OPINION: Crash2 could well turn out to be the saviour of internet freedoms

by John Ward

The electorates of the Western World remain largely unaware of how close they are to losing their social rights, liberties and savings. Only the last of these, alongside Crash2, stands a chance of creating the necessary levels of frustration and desperation to take power back from unelected censors….and those who lie on their behalf.

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Last Monday I received a personal letter from MP Sarah Wollaston in reply to my post about the darker side of the UK Stalking Bill. It was a polite and prompt reply, but it wasn’t any kind of answer. In particular:

1. Wollaston didn’t respond to a single specific concern that appeared in the Slogpost.

2. She didn’t comment on the dubious background of seven of the sponsors.

3. The letter (via email) contained the usual protection saying unauthorised reproduction of her text was forbidden.

So much for consultation, controlling the tendencies of ideologues, and transparency. The post itself got 10 comments, 28 reviews (all 5-Star) and just 912 views. To sum up, the legislator concerned was dismissive,  and just 4% of viewers felt moved to comment or review – that’s under 2% of The Slog’s followers.

This neither surprises nor irritates me, because blogging frequently brings the author down to Earth with a bump: the British élites are (like all others these days) disinterested and secretive, while the electorate is variously desperate, busy, tired, bored, old, gullible, ill, under familial pressure, ignorant, smug, arrogant or apathetic. Without that combination – and more than enough to spend and eat for the vast majority – the bombastic, self-serving nature of the the vast majority of the political class would’ve caused the Palace of Westminster to be razed to the ground decades ago.

As I often write, however, in the 21st century the honeyed voices whispering in the ever-eager ears of the political Executive and its legislative fodder are rather more varied than they were in the days of King John – who suffered little more than barons selling him Magna Carta. It is these varietal and almost always malign influences that threaten all those of us who want little more than a decent life for most citizens, and governments that are accountable solely to we, The People. There used to be a vast consensus among roughly 55 – 70% of the electorate that such an aspiration came before any single Party. That no longer applies.

This – and the gigantic flush of unelected, hidden influence, is what makes the dangers different – and potentially irreversible – this time.

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Looking at the last last two months’ output at The Slog, there have have been 41 posts covering some 32 specific topics like Brexit, the euro, financialised globalist overconfidence, UK Party political splintering, social media, US neoconservative foreign policy, and EU control freaks.

But sometimes, it is as well to simplify what the content is about by looking solely at the ‘higher order’ problems such topics amplify. And of course, at the same time it is vital to point out how they are inexorably interconnected.

Having engaged in that process of reducing apparent complexity to the sort of simplicity distracted voters can grasp and (hopefully) oppose, it is hard to escape the following formula:

Unelected influence + ideological intolerance = Citizen slavery

Allow me to flesh this out somewhat.

Unelected influence results from overdependence by political Executives on bureaucratic process driven by self-interest, and the easy corruption of both the Executive and its tame legislators by monied corporate lobbying.

Ideological intolerance derives from the opportunism of multinational business and its insistence on globalist mercantilism; from the decline in importance of independent thought and changed cultural realities, both largely driven by the political Left through education; and from the falsified culturo-racial priorities stressed by identity activists from the Left. The Four Horsemen ideologies involved here are neoliberal economics, socialist collectivism, radical feminism and fundamentalist Islam.

Citizen slavery is the result of that complex mélange of hidden persuasion and illiberal wishful fancy: it subjects, via a compliant media set, the average citizen to counterfeit narratives about inevitability, certainty, correctness, economic wellbeing and the dangers of dissidence….while demonising those who question the catechism – thus justifying them as targets for security surveillance by secret police working in close cooperation with online social media.

I remind you now of the nature of that populace: variously desperate, busy, tired, bored, old, gullible, ill, under familial pressure, ignorant, smug, arrogant or apathetic.

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Overlaying this complex tapestry is a process that has been continuing, with brief pauses, since the elections of first Richard Nixon, then Ronald Reagan and finally Margaret Thatcher: that is, the biggest shift of power from labour to capital in modern history, the rise and rise of crooked financialised commerce to exaggerate it, and the explosion in numbers (but shrinkage in ownership) of both physical and digital media. This latter event inevitably threw government and the media owners together….with a specific but unseen focus on cooperation between media and the Secret Services.

It was inevitable partly because the world wide web was originally a spawn of military communication. But the image of the internet that eventually emerged has, unsurprisingly, been almost entirely positive from the start. It is, let’s face it, an incredibly useful tool for most people with busy lives, a seemingly inexhaustible source of information, and an amazing way to fill the holes left by ailing memory synapses.

The internet is, in short the perfect Trojan Horse for dictators

Ironically, over the last fifteen years it has also developed (alongside mobile telecoms & digital photography) as a potentially enormous force for freedom of expression and organisation, as well as offering a more objective, less disinforming analysis of “news” than anything on offer from the MSM cabal.

So the internet is also a ready-made Spartacus for citizens

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All of which (perhaps pedantic) restatement of analysis brings me to the main point of this post: every year – increasingly now, every month – it becomes more obvious that this unholy alliance of media moguls, security services, globalist business, military neocons, ideologues, religious maniacs and bumboy politicians with delusions of global hegemony will do everything in their power to crush the internet resistance, and ensure that – ultimately – benign social communication, manic consumption and docile receipt of commands will be the only digital “powers” left to us

Many in the UK political class – like Baron Adonis, Diane Abbott, Harriet Harman and Jess Philips – are merely unable to envisage the consequences of owning a certitude of convictions that bear little or no relevance to real people, and are almost all dangerous to the cause of liberty in an already dangerous environment. A large number of young, anti-Trump Democrats in the US display the same  syndrome….as do a frightening number of younger West European EU citizens.

