A First Draft of the End of History
Pre-Sale Book Announcement (on the James Collins Show for the 20th time) of 'The Abolition of Reality: A First Draft of the End of History', by John Waters, available for pre-order from Easter Monday.
‘I wish I were not an authority on the destruction of my country’.
COMING SOON: The Abolition of Reality: A First Draft of the End of History
By John Waters
Publication date: April 21st (Easter Monday), 2025
The Abolition of Reality may in time become the most significant book to be published by an Irish writer — fiction or non-fiction, in many’s the year. Last week, its author, John Waters, appeared for the 20th time on the James Collins Show to announce the publication of this, his eleventh book, and to talk about his life as a journalist and writer in Ireland over the past half-century. (See YouTube video below.)
Unfortunately, The Abolition of Reality is a book of non-fiction, though to posterity it may seem like something else: a dystopian account of a time when every principle upon which ‘liberal democratic society’ had supposedly been founded was torn up and thrown away — this occurring in every ‘liberal democracy’ in the world, at exactly the same time, with the same scripts and protocols, and the same unanimity of official insistence and sadistic intolerance. Not only did the rules change as though overnight, but the demeanours of those who hitherto had been presumed to serve their people changed from ingratiation and servility to a visage of authoritarianism and contempt, their prior dispositions of cravenness and wheedling metamorphosing into inhumanity and wantonness.
The Abolition of Reality is John Waters’s in-depth witness account of the events of the past five years in Ireland and the wider world, exhaustively recorded and analysed here on his Substack page from the autumn of 2020. Drawn together in a single chronological volume, these articles and essays amount to the most comprehensive account yet published of the matter and meaning of these events.
The Abolition of Reality seeks to go to the depths of the question of how this was even possible.
Was it even real?
Was it a dream?
Was it a game?
The sub-title, ‘A First Draft of the End of History’, is not intended as a prophecy, but as a warning. Unless the population of Western civilisation, in far greater numbers than have manifested so far, begins to awaken to the intentionality, purpose and ruthlessness behind what is happening, and rise up against it, then the world as we have known it will be dismantled in front of our eyes, which is why, for the moment, any reference to what the ‘history will say’, or ‘history will decide’, must be qualified with the caveat, ‘If there is a history’. Of course, come what may, there will in the future be a historiography, but it will not be truthful or credible, even to the same limited extent as we are any longer able to trust the versions of the past we have been told. Written by the final victors over humanity, it will excise every human-centred impulse, witness and action, every valiant deed of freedom-seeking, every account of the world’s great nations and their heroes, replacing these with their inversions and opposites. The Age of Democracy will be obliterated from memory, as will the notion of sovereign peoples with inalienable rights. Gone too will be the last trace of spiritual consciousness and culture rooted in absolute values and aspirations. Instead, the formal records of the past will contain a litany of failure and hopelessness, giving way to the Uptopia of Consumerism and nomadism that will comprise the New Normal. These new charters will consist of falsity to a degree that will make the non-stop official lying of the last five years seem like a casual game of ‘Civilisation’ (a video game marketed as ‘an engaging way to apply historical knowledge and use it as the foundation for an alternate history’ — an excellent instrument of predictive programming for the idle hands and heads of the consumer society — Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘hackable humans’).
The Abolition of Reality may in time become to the past five years what Winston Smith’s diary proposed it might become within the fictional world of 1984. It is intended, first of all, as a permanent record of events that only a few comprehended — in the depths of their meanings and significance — while they were happening, a book — as Winston said of his own journal — ‘For the future, for the unborn’.
In the future it may be hard to persuade people that what happened from the spring of 2020 really did happen. Either the past will have been erased to such an extent that no one will know that human liberty ever existed, or a revolution of human consciousness will make it improbable that human beings could ever have so easily been duped into surrendering the rights and freedoms which their ancestors had won in blood. A fake pandemic was the signal that one morning began the foreclosure on everything that had, until the evening before, been axiomatically central to the idea of liberal, democratic, constitutional republics. The most shocking thing was not so much that this started to happen, but that almost no one seemed to object to it happening; almost no one sought to invoke or defend the rights and liberties being overturned. ‘Liberals’ fell silent; ‘libertarians’ joined in the clamouring for more and more tyranny; ‘conservatives’ examined their shoes.
Although his work is rooted in his own country, Ireland, John Waters speaks to the situation and conditions throughout the entire Western world. Indeed, as the world has recently been hearing, Ireland has been especially targeted for attack on its culture, demographics and freedoms, being in Waters’s words ‘a Petri dish’ for many of the toxic initiatives which have assaulted the countries of Europe, North America and Australasia.
It is John Waters’s belief that Ireland was, some 14 years ago, subject to a secret coup — an autogolpe ‘assistido’, he calls it — involving domestic and foreign interests, in which Irish lives and destinies were essentially rendered forfeit in a process which returned his country to dependency and radical interference from outside, with a view to its ultimate transformation from the once celebrated Island of Saints and Scholars to what its great patriot, Thomas Davis, once warned it might become: a ‘sand bank’, i.e. a piece of economic topography without history, culture or memory.
Ireland, like the United States up to the beginning of the present year, had arrived to a post-democratic condition, which can only be reversed if its dissidents and writers are able to draw the attention of the wider world to its plight.
