A slogan popular in 1789; not pleasant; not recommended behavior; but the sort of thing that happens when people who have had too much gather torches and pitchforks and head to the castle. Is the West approaching that moment?
Let me make the argument that the sheep will never rise. I hope I’m wrong but I suspect that it’s too late.
State propaganda is far, far more powerful than it was in 1789, 1848, 1917 or at any other revolutionary time. And it’s confident that its audience believes everything and remembers nothing. This essay gives examples of what Western reporting expects us to swallow – “A Russian detention center in the Donbass is shelled and 50–odd Ukrainian prisoners are killed. We are asked to believe that Russian forces shelled their own holding camp for reasons unexplained.” Who would be dumb enough to think that the Russians would go to the trouble of shelling the prison when they could easily “disappear” these people? Likewise we are supposed to casually accept that “Russians are shelling a nuclear power plant their own troops have guarded since March”. And that’s just Ukraine. Putin tries to kill somebody but leaves him alone once he gets him in jail. We have the whole thing on radar but nobody can see it. Masks were a bad idea in March 2020 but a good one in June. How about the Steele dossier? A guy in a buffalo hat almost overthrew the United States government. The deadly poison is put back in the bottle and wrapped in cellophane. And all the Hitlers! Milosevic, Sadaam, Gadaffi, Xi, Putin! It’s always Hitler time and it’s always 1937 in Munich.
Absurd as these assertions are, how many of your neighbors question them? Or for that matter, how many who are sure there was something between Trump and Putin even remember the details? The prostitutes and the bed? Alfa Bank? Manafort? “All 17 agencies”? The details are gone but the impression remains.
The effect is all-encompassing. It’s very in-your-face with the Ukraine war in which any deviation from the accepted story of “brutal and unprovoked invasion is failing” is treated as Putin-licking. Can we now laugh at the “senior UK defense sources” who told us Russia had a couple of weeks left in March? How about Wallace telling us Russia had lost in June? Maybe. But you’d better not laugh when they say it again in July and yet again in August. And Putin’s health! The man’s a wreck – “seen limping during foreign summit in September.” That was 2012 – here’s the same story 12 years later. When are we allowed to say that these stories are just propagandist crap? Or would that expose us to the charge of being denialists?
Of course we still have freedom of speech in the West – it’s one of the “core values” they’re always boasting about. But not, of course, if it’s hate speech, science denialism, conspiracy theories or – especially not, not ever – disinformation. The only ray of hope on this particular horizon is that trust in the media is at record lows. Which is probably why there is such an effort to get “disinformation” off the alternate media. It’s a race that I’m don’t expect freedom of speech to win. I see the time coming when all that will be left in the mainstream media is the freedom to say how much you love Big Brother. On the “alternate media” we’ll be able to suggest that we could love him even more if his eyebrows were trimmed. A bit.
Once upon a time, the left agreed that the rich should be overthrown, workers get more and that wars were usually bad. Now they argue about pronouns and which toilet stall to use while the rich become super-rich, the little guy is pushed to the edge and wars are everywhere. This is no small change. The more differences that can be created between individuals, the less chance there is that the people will unite. Returning to 1789, the Cahiers de doléances had a certain unity. What would we see today? Lots of complaints but none the same. Who goes to the lanterns? My tribe has my list, yours yours, others theirs. Many lists but none the same. We’re too divided to agree on anything. So much for a unified opposition. As to wars, lots of lefties now agree they are the best way to spread human rights. Do you think all that just happened by chance?
