by John Ward
Global battle lines are being drawn, and ranks are closing. May and Macron have thrown in their lot with Alt State perjury. The Slog lays out a dozen solid reasons for the depiction of Great Britain’s emerging position as an illiberal, sham democracy.
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Over the last few days, it has become clearer than ever that the world is on course to become The New Bilateral. That is to say – as I have long predicted – an axis of nations on the one hand tied to the United States of America – and on the other, loosely confederated to the People’s Republic of China.
The Western action against Assad in Syria will only serve (quite rightly in my view) to drive Russia further still into the Chinese camp. South America – long distrustful of the US – will do the same. Much of sub-Saharan Africa is already beholden to Beijing. The Middle East will split, as always, one way or another largely based on Sunni or Shi’ite ideas as to what Islam is about. Even Australia – thus far a loyal member of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ camp – harbours huge doubts about the joys of being an American ally.
As time goes on, and the terminal US decline becomes ever more obvious in the light of the petroyuan, Planet Earth will become a very dangerous place. Some will hope that Einstein’s long-predicted Time-and-Space rope can be grasped, and used to take survivors to a safer billet elsewhere in the Universe. For myself, I continue to believe that, in the end, Homo sapiens will rediscover the multilateral localism that comes most naturally to us as a species. And in that end game, I would want the British cantons to be steadfastly neutral.
This might seem at first sight hopelessly optimistic: but bear with me – the entire Global Village construct is antithetical to everything we are about.
I have travelled a great deal over the last decade – more than in the other six of my life put together. And the one blindingly obvious thing about globalism is that it is complete tosh based solely on the atypical flying habits of the usual 3% of saddo nutters who don’t have a meaningful life.
We have global news combines. But every last one of them is forced to adapt to local and regional demand. In India, Sky focuses 90% on Indian news. In the US, the same goes for Fox, Bloomberg, CNN and CNBC. In Britain, both the BBC and Sky are overwhelmingly Anglocentric. France24 is largely concerned with Francophone news. Black African media do exactly what it says on the tin.
The average human finds it hard to relate to any set of friends and acquaintances beyond 240 names. The whole idea of ‘the Global Village’ was an invention of the febrile mind of Ted Levitt. None of his predictions have been borne out: humanity remains community focused.
Whenever it moves away from that natural state, we get problems. Urban problems, EU problems, USSR problems and – even today – Chinese problems derived from trying to cope with with 73 dialects and at least three separate races.
In large metropolitan centres, people form villages. London has Highgate, Islington, Muswell Hill, Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Fulham, Clapham, Brixton et al. New York has the Bronx, Brooklyn, Greenwich, Manhattan and Harlem. Paris has Montmartre, the Boule St Miche, the Huitième, St Germain des Près, Les Halles, La Défense and a dozen other variations in character.
The US has States, the UK has counties, France has départements, Switzerland has cantons. All of these localities enjoy enormous power and evoke strong loyalties.
But no Soviet citizen loved the USSR. No European loves the EU. No PRC citizen loves the Beijing construct. And while Americans love their flag, they are split right down the middle on what their nation State should stand for.
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However, there is a fundamental problem with “community life”. For television, the internet, retail giants and inbuilt parochialism have made smaller communities an oppressive place for entrepreneurial, creative minds to flourish. Young people in particular go in search of the greater stimulation available in the cosmopolitan centres. Communities have become, for various reasons, an anti-intellectual trap where the order of the day is superficial gossip and banal conversation. Believe me, in my current existence I know this only too well.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. Used properly, the internet could be a force for connecting the enjoyable parochial pace to the interesting cosmopolitan intellect. Sadly, after a few years of free information and shared understandings, the internet has indeed proved to be just a new media set to work alongside the old one: that is to say, the target of surveillance agencies, the military (which created it) and rapacious billionaires like Zuckerberg and Murdoch.
But I repeat: it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s going to be a long haul until we get our freedoms back – and trust me, there will be pain and unimaginable levels of conflict along the way. The first step on that pilgrimage, however, is for middle America and Europe to snap itself out of this silly ‘it couldn’t happen here because we are liberal democracies’ fantasy. It simply isn’t true, and it hasn’t been true since the emergence of Reagan, Thatcher and Blair.
Earlier this year – before all the poison and gas attack fantasies began being put about – I went back, after some thought, to the term totalitarian to describe the way things are going. Since the May decision – along with the rest of her depraved Cabinet – to ignore the will of the People and the Constitution in order to begin air strikes against Assad – I have called Britain a de fact dictatorship.