Ireland recently hit global headlines when Conor McGregor, the mixed martial artist and former UFC champion, also an Irishman, spoke of the flooding of Ireland with aliens to the chagrin and detriment of the indigenous population. As a result, the world is now aware of the deep crisis afflicting this once hallowed Republic and historic nation, which has in recent times fallen afoul of very sinister external interests, including some from the United States of America, such a USAID, the Deep State and the more malevolent elements of the Democratic Party.
As Waters puts it: ‘Our dear land has become a guinea pig in the experiment of technocracy and neo-totalitarianism being mounted right across the former Free World. All the things we have noted as jarring with the history and sensibility of our country are part of that experiment. Our mortal affairs are in the hands of utterly corrupt and unscrupulous forces, which have subverted and perverted virtually everything, and now seek to enforce silence so that their crimes will not achieve widespread recognition, in Ireland or — even more so — in the external world. This is the battle we are called to join. There is no other battle worth fighting. Our job is to find ways of conveying the enormity of what is happening to all interested parties, and also those who may not yet understand their own interest in paying attention to Ireland and her plight before it grows definitively too late.’
In his prose-poem, ‘I am an authority on the destruction of my country’, published in The Abolition of Reality, Waters writes: ‘I am an authority on the destruction of my country. I wish I weren’t. I wish I were an expert in building boats, or growing butternut squash. I wish I were not an amateur specialist in psychopathy and ponerology, or an eyewitness authority on authoritarianism. I wish I were a better accordionist or crosswordist instead.’
John Waters has been one of Ireland’s leading journalists, writers and commentators over the past half-century. He spent 25 years (1990-2014) as a columnist with Ireland’s then pre-eminent newspaper of record, The Irish Times. In that period, his key themes related to family, nationhood, culture and transcendence, in addition to more routine subjects relating to the cultural and political life of Ireland. For the past 30 years he has been closely identified with fighting for the regularisation of the legal rights of fathers — unmarried and separated/divorced. This was the theme of his first stage play, Long Black Coat (1994), which explored the then emerging ‘apocalypse of fatherhood’ against the backdrop of a global crisis of military brinkmanship set a quarter century into the future, in 2020.
For the moment at least, due to the corrupt and tyrannical nature of the official and institutional elements of Irish life, The Abolition of Reality will not be available via bookshops in Ireland, with perhaps one or two exceptions, these having yet to be finalised. This arises from the unfortunate experience that followed the publication of Give Us Back the Bad Roads, the 2018 book by John Waters, which presaged many of the events that have unfolded since. The book will, however, be available for mail order, from Amazon and other standard online outlets.
To access the latest conversation between John Waters and James Collins, click on the arrow below:
Excerpt from The Abolition of Reality:
I Am an Authority On the Destruction of My Country
I am an authority on the destruction of my country. I can parse, plumb, dice and slice the catalogue of disaster that has been inflicted upon her by those we trusted to be her husbanders, but who turned out to be villains, cowards, traitors and batterers. I can tell you how they do it, blow by blow, descending on her baffled face like rain. I can describe the involutions of their guile and underhandedness. I can show how it impacts on each of us who are forced to watch and wait as they prate on concerning their ‘compassion’ and ‘humanity’, while we, her children, stand paralysed and muted by several centuries of demoralisation and bad religion. I know it all inside out. I feel it all, though I cannot always find the exact words corresponding to my feelings, and so the sentences burst out of me and trip each other up, and yet are understood sufficiently by others to surprise and puzzle me, though I hear in the echo of my own voice only the spaces in which the missing parts might have been.
I am an authority on the destruction of my country. I stand before audiences and tell them why their souls are dying and their grandchildren may never be born. I watch them nod as though understanding for the first time. I see tears trickle down their cheeks and briefly worry that I have caused this to occur, though I am but the midhusband, and innocent of the conception.
I am an authority on the destruction of my country. For the first sixty-four years of my life, I did not anticipate that my country would fall into the hands of pimps who would sell her into prostitution, who would banish her children to wander in the world without a place to rest their heads, a home to call their own. I thought they had felt at least the essence of what they had preached about her long struggle for Independence, and the importance of her freedoms, and the sacrifices of her martyrs, and now they act as if this was all but bewitchment and foolishness.
I am an authority on the destruction of my country. I did not expect to be such, not knowing there would arise a vacancy. Little did I know, as I walked to school with the words of Pearse rattling around my head that, in studying the writings and deeds of my country’s heroes, the ultimate use to which I would put this knowledge would be to underline its resonances in a present that lay ahead as though a misplaced stretch of the past. I had thought of these stories as a kind of adornment on a finished history, an emblem of patriotic sincerity, the luxury of a people whose trials were over, their problems resolved.
I am an authority on the destruction of my country, but a Bachelor of Destruction only. I am studying for my Masters and writing here my thesis, in which I hope finally to overcome what I believe is my total inability to express what I feel, what needs to be said, and what is to be imagined in order to prevent this cycle recurring.
I am an authority on the destruction of my country. I wish I weren’t. I wish I were an expert in building boats, or growing butternut squash. I wish I were not an amateur specialist in psychopathy and ponerology, or an eyewitness authority on authoritarianism. I wish I were a better accordionist or crosswordist instead.
I wish I were not an authority on the destruction of my country. I wish I could take her for granted as I did for most of my life, walking on tiptoe across her blood-soaked fields, with a heart as light as my step. Oh, days of innocence and naïveté, how we pay for them now, and how we pray to have them back! How we rummage in our heads and memories for some formula or formulation that would enable us to rest, if only for an hour, without thoughts of her obliteration haunting our dreams.
— John Waters