In 1789 if you wanted to shut out the world alcohol was the only exit. Think how many more exits we have today. Marijuana, cocaine, poppies and their derivatives are all out there. They have been joined by powerful artificial enhancements like the opioids – fentanyl is said to be the prime cause of death among 18-45 year olds. Alcohol is still there but even more so: “The rate of all alcohol-related ED visits increased 47 percent between 2006 and 2014.” Do you think the rate has decreased? Of course it hasn’t. Not much good news and happiness in the last decade, was there? All the entertainment you can soak yourself in – movies, round-the-clock sports, a thousand varieties of popular music, superheroes, comic books, porn, ego-stroking on social media. And more being constructed by people who are skilled at attracting eyeballs and ears. So, like they said in the 60s, when the disgust level gets too high, “turn on, tune in, drop out”. Lots more to turn you on, lots more tunes and lots more reasons to drop out. Or, less dramatically, “quiet quitting” – if you can’t stop it, don’t help it.
State propaganda is too powerful, people are divided into hostile tribes and it’s much easier to just fade out. And we’ve all bought trackers and spy devices disguised as smart phones. The bad guys have won I fear.
Not that they’ve won very much that is – just a comfier deck chair.
The iceberg waits, the Mandate of Heaven shifts.
In a conversation with a dear friend today, if asked if she still thought DJT was still the worst ever. Wrong question apparently, no one is owning up to that one then.
Good Larry!!!
The essence of reality, as simple as that.
Absorbed by this spiral and absolutely blinded by the tear gas.
As the people here say: more lost than a blind man in a fucking shooting.
It is all part of the “Great” Reset, aka, Great Culling. Billions are going to die. International emergencies will be declared. Democracy has already been abrogated. Gates and friends in their North Atlantic Bunker, just like “Kingsman: The Secret Service” where Samuel Jackson plays Bill Gates and uses his internet empire and everyone’s cell phone to make everyone hate everyone, kill each other. Only in the reality version, we have no hero to save us all. TPTB control the media which controls the masses. Remember that the French and Russian revolutions required massive suffering of the masses to make them rise – but the modern day aristocracy has been training to hide, to put down the revolt. The German BfV has already set the stage warning of protests over 2,347% increases in electricity prices in a single year https://notrickszone.com/2022/08/21/electricity-crisis-german-wholesale-prices-virtually-exploding-2347-rise-over-single-year/ being used by the Russians to overthrow democracy in the West https://www.rt.com/news/561300-protests-germany-extremists-russia/. Everything is going to their plan
There is no plan, Jimmy; no one’s that smart.
Revolutions happen when the middle class starves.
We aren’t there yet.
I guess EU will be the Canary in Coalmine since they are much worse off. But if Greece, Spain and others who’s first world fortunes have been falling for awhile, at least since the 2000s, are any indication – they will do nothing and neither will we. Westerners are too soft. I believe it’s loss of God… after all you fear death rather than embrace it in struggle without a place to go (heaven). Conversely, the Kadyrovskys of Russia embrace martyrdom as you see in this war.
Middle class is a bit too specific, but yep, a necessary condition (not always a sufficient one) for popular revolutions is a lot of people suffering extreme discomforts, think Russia 1917 or Haiti 1791, and even then, it still rarely happens.
Of course, we’re being lied to on an unprecedented scale, but who does really care ? Very few people are ready to die (or kill, for that matter) for the truth.
I don’t think the possibility of revolution has been stifled by an all-mighty and all-encompassing propaganda, I simply think the level of discomfort is far too low (yet) to move enough people.
I don’t even think the propaganda is that effective. It’s produced on a massive scale with massive means, but compared to what church propaganda achieved, in Europe, with peasants (who were subjected to horrendous levels of discomfort while very rarely rising up) between 800-1700 CE, it’s quite weak and inefficient.
Generally agree with you Vissarionovich. Our once prosperous middle class doesn’t yet have enough discomfort to risk revolutionary change.
One should also note, that roughly 40% of US households have someone employed by the gov’t. Shocking bit add up all those schoolteachers, nurses, highway contractors, cops, etc.etc and you start getting some surprising numbers. Those households aren’t going to want to overthrow the ‘regime’.
My guess is we will see the continued slow but steady erosion of living standards among the great mass of citizenry. Anyone who spends any time in flyover country recognizes that we are in many respects already a third-world society.
