Bonus Content: Extracts From Diary of a Dissenter: The Week From My Window
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.
Action is the Magic Word
FRIDAY
There’s a commotion outside our meeting house in Sligo as I arrive — a neighbour from down the estate is complaining about people parking outside his house. He is not what you would call polite, but ranting and raving and running in and out of the house like someone rescuing items from a fire and being constantly rebuffed by the flames, but returning with renewed fits of determination. Each time he appears to deliver a short informal but informative lecture on parking protocols and courtesies and then runs out again and down towards his own house. Once, as he passes where I have pulled up in the driveway, he mutters something about ‘conspiracies’.
It is most peculiar — the first time in nearly four years that he has even shown his face, even though he would have been welcome to come in and take part and have a cup of tea and a sandwich for himself. He is a wiry whippet of a man, with a tight haircut and wearing a tracksuit. The owner of the house tells me he had one former comparatively low-key complaint from him, months ago, about visitors parking outside his house, and afterwards only an occasional low grumbling. It is strange that he should choose tonight to go full bearshark. There is a rumour that he might be a Shinner, and that this is a hit designed to disrupt our final meeting before the election, which is highly complimentary as regards our chances in a fortnight’s time. He eventually gets bored and goes away without even a bun to console himself, and the meeting begins.
The attendance is one of the highest ever, the double-room stuffed to the cornices and extra chairs in the kitchen. A presentation is made to our bean an tí, who is recovering from a recent bout of medical treatment. She and her husband are the greatest people — fearless and loyal and determined, the salt of Sligo.
I make a short speech and my agent and arm-twister — Seán of the winning surname — makes another. Then we have the tea and repair to the garden, where a local songwriter, Gary Hynes, is lining up to sing an election song he’s composed specially for the occasion. Its called ‘Waters Will Flow’ and is rather good, like a pastiche of early Dylan but with a local flavour reminiscent of the Saw Doctors in their better days. There’s a general good intention to return indoors afterwards and continue the meeting, but this, rather predictably, proves untenable, so most of us stand around outside for an hour, talking and telling yarns in small groups, with others retreating from the slight evening chill to sit around in the living room.
The atmosphere is expectant and hopeful. From the beginning, Seán has been clear in his mind: We are going to win. He has the air of a man who sticks to the facts and knows whereof he speaks, who doesn’t waste words on empty encouragement or bravado. It is contagious. Despite my own rather downbeat assessment — largely based on my 2020 general election experience in Dun Laoghaire — I have almost become a believer. The latest word is that I’m running seventh, just outside the contender zone, and there’s a fortnight still to run, with some of the best strategists and campaigners in the country, if not the world, on my side. I make a short final speech, in which I say that it ‘is not impossible’, instantly correcting myself: ‘It is possible.’
I am starting to believe it.
SATURDAY
We're heading to Drumshanbo this morning to the mart and horse fair. It’s an absolutely gorgeous morning in Maugherow and I go for a walk to the beach before I set off, trying to get back in touch with the mood of this place that I seem to have lost in recent months. I think it’s the garden and the geoengineering that’s done it. All that effort more or less wasted, and being unable to take hold and reverse things for want of time and physical strength. I can’t bear catching glimpse of it through the window, after all my work since 2021, as it strains to return to nature and make a laugh of me.
In another sense, the garden is a useful reminder, for it stands as a functional emblem of what the Evil Ones are doing to us, and is therefore probably motivating me more than upsetting me. At least that’s my studied theory, directed at salvaging some good from this rapid process of unintended rewilding.
I’m glad I’ve lined up some activities for today and tomorrow. Taking last Sunday off was a mistake, even though my main reason was physical exhaustion after nearly two weeks without a break. As I mentioned last week, the demons rush into any vacuum I leave, and they are legion now as things come to a crescendo. When I’m out on the road, even when I’m not sure how effectively I’m operating, things make more sense. In truth, the constituency is so vast and overwhelming that I am never entirely sure I am in the right place. The only wrong thing is doing nothing, Being someplace, doing something, is the same as being somewhere else doing something else. Action is the magic word.
The response from farmers in Drumshanbo is amazingly positive and takes me completely by surprise. Not all of them, obviously, but enough to tell me we’re in with a chance. I fall into deep conversations with various men of my own vintage, including a man who was married at one time to a woman who lived across the road from me in the Grey Castle. I remember him well as a young blade, a serious dude who drove an E-type Jag and had longer hair than me, long before the rest of the world became cool. He was older than me — though not much — and in those longago days, he had seemed elevated and unreachable. I’d never spoken to him before but, not recognising him, I shake his proffered hand and the way he says he will vote for me draws my attention. There is something heartfelt about it. I stop and pay him attention. Then he introduces himself and it all comes flooding back to us from — what? — 50 fleeting years ago! We talk for 10 minutes, standing at the door of the mart canteen. It’s a powerful thing to meet him and feel the intensity of his support and good wishes. His name is Ray.
