It seems as if a whole age has passed since I first put the Anna M on the concrete in Nazaré five years ago, and we are now living in a different world. I find it particularly alarming for two contrary reasons,- on one hand because the pandemic brought home to some of us at least just how immediate is the threat of totalitarianism even here in Europe, what the Powers are capable of doing once the public can be sufficiently scared, and on the other because at this stage so many people just want to forget about the whole affair. The saying ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’ comes to mind. There are some lessons that must be learned.
Exactly what the ‘Powers’ may be is hard to say. It is evident at least that there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the general population to a few multi-billionaires,- also that shadowy someones succeeded in getting governments all over the world to abandon their own protocols and fall into lockstep behind a disastrous narrative and course of action, which they are currently doing their best to avoid discussing, and so we now find a Resistance lining up against these ostriches (or snakes as the case may be).
To what extent we need to resist an organised conspiracy, or a fortuitous confluence of interests in money, power and ‘scientism’, is perhaps impossible to determine, but certainly whatever-it-is reflects what Pope St John-Paul II used to call the ‘culture of death’, which has seen the steady erosion of the right to life and the acceptance of abortion, euthanasia and so on. This in turn is in line with the eugenicist movement of the 1930s, which had however to keep its head down for a while after the full horror of Nazism unfolded, and resulted in the Nuremberg Code in 1947. Unfortunately, the principles which it laid down have been flagrantly flouted in these recent years.
We may consider three basic categories of persons in connection with the onset of totalitarianism:- power mongers, including the deluded and the cynical ones, who for example find it in themselves to party while ordering the masses into a cruel and destructive lock-down,- then those caught perhaps between an easy life with some nice financial perks or making things difficult for themselves and possibly losing their job or worse, who merge into the crowd who simply decline to seriously interrogate either the prevailing narrative or themselves, for reasons which are however best left to themselves to figure out, because accusing them of being lazy or afraid will not get us anywhere, and might not be altogether fair anyway. Then there are the resisters.
It has to be said straight way that the later also face pitfalls, such as, too readily casting themselves as illuminati, aligning themselves with every cause agin’ the government, and vociferously objecting to anything which might impinge on their personal liberty. So it is that we are finding scepticism about the official narrative of the pandemic and the vaccines aligning in some hefty quarters almost automatically with climate denialism and scepticism about the EU and the war in Ukraine, and frequently with support for the famous American ex-president currently in trouble with the law.
It is also true that fear, though it is the common feature of totalitarianism, does have its own raison d'être. After all fear does have its place in the scheme of things, as surely the bravest of soldiers will admit! Anyone who goes to war with no sense of fear or danger is not likely to last long; but one cannot learn from fear so long as it remains unacknowledged, unrecognised. This is the kind of fear that makes people cling to their precious narrative regardless of any facts. Going to war remains necessary in some sense, if we are to defend civilisation from disintegration, but we must let our causes be constantly tested against facts and results!
It is a fact that the world is getting hotter, and there is sufficient reason to believe that fossil fuel burning has a lot to do with it, to make it only prudent to drastically reduce our dependence on it. Anyway it is a dirty business. We didn't have to wait till coal got too scarce or expensive in order to replace steam engines with electric ones! As for the pandemic, then we saw, up close and personal, lies promulgated about the vaccines being 'safe and effective', our basic freedoms suspended, and digital passports for the exercise of basic rights issued on condition of compliance with that suspension. In China we are already witnessing where such totalitarian control leads. It is worth quoting from the chilling account of Tahir Harmut Izgil in the Guardian:-
We heard that, beginning in late 2016, everyone’s data was being entered into a system known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform(IJOP). On the basis of this data, the police - and especially the neighbourhood police - marked the file of each individual they considered dangerous. Since everyone’s ID cards were linked via the internet to the IJOP, anyone with a mark on their file would set off the siren when they scanned their ID card at the ubiquitous police checkpoints, and would be apprehended on the spot….
We may anticipate that there will be no shortage of crises to give governments excuses for such measures. The climate crisis may well make a contribution, on the basis of carbon credits and so on. One way or another, if we do not stand against it, such control is coming our way fast. Artificial intelligence will enable only a small cadre to exercise control. Some serious voices are saying that we have perhaps only a couple of years to effectively mount resistance to the onset of an appalling global tyranny, and that we have only a fast-closing window of opportunity to prevent it from becoming established. Even if this proves alarmist, we know well that it is better to mount resistance early than too late. Yet how rarely this has occurred in the past!
It is not to be expected that such resistance will be all harmonious. Differences of opinion and approach there will be in any aspect of life and political movements in particular, and genuine politics results from their interplay. I am not proposing to think in terms of some new party. What is essential is that we establish modes of communication and structures of mutual respect and trust, both online and in physical reality. Some like myself may well believe that to enable this there is ultimately no substitute for ‘the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’, but meanwhile we must be open to goodwill wherever it comes from.
To make any kind of start, I suggest a few propositions which would need to be more or less accepted, such as:-
The covid pandemic was scandalously mismanaged, and the vaccines which were said many times to be ‘safe and effective’ were neither.
The blanket mainstream coverage of both the wildfires and the pandemic have a certain déjà vu quality in common, in marked contrast to the coverage of vaccine harms and excess deaths.
The world is indeed overheating, in part at least because of the greenhouse gases which we are putting into the atmosphere. This is resulting in tides of displaced persons and refugees, whose plight must to be responded to on an international basis, as does the threat of nuclear Armageddon and other threats such as the pollution and over-fishing of the oceans.
Governments and oligarchs have apparently an inbuilt tendency to grasp more and more power over our lives, while technology is opening up horrifying new possibilities for doing so.
Meanwhile the claims of governments to represent the interests of their populations grow thinner by the day, as they fail in such basic matters as the real economy and public debt, housing, the support of family life and the birth rate, the maintenance of health services and law and order, while marching to the tune of heaven-knows-what which is antithetical to these interests.
We will not do developing countries any good by sucking out all their best and brightest, to make up for the fact that we are too sick or lazy to rear our own children, and it also has to be remembered that 'good fences make good neighbours'.
None of us want our societies overwhelmed by debt, any more than by foreigners.
Both national governments and the EU are in various ways nonetheless essential to our peace and prosperity. They will only thrive and function benignly if full subsidiarity and accountability be reclaimed, which currently means a radical change of direction. In Ireland and elsewhere, local democracy badly needs to be developed.
Another thing that needs to be considered is the establishment of local currencies, with their own banks. It is in working together that the necessary trust may be established.
Perhaps the implosion of Twitter will provide the occasion for a rethink about how best to discuss this kind of thing online?
The most basic requirement is that we do not succumb to censorship and isolation, but establish actual communities of people who know each other and can interact and communicate physically on an ongoing basis. Wherever we encounter people who do not feel free to say what they think, we are losing the battle against totalitarianism.
We should not accept notions that undermine basic axioms of our culture, such as that God made the human race male and female, that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, or that we have a duty to protect innocent human lives. We must defend the family, based on real marriage.
We need to work every way we can to reclaim subsidiarity, bolster local community, make sure education is atuned to parents, foster resilience and self-sufficiency.
This is mainly about protecting the vegetables from the west wind.
Last comment, on a more personal note, let those who can keep the freedom of the seas! For one thing, we will need the kind of resilience that the sea breeds. For another, air travel is too easy to control, and indeed the taps may get turned off wherever one depends on fossil fuel. I propose to do all I can to keep open the ancient sailing route between the West of Ireland and the Iberian peninsula…. See The Gannetsway Project.