But the malignant and fragile egos of most other legislators – and this is more evident among the senior ranks – will consciously drive them to wholesale censorship, and the careful surveillance of ‘wild conspiracy theorists and abusively unbalanced citizens’ will be (like every other term in modern linguistics) monstrously expanded to include any and all dissent.

We have seen the ludicrous invention by Cameron and May four years ago of the offence of ‘non-violent extremism’. This was stopped not by the hoots of laughter among the population, but by the fall of Cameron.

On the other side of the Westminster aisle, we have seen boo-terms like racist, rapist, murderer, anti-Semite and Islamophobe applied to UKIP voters, Trump, Farage, any nationalist suspicious of Brussels, Boris Johnson, and all criticisms of Sadiq Khan. For millennials, this is rapidly creating a new normal.

The People have yet to declare a victory on either front.

The battle for Net neutrality (whereby the moguls, spin-doctors and spooks get privileged access to information) is already as good as lost.

The Stalking Bill post wherein I highlighted the very real dangers to civil liberties last week created barely a ripple. The removal – aka embezzlement – of the financial civil liberty of female State pensioners – has been the subject of over 60 posts at The Slog and mass movements lobbying the government for eight years. The government and the DWP is thoroughly unmoved by any of it; so (to its eternal shame) is Momentum.

Hot on the heels (if ever there was a good word for the vandals of Brussels, that’s it) of their hollow hypocrisy in censuring  Orban and Hungary, our diligent MEPs have just approved one of the most direct attacks on the internet (and its capacity to viralise important information) yet devised by those who exercise their unelected power to give directives. 

The “ruling” (for that is what the Pinched Commission Goblins now call such things) will introduce a “link tax” for every website – including this one – ensuring at a stroke that the sources of a story will be missing (thus enabling the cry of ‘wild theory’ to ring out from the corridors of power) and – to avoid the tax – links to a scoop will be omitted in most articles. The ruling is nothing more or less than a complement to the defeat of Net Neutrality: the Big Guys will use their already established readership, while the Small Guys will gradually be edged out.

In particular, it will be welcomed by every wobbly bank in the eurozone as another means by which information to save investors from penury will be withheld at worst, or reduced in impact at best.

Go to my Aims page at the head of Slog Home, and you will read that a fundamental drive in writing and marketing this blog is to protect vulnerable ideas from process. 

For those of you who didn’t catch the movies, I bring bad tidings:

The Trojan Horse won, but Spartacus lost

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I paint a bleak picture not to exaggerate the size of task or spread dismay, but rather to try and wake The People up. I am a pacifist who will always condemn the use of violence towards any end: those who resort to violence have already stripped themselves in public of any pretensions to morality. Momentum has quietly dumped its half-hearted commitment to peaceful protest; Antifa never pretended to have any such political tolerance in the first place.

Equally, not all the signs are discouraging. For many British citizens, for example, the Skripal narrative raised huge doubts, such that fully 80% of respondents in a survey  disapproved of the bombing of Syria. But again, the bad news is: Theresa May and her fellow NATO hobgoblins got their way.

The decline of trust in the MSM in recent years also offers evidence of Resistance progress being made. A survey of 2,019 adults by the US Media Insight Project conducted in July this year showed that 44% of Americans say their trust in mainstream media sources has decreased in the last year, against only 17% who felt happy with it.

In Britain, the annual Edelman Trust Barometer for 2017 recorded how the percentage of people in the UK who said they trusted the media fell from 36 to 24%. Not only is that a massive drop in one year, it also shows that three in four Brits do not automatically believe (in fact, they doubt) what the media have to say about what’s really happening.

But as long as ‘normal life’ seems to be continuing, these feelings will be nothing more than attitudes: they will not convert into behaviour. And if the innumerable Alt States continue to erode opportunities for effective discontent, by the time the electorate at large gets round to such inclinations it could easily be too late.

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This is what makes the timing of Crash2 so crucially important. The financialisation of capitalism by the US Fed after 2003, the kopout of 2008 and the twin lunacies of QE and Zirp after 2010 have together created a bubble in consumer debt and asset valuations of such enormity, the certainty of at least three outcomes is now beyond reasonable doubt:

  • A rapid inflation of middle-class debt-to-income ratios that will render the lifestyles of all but the most comfortably smug unsustainable
  • Multiple banking failures that will see the usual unelected suspects demanding ‘bail-in’ policies sufficient to wipe out the savings accumulated by many of the aforementioned comfortably smug
  • Third World unrest on a hitherto unseen scale.

The last thing I want to see is a violent battle between the mad élites in the bunker, and a desperate citizenry rendered extreme by the inability of those élites to harken unto common sense. All that can lead to is intolerant collectivism as the false antidote to greedy monetarism.

But such is unavoidable unless an alliance of ideology-free decency – a Movement of some kind – can be forged in a bid to outvote and banish the hegemonists in the meantime.

Experience intervenes to show that, each and every Autumn following graduation, millions of young adults forego their freedom to pursue the fortunes that will allegedly accrue from trading on the bourses. Each and every new generation seeks a Messiah by following a man of straw. Each and every comfortable citizen votes with his wallet rather than the chance to enjoy the genuine reality of personal liberty.

There is an immeasurable distance between late and too late. Better late than never. Better to endure a degree of ignorant ridicule than spend an eternity saying “If only”.

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