Another man I meet lives in a tinker’s caravan, one of the horse-drawn ones that were commonplace when we were children. This is an Ireland that one could easily come to believe has ceased to exist, but it remains, constant, true, and eccentric in the precise meaning of that word: outside the centre.
There is an intensity of feeling here that utterly transcends politics of the shiny-suit variety. These men are as exercised about the mortal dangers facing their country as about their fears for their livelihoods and way of life. I put out a tweet to this effect, finishing with: For me it’s the same problem: bad politics and bad (as in evil) politicians.
We muck about the place in Drumshanbo, with emphasis on the muck. I have a mug of tea and a beef sandwich in the canteen. The feeling is good. I don’t necessarily infer from that a meaning concerning the election — I’ve been in similar situations before and things came to grief — but it tells me that the meanings are in harmony with what is required. I am surrounded by good — no, great — people, and we are all doing our part, and that means He will do His, whatever that may be. That’s what I believe: that the purpose of things is never going to accord to my will, but relates to the leveraging of my actions, properly and honestly directed, to a higher purpose.
Action is the magic word. Better to be out here tip-toeing through cowdung than sitting at home waiting around and fretting about the outcome. I have things I could be doing, writing-wise, but the intensity of events is too great to recommend spending much time alone. I long for the peace of the post-count moment, and yet am fully cognizant that these are the moments that will decide the nature of that one. It’s important to stay positive. Negativity is easy, leaves you with nothing to lose. Positivity has its own life-force, and is contagious.
And a part of me knows, too, that the idea of some oasis of peace and self-satisfaction when this is all over is a bit of a pipe-dream. I’m not built like that and well I know it. Each new moment brings its own demands and duties. The knuckle in my back may relent for a day or two, but no more. I’m heading to Andalusia in mid-June with a one-way ticket. Rita has to return for family reasons in late June, but my plan right now is to remain and try to vegetate a little. Some hope. I tried it before and was climbing the walls. It’s remotely possible that this time things will be different, but I’m not betting on it. My bet — or fear — is that after a week there alone, I’ll be restless to be back on the battlefield. Whether this is a curse or a blessing is something I struggle with all the time. I’m not the retiring type, especially the way things are, but I do still wonder: Will there come a point at which I’ll be content that I have done all I can?
Of course, much depends on what happens on count day, which is actually Sunday June 9th, and not the Saturday as I may have been implying. Of course, since the local elections count happens first (On Saturday the 8th), the tallymen will have a shrewd sense of the general picture — in both elections — by lunchtime on that day, which will add to the torture.
SUNDAY
I spend the day in Athenry, with Cliff the Wizard, at the Agricultural Show. I was in two minds about going, because of the rain, but decided to chance it for the reasons outlined above. By noon, the sun has come out, so Cliff and I head down to the show grounds to press the flesh and take some temperatures. The reception is generally positive, though people seem more reserved here than further north or west. We take some video footage to accompany a new song about our campaign written by a local lad, name of Con, an improvised scatlike composition that changes every time he performs it. The video should be available by the time you read this.
I feel like I am driving around the upper two-thirds of the Republic in a beaten-up Thames 800, as my father did half a century ago, with the mirrors hanging off and the windscreen shattered, so that I am able to see ahead only through a tiny hole I’ve prodded through with a screwdriver. I can make progress, but slowly and with great caution. I have little or no idea where I am or what the landscape around me looks like. I have little idea where I’m going and even less of where I’ve come from. I might be ahead, I might be behind. I might be the leader or the laggard. I have no way of knowing, except the confident words of my agent and arm-twister, whose surname is Wynne.
This evening, a friend in Carrick rings to say that a certain political figure who is neither of the Regime nor against it, but has himself a dog in this race, has confided that his organisation’s private polls are calling Barry Cowan (FF), Chris McManus (SF) Maria Walsh (FG), AND Ming (Ind) to take the first four seats (and in that order) — and Ciaran Mullooly (IND IRL) to get the 5th and last. Peadar Tóibín and myself are neck and neck on 6th/7th places. This poll will have been conducted early last week — around the 20th/21st of May.