De-dollarization likely accelerates this long term trend. Most likely is we’ll see economic collapse before revolution.
Note – revolution is not desirable in any way. The last thing we need is a Spanish Civil War scenario. Too horrible to contemplate.
More like, “the movement starts happening”…..
It does not seem likely to succeed as a “revolution” in these days and times…
Larry, I couldn’t agree more. It’s too time- and labor-intensive, not to mention dangerous, to organize a genuine, armed grassroots insurrection – largely because of the smartphones you mention and other online surveillance, much of it carried out by Google et al. under the new ‘public-private’ partnership that has seized power.
Until Covid came along, I had always assumed that certain ‘sentinel events’ (unlawful business closures and shelter-in-place orders, an attempted coup, a stolen election, rule by a shadowy junta hiding behind a preposterous, senile sock-puppet) would trigger the same kind of popular reaction in the US that one sees in the developing world.
Progressives’ ardent embrace of masks and lockdowns, of the suppression of useful early antiviral therapies, then of mandatory experimental gene therapy with a grim side-effect profile didn’t surprise me much. I always knew they were nuts, I’ve got some in my family (or did have, I’ve ghosted most of ’em.)
But I was shocked at how quiescent the rest of us were. Sure, there was an awful lot of passive resistance and noncompliance in rural areas and red states. But that’s obviously not enough to bring about regime change.
I think some catastrophic event will have to happen – eg currency and then economic collapse, and much of the grid going down – before people get feisty enough to do what’s necessary. And at that point, most of us will be so busy trying to keep body and soul together that we won’t be storming or torching anything.
When there is no food in the stores and the majority do not know where their next meal will come from, then there will be food riots that perhaps will evolve further as intelligent people meet in the streets.
See the Netherland farmers and fishermen, they have nothing to lose and are fighting in the streets.
Unfortunately we do have to many propagandized “divided and conquered” idiots in our nations that still believe they have something to lose.
Another excellent overview of our world situation, thanks Larry!
I may add that we have Germany as the testing grounds for “When The Bullet Hits The Bone” (since we like songs lyrics :). The German economy is being dismantled in front of our eyes, the population is asked to use wet rugs instead of showering, while Hans and Helga are into some sort of cult trance waiting to be sacrificed on some fake god stone.
Good article. I think the “senior UK defense sources” link in the 5th paragraph is broken.
And yet, I see a growing silent minority who sees the writing on the wall, and carefully “feels” others out in speaking it’s mind.
You omitted some Hitlers: Mr and Mrs Habyarimana, Mr Ndindiliyimana, and Mr Robert Kajuga, the last of whom is baTúutsi…
You say À la lanterne is not recommended behavior, but its pretty much all they leaving us with so recommended or not it will be necessary sooner or later.
I think It’ll be a case of ‘no, you go first’, and I think thay’ll be Eurocentric. But probably not from their indigenous population, well at least to start with. See French covid riots, Nov 2020.
I made a comment during a meeting last year about preparing for societal collapse. My colleagues thought I was joking. As news came in today that Citi was predicting UK CPI to hit 18.6% later this year, one of my colleagues asked what I thought, and I said that Citi was optimistic and I was standing by my take from last year.
Bad guys have not won anything , they are the most miserable people on the planet.A PERSON REAPS WHAT HE SOWS , no one and I mean no one can escape that fate whether you believe in God or not it does not change the law it’s like gravity , you cannot escape it. They are destroyers , haters of anything good power hungry and very very unhappy. If you can enjoy a quiet evening with a loved one or friend, or walk out and enjoy the breeze and all the wonderful things there for us to enjoy then you are WINNING!!! The trouble coming to this world cannot be stopped. While we are free and able let’s enjoy the time we have , there is so much to smile about ! Look for it. 😎
Thank You
I have to respectfully disagree. It may be the fascistic apparatus is powerful now but the internet (the reason I am reading you despite heavy censorship of the press) is still a saving grace and a useful tool to gather the disgruntled masses still. Also, 3 days without bread has always lead to a “cleansing of the slate”, so we must wait and see. Of course why wait until such a scenario, I would fight and protests now but I am patient, better to wait until the time is ripe.
