by John Ward
The days of lone bloggers are numbered: they will soon be the next target of those who would silence all contrarian thought, and cannot equal the impact of the ‘old’ mainstream media. Radical realists need a medium of their own, but one connected to a physical Movement at local level. The Slog suggests an opening strategy.
Thursday’s investigative Slogpost on the deeply unpleasant National Socialist “Sir” Mark Sedwill came and went with barely a ripple.
Online and in terms of thread comments, it was by Slog standards an outstanding success: just under 20,000 hits, 71 5-star ratings and a bulging email postbag filled with supporters offering me other useful tips and tidbits that disgusted them as much as one could hope to expect. I must also add, by the way, that it was Slogger Brian who first pointed out to me Sedwill’s directorship at Halo. As ‘man who helps direct ops that involve the laying of landmines, and then gets a second bite by rendering them harmless’, Our Mark is very Tony Blair and on message. Well hurrah, he has been called out by a cast-iron unspun column that has made an impact among the decent, thinking online minority.
But beyond that, it’s had zero effect: not a single televisual, paper or online version of what we all call these days the MSM went near it. We did not see GMB rentagob Piers Morgan having a rant about it. Gorgeous George Galloway ignored it – as did every Fleet Street editor and columnist I emailed. I sent the guff to Fox News, but as there was nothing American or Noo Yoikka in it, the post went into a predictable black hole.
I’m trying to be a realist, not a bitter voice in the wilderness. Here and there – I’m happy to report – there are signs of cracks in the totalitarian edifice: the Boy King Macron’s Party France en Marche may have a superficial command of the National Assembly, but an infuential French media outfit Les Echos ran a good story this week showing that the Party is less than happy with its leader’s undeniable links to Big Pharma in the shape of Sanofi, his Imperial decrees demanding total obedience to lockdown, and the use of Covid19 as a battering ram with which to smash all decent opposition.
It now looks like at least 70 Assembly members will desert Macronapoleon and join with other minority Parties to form a Front that isn’t LePen. Given that (as ever) the Left is all over the place here, this is an encouraging sign.
But such is little more than a small child’s micturation in the Pacific ocean. Even if we move up to a much larger scale – as in Fox News – we see this terrific piece of thoughtful and damning grown-up journalism from Tucker Carlson:
www.foxnews.com/media/tucker-carlson-youtube-coronavirus-censorship-science
It’s great stuff, reporting on the completely unacceptable private sector spook-friendly Goebbels admirers at YouTube decision to vapourise the two California-based virologists who got five million online views of their databased denunciation of Contrick19.
The pinched YouTube goblins couldn’t slag it off as “wild conspiracy theory”, so they Unevented it: it became an Unhappening….rather in the way that Trotsky (and anyone else Joe Stalin didn’t like) became an Unperson.
What YouTube did was illegal in roughly 56 ways, the most important being the American Bill of Rights. Will the Google-owned video site be prosecuted? Best not to hold your breath on that one. The vast majority of those locked down and screwed up around the world will continue to be believe the Wall of Soundbites that dictate the narrative.
I think it might be instructive at this point to revisit the works of Aleksander Solzhenytsin, the USSR’s most celebrated (and hunted) dissident writer. While George Orwell foresaw what would happen in any free society that adopted an illiberal version of socialism, Solzhenytsin recorded every nightmare of dictated MediaThink as it unfolded in the Soviet Union.
Deplorably, hardly anyone under the age of 40 today knows anything about this courageous author; perilously few have read any of his works. But what he did was point out the interstellar difference between truth and propaganda that defined the USSR…despite the fact that its biggest-selling daily newspaper was called Izvestia – The Truth.
The difference between then and now is that the Bolsheviks made no secret of their determination to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat: they siezed power in 1917, neutered the Duma legislature along the lines of the current EU Parliament, and established a régime of crushing, cruel conformity brilliantly described in We Never Make Mistakes, One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch, Cancer Ward, The First Circle and other novels smuggled out to the West from 1965 to 1980.
Today’s corporacratic technonerds lack the brazen ideological honesty of the Bolshies, while enjoying the hitherto unimaginable advantages of (a) mind-boggling media information overload and (b) a distracted and generally supine citizenry. The rich seam they are mining is widespread acceptance of bollocks.
IABATO applies – Its All Bollocks And That’s Official.
Thus, the stamp of officialdom is all the comfortable 21st century electorate requires for unquestioning acceptance. But in the long term, it can only fulfil Orwell’s prediction of the future as “a boot stamping on a human face”.
Needless to say, a growing number of Western citizens are far from comfortable. But they are in turn being fixated by that very same pc Stateism hellbent on equally illiberal control.
The Leftlibs in Britain have invented a racist culture that simply doesn’t exist any more. If they have a concert, it has to be Rock Against Racism. They call something an Anti-Nazi League, although the number of real Nazis is barely more than a few hundred….and none of them have any access to power – with the exception of Mark Sedwill who, of course, the luvvie Left quite likes because he likes the EU. Dot joining has never been their metier.
‘The Right is on the march,” said Rebecca Long-Bailey last February. Really? Where is the Stürm Abteilung? Where are the Krystallnachts? The Stars of David painted on Jewish shops? I agree that on the European mainland, anti-Semitism is on the rise; but in England, most of it is in the Labour Party.
The point I’m making is simple and clear enough: by being profoundly intolerant, ruthless in pursuit of those who oppose them, and creating a make-believe world that doesn’t exist, the Leftlibs are giving respectability and credibility to the BS being handed out by the security services, Big Pharma and neocon diplomats. The Red boys and girls don’t realise it of course, but they are on the same side as the Nasties when it comes to “fake news”.