I read it as heartening news. Better than I expected and about as much as I could have hoped for at this stage, even in my wildest dreams. Remember that what’s showing up in this poll is mostly uncommitted opinion on the chances of various candidates, rather than necessarily direct expression of intended support. This is especially true in respect of the Big Beast candidates, who can only slip downwards from here on in. More to the point, these polls are only reliable for first preferences — in an election that will hinger overwhelmingly on the transfer patterns.
Most of the early transfers, coming from eliminated Independents, will favour other Independents, and the trick is to stay in long enough to benefit. The Big Beasts will have to wait some time to attract serious transfers, and then only when one of their party comrades comes a cropper.
It seems to me that the Big Beasts cannot make any gains in the coming ten days. This is open only to the well-placed Independents, Aontú and possibly Independent Ireland, who are already establishment. Will Ciaran Mullooly turn out to have been a shrewd strategy by Independent Ireland leader, Michael Fitzmaurice: An Independent who is not an Independent?
That poll is a snapshot nearly three weeks out. The public mood is in rapid flux, as it was in the final week of the referendum campaign, approaching March 8th last. Never was this so true: ‘The only poll that matters is the one on voting day!’
Despite my caution, I am beginning to see a somewhat hidden logic in the possibilities. Though congenitally sceptical, I have to admit that the facts are not entirely unfavourable.
I send a version of these ruminations to my agent and arm-twister, who responds:
If you take Donegal you will win easily that is why you need three days touring the county. All is there to play for. 10 more candidates will be gone by next weekend and they will need a home and someone to vote for except the parties. We are on the rise.
All to play for, so let’s get back on the pitch. Donegal, here we come!
TUESDAY
At midnight I enter my 70th year, a matter I can only wonder at, from various perspectives. One of these is that, for most of my life — even as late as 20 years ago — I regarded such an age as unattainable — not so much because I could not see myself surviving as that being that old seemed to be something that happened to other people. Well, here I am now, feeling pretty much as I always did. If you had asked me five years ago, as I crawled down a Spanish staircase every morning to sit dazed and reeling in the sun, I would have thought this day unattainable for entirely other reasons. So my overwhelming sense today is of gratitude, that I have made it this far and — most of the time anyway — seem to be capable of struggling on for another while. When I see others keeling over ‘unexpectedly’ and ‘suddenly’ — including some of late who had declared themselves my enemies — I count my lucky stars and my many blessings. It seems I shall be left here until some unclear mission I am charged with has been completed, or until I give up. So, for the avoidance of doubt, I shall not be giving up.
It’s another grey morning in Maugherow, so I resist the call of the outdoors and catch up on my social media electoral duties. I have to be in Edgeworthtown at 1pm to attend a meeting about a new plantation centre being planned there. Shannonside FM is reported to be turning up to cover it, which for me amounts more to a cause for concern than celebration, since it’s more likely to be an ambush as anything else. My resolve not to allow prejudice to deter me from pursuing my truce, and therefore taking advantage of whatever publicity I can glean in the last week, may not survive another experience like the one yesterday.
I have promised to call in to see a friend in Carrick on the way to Edgeworthstown, and we spend a pleasant hour talking politics, and especially about the strange death of Fianna Fáil. Running slightly late in Longford, I get a call to tell me that there’s been some kind of split in the resistance in Edgeworthstown, and a breakaway individual has gone on to Shannonside, live in studio, spuriously claiming to represent the community. Standard planter playbook, page 197: divide and conquer.
The meeting outside the Park House Hotel — the location of the planned plantation centre — goes off well. The attendance is small but determined and largely unequivocal. In the middle of my brief address to the crowd, I mention that it is my birthday, and suddenly my friend Dave, from Sallynoggin and Sligo, pulls a birthday cake from a hat. When the speeches are finished we repair to a local cafe for coffee, cake and conspiracy.
TUESDAY II
A reader pulls me up on something I said in a recent video — the Silver Eel one, I think — about Orwell having called his (in)famous book by the title ‘1984’ because it was a reversal of 1948, the year he finished writing it. My correspondent throws some doubt on this otherwise plausible theory, writing:
MI5 Fabian George Orwell was an insider who used his novels to warn mankind about the concrete plans of his own Fabian Society (dubbed ‘Ingsoc’), for which his employer BBC worked as a key propaganda organ. The title of his novel 1984 was based on an old Fabian boast that it would only take it 100 years, since its founding in 1884, to utterly turn Britain on its head. In the event, it may take the Fabian Society 140 or 150 years to realise all of its collectivist aims, unless of course the slaves finally move to foil the worst-laid plans of ‘Team Antichrist’.
He adds:
My take is also that [Orwell’s] ‘Spanish Civil War Stint’ in Catalonia was as an MI6 observer.
