.
In the 1990s I penned an unpublished (and probably unpublishable!) novel called The Extremist and later nodded in the same direction with the sub-title of 2019’s No Such Place As Asha (“an extremist novel”).
Is it really “extremist” to seek to defend basic freedom from the encroachment of authoritarian police-state control?
Is it really “extremist” to object to the destruction of the natural world in the pursuit of material greed?
Is it really “extremist” to protest against resource-grabbing wars waged under false pretences at the cost of endless innocent lives?
Is it really “extremist” to be appalled by the ever-accelerating accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny gang of criminal sociopaths?
Is it really “extremist” to see through their lies, to investigate their activities and to denounce their insidious scheming?
No, of course it isn’t!
It works even better than terms such as “unacceptable”, “fringe” or “beyond the pale” because it also serves to slice up dissenters into two opposite camps.
Once labelled “extreme left” or “extreme right”, we are supposed to cling to that manufactured allegiance, to adopt all the opinions peddled by its self-appointed leaders, never to agree with anything said by the “other extreme” and, indeed, to consider these rival dissidents as our principal enemies, instead of the power-nexus itself.
I said “until now”, because it looks as if the rigid “left-right” divide is finally breaking down, as people realise that the crucial battle is in fact between “below” and “above”, between “us” and “them”.
When the illusion has been shattered of opposing “extremes” flanking a moderate “centre”, the overall picture becomes a lot clearer.
It becomes apparent that the real “extremists” are those who are already extremely rich but want to get even richer; those who are extremely deceitful and dishonest in their dealings; those who have an extreme disregard for the lives and well-being of others and an extreme fear of real democracy, along with a deeply unpleasant propensity to use extreme violence to protect and expand their power.
The forthcoming collapse of their mendacious narrative and the long-overdue awakening of the people promises to be extremely interesting!
4. Mikhail Bakunin: an organic radical inspiration
The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.
“We must first of all purify our atmosphere and transform completely the surroundings in which we live”
Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was a charismatic anarchist pioneer, a tempestuous man of action who spotted, very early on, the authoritarian implications of Marx’s socialism and helped form the dissenting faction within the First International that became the anarchist movement.
He was a romantic revolutionary, whose sense of freedom rejected the state as “nothing else but the negation of humanity” (1) and yet went far beyond mere individualism.
Bakunin was repulsed by the sterility of the flat economic theories of Marx and his comrades, complaining in 1871 that they “want to see all human history, in the most idealistic manifestations of the collective as well as the individual life of humanity, in all the intellectual, moral, religious, metaphysical, scientific, artistic, political, juridical, and social developments which have been produced in the past and continue to be produced in the present, nothing but the reflections or the necessary after-effects of the development of economic facts”. (2)
For Bakunin, the desire for freedom, the will to revolt, was something innate within the human spirit and he accused the Marxists of ignoring a number of “natural traits”. These included “the intensity of the instinct of revolt, and by the same token, of liberty, with which it is endowed or which it has conserved”.
He added: “This instinct is a fact which is completely primordial and animal; one finds it in different degrees in every living being, and the energy, the vital power of each is to be measured by its intensity”. (3)
Bakunin attended lectures by the great nature-philosopher Friedrich Schelling and, although he later developed his own ideas in other directions, the influence remains clear.
For instance, in ‘Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism’ he wrote: “Nature, notwithstanding the inexhaustible wealth and variety of beings of which it is constituted, does not by any means present chaos, but instead a magnificently organized world wherein every part is logically correlated to all the other parts”. (4)
Elsewhere he declared that natural laws were the only kind that he was prepared to bow to: “Yes, we are unconditionally the slaves of these laws. But in such slavery there is no humiliation, or rather it is not slavery at all. For slavery presupposes the existence of an external master, a legislator standing above those whom he commands, while those laws are not extrinsic in relation to us: they are inherent in us, they constitute our nature, our whole being, physically, intellectually and morally.
“And it is only through those laws that we live, breathe, act, think and will. Without them we would be nothing, we simply would not exist”. (5)
Bakunin expanded on his radical organic vision in the essay ‘Philosophical Considerations’: “Whatever exists, all the beings which constitute the undefined totality of the Universe, all things existing in the world, whatever their particular nature may be in respect to quality or quantity – the most diverse and the most similar things, great or small, close together or far apart – necessarily and unconsciously exercise upon one another, whether directly or indirectly, perpetual action and reaction.