This helps explain why the decent thinking minority is forced to look to the Right for its heroes. Not that many of us like or Trust Johnson and Trump; but the alternatives are, respectively, a stony-faced Statist bureaucrat with all the charisma of a shoe-horn, and a failed cryogenic experiment who seems perpetually unsure on the who, why and how thing.
For myself, I’d prefer to have a proper choice. That is, something other than bent greedy bastards or rigid ideologues. But that’s not available, and this is the problem we all face: what the folks on our side of the fence don’t have is a Common Purpose. Which doesn’t mean aping jerks like Robert Peston and other CP luminaries: it means building an organisation passionate about reform from the ground up, not blinkered directives from the top down.
I have been saying this now for six years, but it is still not too late: if anything, I sense now that this is an idea whose time has come.
It would require the ignorance of an alien visitor to Earth to arrive on the planet today and think that power in the West still resides within a political class governed by the rule of law. The real future of reform lies not in the legislatures, but rather among those people with the tolerance and talent at local level to construct changes that allow us to (a) effectively and peacefully oppose the 3% of controllers and (b) demonstrate our independence from them.
If there is going to be a reset of financialised globalist monopolism in the near future, social anthropology and common sense tells the informed mind that it will benefit those with their hands on the cutlery, not those catching the crumbs off the table.
So the aim of the sort of movement I’m talking about would be to recruit people who can command the level of social disobedience required to spike those plans.
The electoral Party systems we have in the West do not allow for important minorities to have a persuasive say about the nature of change. Partly, this is to do with FPTP such as we have in Britain, but primarily it is to do with the stifling influence of the central Party machines in cloning the candidates they want with the representatives they already have.
That is not democracy. It is, to be blunt, braindead Mob approval of spin based on the colour of a rosette.
First and foremost therefore, the Decent Resistance needs to grow into long trousers and grasp one crucial reality: we do not need a Movement to challenge the legislative Closed Shop. What we require is an intelligent and wise vocal minority able to stop the votecentric and donorcentric Establishment having their will prevail.
I make no apology for the intrinsic élitism in this strategy – it is, let’s face it, nothing new: seven years ago I posted thus: ‘The era of Bastille storming is long gone. The next major 21st century régime change will be carried out by those who value liberty on behalf of those who don’t care’. There’s an element of Rousseauesque “forcing people to be free” in that for sure; but if part of the reform is a broader definition of eclectic education – based on awareness of the civics of liberty and responsibility – then the principle of obligatoire need not be dictatorial. Rather, it becomes the guardian of mutually beneficial communitarianism.
For example, a central tenet of that open-minded educational ethic would be the encouragement of all pupils and students to question received wisdom – not with the battering ram of ideological mob chanting, but rather by using objective data, the tenets of scientific logic, and above all a recognition of the values of planetary life balance that add up to quality of life rather than standard of living.
It is time to stop being prepared to accept the spin of “this is the standard contract”. In 2012, 6% of the global population owned 71.6% of planetary wealth. By November 2017, the top 1% owned 50.1%. The process of more and more and more money-power in the hands of fewer and fewer and fewer greasy palms continues unabated. This is not a clarion call for Socialist forced wealth redistribution; it is a plea for neoliberal apologists to wake up and accept that trickle-down wealth is a ridiculous lie that will never produce a Planet Earth where Homo sapiens is at ease with itself.
We’ve been here before, have we not? Trust me, I am not the Messiah. I am at best a very naughty boy. I lack the energy, resources, and – to be honest – the enthusiasm to be a leader any more. All I suggest is that those who grasp the need for a return to compassionate reality come together and reject tired old ideas from Marx to Friedman in favour of constructive radicalism.
Constructive radicalism is another way of saying “creative risk” in the context of constipated thought driven by privilege. We all know that, when the post-Covid World finally presents itself, we are going to get the same empty tinkering with the fringe irrelevance we got after the 2008 Crash. And not terribly deep down, we all know it will be a fudge along the lines of treating inoperable bowel cancer with a daily bowl of porridge oats…..that is to say, far too little far too late.
But as ever, the Sixty-four Million Dollar question is how to grow that common-good radicalism, how to format it, encourage it and publicise it?
As a media specialist most of my adult life – and understanding just how gutless most hacks are in 2020 – my starting point is the generation of far more awareness about how liberties are being diluted, and the evident signs that we are on the brink of a dark totalitarian age.
By far the most potential for such enlightenment lies in the 50-90 age group which, at the last count, amounted to almost a quarter of the population (24.79%). I posit this for a variety of reasons:
- This group has a much higher level of education, grasp of history and civic ethics than younger people
- Within it are those already schooled in fighting the injustice of the State – that is, the Waspi/Back to 60 women born after 1953
- Consisting of a huge group of the retired on fixed incomes – while facing the daily ageism that makes employment hard to find and the near certainty of chronic illness – these are the people who will be most immediately hit by a “reset” in which the powerful get immunity and the real people get shafted
- They are relatively untouched by political, pc, or pro-EU/multicultural madness, and far more worldly and realistic about what utter lowlife most of the 3% are.
So my ‘starter for ten’ would be the creation of a dedicated website also available in a simple email format – written by that age group about the practical problems, fears, anger, alienation and commonwealth of that age group.
This would bear the same header title as the name of the Movement. It would appear (say) three days a week – Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
But it would avoid didacticism in favour of little-known facts, unravelling spin and practical advice.
For the kind of movement I envisage, nothing succeeds like success. From the outset, the emphasis should be on taking manageable injustic issues and getting a result.
Once again, I leave this out here for people to think about, reply to and discuss.
In the meantime, enjoy your Sunday lunch.