His ‘Big Brother’ actually stems from his own very apt nickname for the BBC as ‘Big Brother Corporation’.
WEDNESDAY
I watch an appalling clip of Simple Harris turning his back to walk away from a woman in the street who asked about excess deaths. Do they ever stop to think that such responses announce their guilt, for if they were either innocent or cunning, they would stop to ask the woman what she means — ‘Excess deaths? Really? Tell me more!’ (innocent) — or pretend to already be looking into it (cunning)?
It reminded me of the time I first came across an Uber cab, in Miami several years ago. We had booked the cab to go to the airport and, on arrival there, were accosted by several plainclothes policemen, who surrounded the car. At the time, Uber was unlicensed and the target of serious municipal harassment on account of the power of the taxi lobby. When I stepped out of the car, one of the cops assailed me with a repeated question: ‘Friend or Uber? Friend or Uber?’ I had only the vaguest sense of what he was getting at, though it is obvious now.
I answered: ‘Friend!’, thinking this the safer option.
Of course, it wasn’t, for it immediately indicated that I understood what the issue was, and was seeking to mislead. The question was meaningless unless I understood the context, and my lack of incomprehension made it probable that I was — let’s say — fibbing.
There were no implications for us, only for our driver. They eventually went away, having taken his details.
Afterwards I used up some grey matter pondering what I might have said to avoid the trap buried in the question. The smartest thing to have said, I decided, would have been, ‘What’s Uber?’, or — even better — ‘What’s Uver?’, since this would have been indicative of total innocence, and might well have resulted in our driver being given the benefit of the doubt.
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THURSDAY
The following is a Parable of the Parasite Class versus the Able Men and Women of Ireland — a parable of wealth and theft. This, ultimately, is what everything is ‘about’ — the entire panoply of events and assaults and psy-ops and disruptions we are experiencing under multiple headings. The war, like all wars, is essentially about money.
We used to think talking about money was vulgar, but soon talking about it — its true nature, its corruption, its dangers — may become the most vital aspect of our battle for survival. If we are to understand what is happening to us, we must look to what has been happening to what we currently call 'money’.
Something has been happening to money, over a long period — more than a hundred years — but recently accelerating. First gradually, as you might say, then suddenly. You might have noticed of late that there seem to be at least two kinds of money about: one being the kind that fixes potholes and builds hospitals, which has always been scarce and remains so. Then, there’s the other kind, the kind that’s used to flood Irish towns and villages with illegal, unvetted aliens who have no love for Ireland and no reason to be here other than for what they can get at the point of a spell-word.
Think about how, for more than a decade, there has been a visible and much-debated ‘housing crisis’ in Ireland, with thousands of Irish families languishing on the housing list, but nothing could be done because there was ‘no money’. Yet, now, there is endless money for people to whom we or our government have zero actual responsibility.
This kind of money seems to be limitless, and that’s because it is. It’s funny money, though not particularly amusing. It’s money that becomes available in the death throes of the fiat currencies of the West — the Dollar, the Euro, Sterling — a moment when the criminal nature of banking will briefly become evident for all to see. In this final phase before meltdown, systems which live by creating money as debt — out of nothing — and are destined to achieve supernova without warning when the end comes, provide their criminal handlers with one last opportunity to turn tricks on behalf of themselves and their clients, and convert the softening asset of cash into the hard assets of property and material goods, before the whole thing goes up in flames.
Money is — clearly — not what it used to seem to be. Once it was the measure of human work, genius, effort and produce — and this by virtue of being the token of reward for all of the above. Money was simply and primarily a means of trading, and in that sense defined the measure of the real freedom of mankind to exist, survive, live and prosper, in a healthy and balanced fashion. But money is not simple at all: It is actually a form of magic — an energy embodiment which serves as a common measure of creativity and effort, and at the same time a reward for productive activity. The point of money is to facilitate the exchange of labour, objects and services, so as to reflect the value of real phenomena and real things — real effort, real sweat and toil — and to allow for an efficient and proportionate system of rewarding those who contribute to the good of human society.
Credit has long been an essential element of money management in the pursuit of human endeavour, needs, work, trade, service and reward. Now it is as though what we call money is the measure of the threat to our civilisation, and that is not a misapprehension. Those who have controlled and enriched themselves from our money systems are now engaged in a final attempt to maximise their paper wealth by converting it to hard assets before the fiat currencies turn into confetti.