“All this boundless multitude of particular actions and reactions, combined in one general movement, produces and constitutes what we call Life, Solidarity, Universal Causality, Nature. Call it, if you find it amusing, God, the Absolute – it really does not matter – provided you do not attribute to the word God a meaning different from the one we have just established: the universal, natural, necessary, and real, but in no way predetermined, preconceived, or foreknown combination of the infinity of particular actions and reactions which all things having real existence incessantly exercise upon one another. Thus defined, this Universal Solidarity, Nature viewed as an infinite universe, is imposed upon our mind as a rational necessity”. (6)
For him, our belonging to nature and the Universe was not a negation of individual freedom but its fulfilment. He called for a liberty consisting of the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers latent in each person, “liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being”. (7)
Bakunin never imagined that the liberation of humankind would be easy or achieved by using the mechanisms provided by the capitalist system itself. On the subject of voting, he commented: “Men once believed that the establishment of universal suffrage would guarantee the freedom of the people. That, alas, was a great illusion.” (8)
Reforming current society, fighting for little changes here and there, would achieve nothing while the overall tyranny remained, he insisted. Revolution was needed to sweep away the whole rotten edifice.
“We must first of all purify our atmosphere and transform completely the surroundings in which we live, for they corrupt our instincts and our wills, they constrict our hearts and our intelligences”, (8) he wrote.
“There will be a qualitative transformation, a new living, life-giving revelation, a new heaven and a new earth, a young and mighty world in which all our present dissonances will be resolved into a harmonious whole.
“Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life. The urge to destroy is also a creative urge”. (9)
Audio link: ‘The Capitalist System’ by Mikhail Bakunin
1. Mikhail Bakunin, ‘The Bear of Berne and the Bear of St Petersburg’, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism, ed. by G.P. Maximoff, (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964) p. 140.
2. Mikhail Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, trans. by K.J. Kenafick, (London: Freedom Press, 1990) p. 21.
3. Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, p. 50.
4. Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism’, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 55.
5. Mikhail Bakunin, ‘The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution’, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 239.
6. Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Philosophical Considerations’, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 53.
7. Mikhail Bakunin, ‘La commune de Paris et la notion de l’État’, cit. Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Anarchism, ed. by Barry Pateman (Edinburgh, Oakland and West Virginia: AK Press, 2005), p. 122.
8. Mikhail Bakunin, Oeuvres, Vol II, 1907, The Anarchist Reader, ed. George Woodcock, (Glasgow: Fontana, 1986) p. 108.
8. Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Appeal to the Slavs’, cit. George Woodcock, Anarchism, (London: Penguin, 1979) p. 144.
9. Mikhail Bakunin, ‘Reaction in Germany’, cit. Woodcock, Anarchism, p. 139.
5. Acorninfo
“Central bank digital currency (CBDC) will end human freedom. Don’t fall for the assurances of safeguards, the promises of anonymity and of data protection. They are all deceptions and diversions to obscure the malevolent intent behind the global rollout of CBDC”, warns Iain Davis on his Substack site. He adds: “Should we allow it to prevail, CBDC will deliver the global governance of humanity into the hands of the bankers”. Meanwhile, in this interview with Hrvoje Morić of Geopolitics & Empire, Iain stresses that the “multi-polar world order” is still a world order, still a global centralisation of power in the hands of the same unwholesome few.
* * *
“A lot of superficially friendly, positive messaging is being deployed to persuade us that living in what to all intents and purposes will be a digital prison is something that will benefit us”. So writes Dave, editor of The Stirrer (“Maverick malcontents calling truth to power”) in a powerful piece which asks “What next? Dystopia?”
* * *
“To launch the shock-and-awe of the Covid Operation it was necessary to create the illusion of a viral invasion… A bankrupt country with a financial sector desperate for bailouts and a command structure run by central bankers made for a willing and compliant government”. Michael Bryant takes a forensic look at the Covid “crisis” that broke out in Italy in 2020 in this article on the 21st Century Wire site.
* * *
Luke Dodson interviews Winter Oak’s very own Paul Cudenec in his 41st Dodcast. In an hour-long session, they discuss the origins of the First World War and its role as the original “Great Reset”, the Anglo-American Establishment, and the co-optation of the green movement.
* * *
A sinister surveillance system called “Gabriel”, backed by top Mossad, CIA and FBI officials, is being rolled out in the USA, reveals Whitney Webb. It features panic buttons plus “smart cameras” that use AI, facial recognition and related technologies to detect “abnormal behavior” or “unusual movements”. Funding has come secretly from someone described by the Jewish Press website as an “anonymous philanthropist”.
* * *
Temora Yuille explains why we have to say “no” to the Internet of Things in a very useful 15-minute video featuring the chilling IOT Scotland website. Our worst sci-fi nightmares will come true if we do not resist this everywhere!
* * *
“The World Economic Forum, along with other institutions and actors of and for global capital, have captured our NHS with their Great Reset or 4th industrial revolution agendas”, warns Emily Garcia of Real Left. She notes that this capture goes back at least several decades, but that the rollout has been rapidly picking up steam since the first Covid lockdown of 2020.
* * *
“Pleasure cannot be ours as long as we wander from the true path of mankind. In your heart, therefore, seek the true path and then the pleasure shall be added” – Kaibara Ekken
(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)
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