As you might imagine, this has occasioned a swarm of the usual suspects telling me what a traitor I am. But I have begun using those words because the blatant realities of corporate governance and 24/7 surveillance demand their use, not because I’ve turned overnight into a late Sixties student radical.
Consider the classically recognised philosophical definition of a totalitarian dictatorship:
- Bypassing the legislature, or using it as a rubber stamp.
- Giving free rein and massive budgets to unaccountable military intelligence
- The rapid emergence of unthinking cults of personality
- Delusions of grandeur about ‘the Volk’ and their place in the world
- Control of the police until they are nakedly politicised
- Erosion of an independent judiciary
- Foreign adventurism to justify the erosion of liberty and efficiency
- Accusing all opposition and resistance of being unpatriotic and mentally unbalanced
- A political system bankrolled by corporate funds
- Banking sleight of hand to hide the real economic mess being created
- A compliant media set casually ignoring any and all constitutional guarantees of citizen liberty
- Depicting empirical reality as a perversion of the Truth.
The first point above is as good a description as you’ll find of Iraq intervention in the first decade of the century, and Syria intervention in the second.
As to GCHQ and internet surveillance alongside the obvious role of “intelligence” in constructing a case for demonisation, Britain throughout the new century has been a model of invasive mendacity. In the UK now, there are more cameras per square mile than any other State in the world. Our emails, social media comments and blogs are monitored nonstop. Somewhere in a lead-lined coffin, Erich Hönneker is having a wet dream: not a pleasant thought, but an apt metaphor.
We have had two personality cults since 1980: Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. A third one is now developing, called Boris Johnson: the cheekie chappy who speaks his mind and is just like us. And is connected to every unpleasant, twisted gargoyle and nasty régime on the planet. [Boris the Spider] Johnson is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he’s a velociraptor playing Bo Peep.
If you don’t recognise British grandeur delusions, then you’re sensorily challenged. “The great and wise British people” barely exist any more, and they are dying off with every year. We can’t even afford to fuel our white elephant battleships. But one after another, every British leader since Major has had a crack at his or her own Falklands moment. The soft Left is so deluded about British power, it honestly believes that we can “effect reform from within the European Union”. But observe its frantic, off-piste attempts to undermine the majority vote since the EU Referendum: now that, my friends, is the blatant Alt State of corporate muscle at work.
Is there anyone in the UK (apart from 650 legislators) who still argues that our police forces are politically independent? They parrot the pc of the Left – and talk of ‘diversity management’ and other similar business consultancy claptrap. They encourage opportunist “victims” to come forward and help them smear the likes of Jim Davidson, Paul Gambaccini, Rolf Harris and Jimmy Tarbuck. They tear into the slightest sign of “Islamaphobia”, but then cover up Pakistani rape gangs throughout Britain….in much the same way as they covered up the chamber of horrors at Elm House – with the help of – yes, you guessed it – the cheeky chappy, Boris Johnson. The man who tried to strangle the Newscorp hacking enquiry at birth. The Met Police and Newscorp ‘dining club’ was the greatest disgrace of policing since Robert Peel created the force as a civil cadre; but the entire government rallied behind Murdoch…and the Opposition bottled out of the best chance we’ll ever get to rid Britain of this ghastly man forever.
The feeble attempts of the judiciary to let justice “be done” in the pitifully small number of actual prosecutions that resulted was laughable. Cameron’s press secretary Coulson went to an open prison for 18 weeks. Tried later for perjury, the Judge dismissed the case without bothering to consult the jury. Rebekah Brooks was found not guilty, using the smart CPS ruse of restricting the charges to things where she’d destroyed all the evidence. Boris Johnson conspired with Tim Yeo to falsify taxi emission data; neither man was even questioned.
Foreign adventurism? Well, we’re in the middle of it as I write. Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, the national debt has doubled, 1950s born women have been swindled, the deficit steadfastly refuses to disappear, and the manufacturing sector of our economy has shrunk by a further 20%. I rest my case.
Media show-trial accusations emerge from Boris Johson’s lips each and every day. He calls the Russian World Cup hosting “an attempt like Hitler’s 1936 Olympics to give a veneer of respectability to a dictator”. He refers to Jeremy Corbyn’s doubts about the Salisbury caper in these terms: “It is very sad to see a senior British politician taking the enemy’s side”. He dismissed the Guardian’s hacking investigation as “another load of leftwing poppycock”. It’s appalling behaviour; but for some, it’s “Good old Boris, saying what we all think really”.