To believe that money itself is the valuable thing is not merely to lose the economic plot, but to misunderstand human existence. To ‘trade’ not in things that humans need and desire, but in the tokens by which they have arranged to exchange these quantities, is to make inevitable the enormous distortions that now cripple our nations and our peoples. It is, in fact, a form of parasitism, which seeks to turn tricks in the tokens of exchange and in doing so deprive actual contributors to economic well-being of real wealth which is rightly theirs.
Money is supposed to belong to the people, but has become the instrument of the people’s enslavement. The means of this enslavement is its aforementioned mode of creation in the form of debt. The process of modern ‘money creation’ could be termed a form of priestcraft — the manipulation of money systems by powerful bankers, who generate power and wealth for themselves and their accomplices at the expense of social functioning and human security. The chief mechanism is a kind of ex nihilo substantiation of the symbols of exchange and wealth retention — money generated out of nothing and less-than-nothing, which is what debt amounts to.
The Irish money system — like those of every ‘modern’ society — is owned and controlled by private banks, which create money/debt, thus tying each worker into a discrete parallel process of enslavement which by default becomes the ‘purpose’ of his working. In this system, money is generated only when it is borrowed — each new loan means that a specific amount of money is brought into being. When the loan is eventually repaid, the capital is eliminated. Meanwhile, somewhat greater amounts of new debt materialise in the form of interest, which continues to exist as a negative quantity, without any positive corresponding element of wealth or benefit.
Debt, in economic terms, is the expression of human desire exceeding human capacity to immediately generate human needs. The ‘spurious surplus’ represented by debt is nowadays at the core of the inversion that has taken over our economic systems, whereby debt is an ‘asset’ of the lender by virtue of being a liability of the borrower. We live, then, in a minus world, where indebtedness is the measure of ‘prosperity,’ and this has resulted in a waning respect for real producers, real work and real wealth. In this warped culture, no distinction is made between productive economic activity and parasitical financial jobbery.
Gold has long been the optimal substance for use as ‘natural money’, which, in mirroring nature’s limitations, acted as a brake and safeguard against attempts to cheat the system. Gold, being the longest-lasting, the most energy efficient, and the rarest of the possible energy embodiments that nature provides, was through millennia the money of choice of human societies. Gold is sublimely capable of measuring and rewarding the production of energy embodiments without clashing or competing with them, enduring through time while maintaining relationships of weight and correspondence to the larger reality rooted in human endeavour. For millennia, this ensured that the 'productive' sector of the economy (farming, fishing, hunting, fuel-harvesting and the recovery of base materials) remained uppermost as the priorities of those who managed things. To this end, it was essential that those involved continued to obey the unwritten laws of balance and ecological accountability that served to prevent cheating or skimming or hoarding or over-exploitation of natural resources.
This changed with what might be termed the greatest scam in history, beginning in 1913, when American President Woodrow Wilson initiated the Federal Reserve Act, which resulted in subsequent generations of American men and women being subjugated to the demands and whims of private banking interests in a process that owed much more to usury than to economics. This followed the foundation in 1910 of the Federal Reserve — the American Central Bank, nowadays known as ‘the Fed’ — a system of banking created not by the representatives of the people but by private money and banking interests at a secret meeting on Jekyll Island, Georgia, by a small group of powerful bankers and billionaires who conspired to pass off the Federal Reserve as a government entity so as to gain public support, even though it was, in essence, a private institution.
An equivalent process occurred in Ireland, just 29 years later, in 1942, when a Fianna Fáil Minister for Finance — Sean T Ó Ceallaigh (later President of Ireland) pushed through the Dáil, with only a few TDs present, the scurrilous Central Bank Act, little more than a copy-and-paste of Wilson’s charter of parasitism. On July 17th, 1942, at the fifth and final stage of the Dáil debate on the bill, Ó Ceallaigh argued that ownership of the credit issued by the Central Bank of Ireland should reside with the joint stock bankers and no longer be the property of the people of Ireland. Thus, we observe that, going back more or less an entire human life span, the stewards of the Irish political system were representing not the Irish People but the exploiters of Ireland and her wealth and resources. The Central Bank Act, in effect, undid the genuine ambitions and sacrifices of Irish heroes, and the aspirations of the 1916 Proclamation, by gifting to vested interests — the stock holder banks and their clients — control over and the benefit of the credit of the nation. That act facilitated a level of wealth-extraction amounting to trillions at the expense of the Irish People over the subsequent 82 years, and counting.
As a result, the current structure and behaviour of our banking sector is wholly incompatible with driving our indigenous economy in the interests of the Irish People. On the contrary, Irish banks are not in any meaningful way serving our citizens, small businesses or farmers. Even when they are prepared to grant loans, the rates charged are two, three, four and five times what our counterparts in Germany and France are paying. A study conducted back in 2017 found that an Irish borrower paid back, on a loan of €285,000, a total of €120,000 more than his German counterpart, over the lifetime of the loan.
Article 45 (2) [iv] of the Irish Constitution states that 'the State shall, ‘in particular, direct its policy towards securing . . . that in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people.’ Interestingly, Article 45 also informs us that its principles are for application by the Oireachtas exclusively, and ‘shall not be cognisable by any Court under any of the provisions of the Constitution.’ This means that no citizen has any hope of redress if he is cheated by the banking system.
The growing accumulation of debt in our economies is not a misfortune, but a structural inevitability of the prevailing system. The continuing scramble to find money to pay down interest means that the only way debt repayments can be discharged is by borrowing more money, which throws the structural flaw into a new and wider orbit. The generalised accumulation of debts in the system, without any basis other than on the computer screen of the lenders, means that there is a diminishing pool of ‘money’ with which these mounting debts can be paid down. The result has been an exponential explosion of debt, which now exists in the world as many multiples of the amount of endeavour, property, goods or produce in existence. This is the fundamental reason for the coming supernova, after which the representatives of the chit-holders will stake claims against the real wealth of the world — and most likely have the backing of the purchased (with funny money) political, legal and media institutions of the world in so doing.
These processes of stealth and stealing have been accelerated in the past half century since the untethering of money from the Gold Standard. This has resulted in an undeclared war between the skimmers of wealth — the bankers, financiers and speculators — and the Able Men and Women of the working world, which is to say those who feed, build, service and maintain the world on a daily basis. By this I mean mainly those, men and women, who work with their hands and their minds — to positive and constructive ends — without whose work and endeavour the human world could not function: all those farmers, fishermen, coalminers, lumberjacks, turfcutters, carpenters, fruit-growers who form the first rank of the real economy as a consequence of making, mending and feeding the world. These ‘primary cooperators’ in the real — i.e. productive — economy are the ones who ‘mediate energy sources’ in the form of food or fuel or other essential materials from the natural world into the greater economy. They are the ones who fill the shelves of our supermarkets, and keep our home fires burning. For many years, what is referred to as ‘economics’ has been a continuous process of transferring real wealth from such actors to the parasitical predator class that produces nothing except debt for others and wealth for itself. These transfers, over the course of the past century alone, have amounted to sums in the hundreds of trillions of Dollars, Euro and Sterling Pounds.
This division has taken on a new life in the culture of the modern world, which is to be observed of recent times in the battles over Brexit and the phenomenon of Donald Trump. A crude but useful division I have occasionally delineated is between the Able Men and the Virtual Men of the postmodern metropolis. Ostensibly, the two groups are separated by ‘education’, style and accent, but in reality they are divided by a trivial mutual resentment based on spurious notions of class and sophistication, weaponised by unseen actors into a full-blown culture war, which in reality is utterly delusional in the sense that it fails to recognise any distinction between ’essential’ and ‘inessential‘ work — or, worse, gets these concepts back to front. In recent times, this war has crystallised linguistically to suggest it as a political quarrel between Populism and Progressivism, but these, like their ancestors, ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, are increasingly meaningless concepts, especially when considered against the partly obscured backdrop of the disintegration actually unfolding in the world.
These circumstances, rather than a virus or a pandemic, are what have delivered us to this moment. In effect, the so-called ‘pandemic’ was a cover-up strategy for the taking down of the world economy in a manageable fashion, so as to avoid exposing what was truly the Greatest Crime in History, and ensuring that the world could be rolled over (both senses) into a new dispensation in which the ambitions of the new oligarchs would be enforced by technology and the threat of starvation.
There is a strange paradox — probably amounting to an epic case of gaslighting — in the very essence of the 'Covid Project’. It’s purpose was, as we now see clearly, to effect the ultimate feat of plunder — to finally dispossess all but ‘the few’ — i.e. the vast majority of the human family — of all possessions, properties, saved tokens, and securities, so as finally — materially speaking — to wipe out virtually everyone in economic terms. This might well be couched as the apotheosis of deracination and de-materialising, whereby what is called ‘modern society’, in order to be brought to a terminal state of alienation in which consumerist appetites might be maximised, was to be stripped of its intrinsic solidarities, values, cultures and particularities, so that each country might become a mere ‘sand bank’ upon which a form of economics might be managed under a system of total control. The great irony of this is that the instrument chosen to implement the final phase of this process — a spurious pandemic — was one designed to evoke and reawaken some of the most dormant of atavistic inclinations of humanity towards the generation of communality and cooperation in times of crisis and emergency. Thus, in 2020, Western civilisation was brought to a fervour of spurious solidarity in order to achieve the ultimate destruction of the tribal instincts which once bonded alike and like-minded people together in the interests of mutual survival. In other words, by the application of the most up-to-date technologies, the Combine succeeded in leveraging the most fundamental group instincts of humanity in the cause of its own absolute self-seeking, with the final objective of plundering everything not already owned by its own members.