Donations to the Conservative Party are obscenely weighted towards the top, Globalist end of the corporate sector. The total came to £13 million last year, and included £2.5m from JCB (keep building the houses, guys) plus large dollops (£4.5m) from senior City leaders like hedge fund boss Sir Michael Hintze, bankers like Andrew Law and others knighted by David Cameron. When, in 1997, Blair and Brown swept to victory, they did so on the basis of exactly the same breed of power brokers worried that the appalling sleaze of the last Major government wasn’t playing too well. Under Labour, new bank HQs were regularly opened by Gordon Brown, the Dark Angel and former Young Communist Peter Mandelson declared himself “relaxed in the company of billionaires”, real wages for ordinary people continued to erode, and we suffered the biggest financial crash since 1929.
The preponderance of “financialised capitalism” in those donations tell us all how the system works, but banking in particular has always been central to successful totalitarian fascism….that, and having the military onside. Just as Hitler had Hjalmar Schacht, Mussolini had his Milanese business mafia, Brussels has Mario Draghi and Stalin had the Red Army, so too the US Alt State has the Pentagon and Wall Street alongside the Federal Reserve – all designed to disguise the real economic dysfunction at the heart of everything. In the UK, Boris Johnson’s City connections are legendary (those prepared to talk off the record about the Brexit negotiations confirm that continued City predominance is all he cares about) but many people refuse to recognise just how global his reach is: into Newscorp, military intelligence, Asian tigers like Singapore, and the sort of people that enabled him to coordinate and lead the entire Skripal to Syrian airstrikes set-up.
Bank of England sleight of hand under Goldman Sachs alumnus Mark Carney works hard to hide the fundamentals of British economic suicide, while at the same time doing his best as a globalist to undermine Brexit. Carney has now, on three separate occasions, hugely overstepped his remit in support of the Alt State.
That much of this goes unreported reflects the docile – indeed, at times diabolical – compliance of the media both in the US and Britain. This too has become much worse in recent years. In the run-up to the 2nd Iraq War, the BBC took a firm and brave stand against the murderous illegalities perpetrated by Tony Blair and his creature Alastair Campbell. Slowly but definitively, the UK’s political class has first threatened and then neutered the role of the BBC as a Voice of Truth respected around the world. Today, a BBC full of pro-EU Lefties and HSBC controllers happily acts as the latter day version of Tass in the USSR, repeating blatant lies about Executive accountability to Parliament. The Barclay twins’ Telegraph newspapers have sold out to both corporate and government propaganda, and the Murdoch press trots out demonisations of Putin, Assad and Corbyn on a daily basis.
All of which segues naturally into the most telling symptom of all: the Orwellian presentation of verifiable facts as “enemy propaganda”. From Brexit via Salisbury to Damascus, both the UK and the US have displayed denialism of awkward evidence on a scale worthy of anything in the Room 101 of 1984’s nightmare vision. For the likes of John Bolton, Jean-Claude Juncker, Guy Verhofstadt, Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson, George Orwell’s classic novel is not a warning: for them, it is a blueprint.
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I don’t like “Deep State” as a term, because it is no longer hidden or underground in any way whatsoever. It is on the surface of life, laughing at us. Occasions such as Jeremy Hunt telling the Commons he had “done nothing wrong” (in completely abusing his powers as Culture Minister to favour Newscorp’s interests) are real turning points in every tale of the slide into corporate fascism.
Nor do I buy into Jeremy Corbyn’s archaic and ideologically petrified version of Hard Left ideology as anything other than another version of globalism every bit as dangerous to citizen liberties as neocon foreign policy and neolib economics. Corbyn and his profoundly illiberal followers in Momentum continue to assert that we have a political problem in Britain, and the West generally. We do not: the problem is cultural and constitutional….one within which electoral apathy, unquestioning educational assumption and intolerant ideology are the cancers of our age.
But I will say this: should Corbynista Labour ever come to power in Britain, it will be assailed from all sides by unelected power. McDonnell may dismiss this reality, but he is an arrogant idiot: the financialised directioneers will render Britain bankrupt rather than let him attempt to prove people like me wrong.
Democracy and Liberty are on the run as they have never been since 1941. And dismissing my grounded analyses as paranoia just won’t wash. The evidence is clearly visible for those who wish to see it.