This episode touches on matters that we rarely discuss in what we term ‘modern’ society: the extent to which the human being’s hard-wiring for the most basic demands of survival, while largely bypassed in ‘modern’ societies by a soft-wiring directed at leisure and pleasure, remains in place and operable with the application of a kind of mechanistic voodoo, capable of weaponising the most basis human instincts by processes of indoctrination and deception.
This may indeed be possible now — in ‘modernity’ — to an extent that it would not have been, when these instincts were more readily detectable on the basis of the constant threat of danger hanging over human communities, which is to say tribes. In a traditional society, a band of self-interested schemers like the Combine would have had virtually no chance of getting away with what it has been attempting to impose upon the human race for the past five years. Its plan to loot and defraud the tribe — never mind the entire human race — would long since have resulted in its personnel being terminated with extreme prejudice, or at the least their banishment from the tribe, which would, in the conditions then prevailing, have amounted to the same thing.
In traditional societies, selfishness was the most disapproved condition and behaviour. In foraging and hunter-gatherer societies, anyone caught stealing from the resources of the tribe was dealt with severely, and usually terminally. There was no greater crime than stealing from the common weal. In such societies, egalitarianism was not a luxury but a mandatory condition of continued membership. The idea of personal or private property would have been anathema had it even been conceived of. Inherited wealth was unheard of. The idea of skimming off from the communal wealth of the tribe, in the manner of the modern banker’s everday conduct, would have been regarded as a capital offence.
Some such societies survived almost to the present day, despite being looked down upon by the ‘modern’ world, its increasing tilt towards communism notwithstanding. A 1960s anthropological study of the still-extant iKung people of the Kalahari Desert observed that the camp of the tribe was ‘an open aggregate of cooperating persons’ from which ‘the members move out each day to hunt and gather, and return in the evening to pool the collected foods in such a way that every person present receives an equitable share.’ This meant that hoarding was both impossible and frowned upon, and indeed many such societies made a virtue of using up all the accumulated resources and starting out again as equals — for example, in the tradition of harvest festivals, in which everything was consumed in an exuberant party to mark the turning over into a new year of communal working.
As Sebastian Junger noted in his excellent 2016 book, Tribe, the average iKung tribesman was able to survive while working as little as 12 hours a week: ‘The relatively relaxed pace of iKung life — even during times of adversity — challenged long-standing ideas that modern society created a surplus of leisure time. It created exactly the opposite: a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work. The iKung had far fewer belongings than Westerners, but their lives were under much greater personal control. Early humans lived in such tribes comprising perhaps 50 people — nomadic, foraging, highly collectivised in practice and outlook. .
Such societies nurtured complex and exotic modes of marking and stigmatising those members who offended against the collective rule of solidarity, and those occasional individuals, like comedians and poets, who were licensed to do so. In his 2008 book, Us and Them — Understanding Your Tribal Mind, David Berreby explores the idea that tribalism is innate to humankind — that we are hardwired to band together with those who think like us, and oppose those who do not. Berreby conducts a careful study of how societies place imprints on the minds of their members, making connections in the individual brain between neurological programmes governing functions like language, sight and music, and the social requirements of conduct, law and morality. In one fascinating sequence, he looks at the role in history of what he calls stigma, exploring the possibility that many everyday tropes of modern fashion derive from past forms of marginalisation and scapegoating, probably designed to deter disloyalty to the tribe. To preserve necessary concepts of hierarchy and conformity, societies through history have created marks of exclusion to isolate individuals or groups deemed to be outside society’s walls. In medieval Europe, groups like soldiers, criminals and wandering minstrels wore multicoloured clothes to distinguish them from ‘normal’ citizens. In our modern societies, fashion and youth culture have long flirted with these signs of infamy and, since the 1960s, have frequently adapted and reinvented such indicators of societal stigma or difference, seeking to assert identity on the basis of the iconography of marginalisation. In the 1960s, long hair became fashionable for men because of its androgynous connotations, previously a big taboo. Similarly, shaved heads, because of the association with convicts, remained a symbol of exclusion until relatively recently. Berreby’s fascinating thesis is that authority seeks to prevent the mainstreaming of such imagery not to protect young people from harmful associations but to prevent the iconography of societal rejection from devaluation. In other words, it is a fundamental impulse of societies — and, by reduction, of groups — that they reserve the capacity to expel malefactors and non-conformists. The countervailing idea of ‘inclusiveness’ — much valued by the Combine and its servants — is a relatively recent invention, and in this observation we gain access to the central logic of virtually everything being done to our civilisation now: the mass plantation of long-established cultures, the demoralisation of societies with crazed concepts of identity, the use of emergencies to short-out the functional but superficial cultures of coexistence, et cetera — all with the end of permanently preventing their continued operation of such communities other than via a centrally-managed control grid. Since the spring of 2020, we have been under the cosh of a fake but highly-managed societal cohesiveness, which rewards obedience and punishes dissent, and ultimately acts to achieve the direct antithesis of these hardwired instincts: to assist the ultimate plunderers of humanity in carrying out their evil project. This, essentially, is what BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink,means when he says that democracy is a poor fit for modern capitalism, and ‘totalitarianism is better’.
From this crude sketch, it is possible to grasp that the ‘principles’ of modern banking would have been anathema to traditional societies practicing such customs and conventions as are adumbrated above. In light of this history, it is intriguing that, in devising a mechanism of control and takeover in 2019 — the regimen that would become known by the names of ‘Covid’ and ‘lockdown’ — the conspirators and perpetrators hit upon a mechanism which, in the enterprise of stripping humanity of all residues of tribal affiliation, leveraged a fabricated instrument of epidemic as a means of throwing people together briefly so as to sunder them permanently from one another. The threat of collapse and collective destruction tends to bring people together. War, natural disaster and pandemics had, through history, contrived to unite disintegrating societies in communal effort to the end of mutual salvation. As Junger describes it, ‘Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos or disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.’ Such collectives almost automatically generate their own rules and laws, all directed at the end of survival. And, interestingly, conditions like depression and suicidal ideation, ubiquitous in modern societies, are almost unknown, crime all but unheard of. In times of communal stress, solidarity and cooperation become imperative, and sanctions against those who do not pull with the tribe are made more severe. People become less solipsistic and begin to work for the common good, in the knowledge that therein lies their best chance of salvation. In such collectives, class, race and ethnicity disappear as indicators of difference, disparities of wealth and income become irrelevant, and group welfare becomes the central commonly-held objective.
What a strange thing that such traits and capacities should be weaponised in the case of ultimately destroying not merely the remnants of tribal solidarity, but all forms of societal cooperation — to be replaced by total subjugation in a world in which all wealth, all property and all power are to reside with a tiny few self-appointed oligarchs and despots, exercising total control via technologies which have only recently been perfected to a degree that makes such a system eminently conceivable.
And how strange that such a cadre of would-be monarchs, who in other contexts abhor the very idea of tribal togetherness, should here contemplate the adaptation of some of those leftover instincts to the end of achieving the total and final obliteration of autonomous human action and discretion. Forces that, in all other contexts, deny the validity or virtue of the tribe, seek here to inculcate like-mindedness, homogeneity and obedience to the collective well-being in a form of human homogenisation that is gaslightingly referred to as ‘diversity’.
These are some of the thoughts that been jostling and tripping around my larynx for the past few weeks as I travelled the Midlands North West constituency, seeking to offer my candidacy for the European Parliament to anyone who already knew enough of this to be interested and/or concerned. The results have, as already indicated, been mixed. Some people get the full picture, others parts of it. But the pseudo-reality remains strong and, for a lot of people, comfortably seductive. On June 9th, or perhaps the 10th, we shall know more or less where we stand. If the result in any degree matches what happened — or appeared to happen — on March 8th, then we have an immediate opportunity to turn our world back from tyranny. If it doesn’t — if the usual suspects are returned with their predictable word salads — then we know we have a long, hard road ahead.
Let us pray.
FRIDAY
I wish to conclude this week with a prose-poem I have been doodling with for a couple of weeks. It began to occur to me a couple of weeks back as I addressed meetings in Bohola, Ballina and Mullingar. It is unfinished — or perhaps it isn’t. It came to me, listening to myself constructing sentences about the meaning of what is happening to us, and feeling desolate on account of both my ‘success’ (people praising me for what they call my ability to describe these matters) and my failure to fully express what is in my own heart. It is a work-in-progress, yet one that belongs to this moment perhaps more than to any future one in which it may have acquired more polish. It amounts to a sad note, but also — I hope — a rallying cry, though it is unfinished, or perhaps not yet properly begun.
I am an authority in 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 them 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 64 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.
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