People are way too brain dead to do anything about it. My whole life it’s only gotten worse – born in 1969, public honor died in Vietnam and polling reflects that – can you believe congress once had a 88% approval rating back when JFK was around? Anyway, it’s like single digits now on par with media in single digits too. Best you can do in tune it out and not harm yourself. I retired early even bought 4 years from a major metro so I could sit back with a bag of popcorn and laugh on my nominal pension. I live in mayberry USA for most part so I’m safer than most. If I were a young man again I get the fuck out of USA – probably Russia or someplace else -it’s just gonna get worse as it has all my life.
Edward Abbey stated that “A Patriot must always be ready to defend his Country against his Government”! As a a New Zealander, I’ve always loved that quote because it’s meaning is universal, it doesn’t just have relevance in a American context but extends far beyond America’s borders & has relevance on a Worldwide scale as well? We are all fighting the same enemies, in every Country & that is a Neoliberal Globalist cabal who are controlling Western Govt’s, particularly in America? I salute you Larry for doing the work you do, your a true Patriot defending your Country against your Govt in a attempt to wake up a stupefied & purposely brainwashed American people & not only them but also every other Citizen in the World, we have all been ruthlessly propagandised to such a extent that we can’t think straight anymore? Thank you for attempting to awaken us from our slumber but it may be to little, too late unless everyone, everywhere has a lightbulb & storming of the Bastille moment & figures out, like the French people did during the French Revolution, who the real Enemy was & awakens to take action to remove these Tormentors from Power? At some Stage the Lanterns & Pitchforks you mention have to come out as people reach a Tipping point & the Song “We’re not going to take it”, NO we’re not going to take it”, we’re not going to take it, ANYMORE” becomes a rally cry & a call to arms as the Anthem of the Oppressed?
I don’t think it is hopeless unless of course GOD has had it with us and I don’t think He has. It takes a lot to get the American people riled up, look what it took to get behind involvement in WWII. It will happen even faster now for the very reasons you are stating it might not. Technology. We communicate so fast now and have such a large pool of info that there is literally no hiding what is going on. We will be OK after this dark time before dawn.
Mr. Johnson, allow me to make one quibble with (yet another) otherwise very good posting. In short, the left still believes those things, but the term ‘left’ has been co-opted by the virtue-signalling woke liberal hordes, and what is identified as ‘left’ nowadays most certainly isn’t. The proper term in my view is ‘liberals’, who are in fact sworn enemies of the left (and the right).
As Canadian left, which is way way more left that anything visible to me in the US (the ‘Squad’ are considered right of centre up here), every leftist I know still very much believes “… that the rich should be overthrown, workers get more and that wars were usually bad.” if by rich you mean the really REALLY rich that effectively run the show. With considerable confidence I can say that no-one ‘left’ here subscribes to all the pronoun-infatuated virtual-signaling wokism that IMNSHO pollutes our social discourse. It is often the #1 topic of kvetching over weekends beers, and there are few things that frustrate me more than seeing those liberal snowflakes co-opt the term ‘left’. They are most certainly NOT left, though they make quite a show of pretending to be.
The difference is consequential, as it effectively neuters any attempt for widespread social change. Some argue that is purposeful, as liberals can use it to both suppress the real left and attack the right. If we are to make progress on the things that really matter to our society, then I think it’s important to identify properly the forces at work suppressing that progress. BTW, liberal is also not ‘centrist’ – its off on its own cockamamie axis.
IMO there are many things the left and right can agree on, and one of them should be the struggle against liberals and their society-suffocating ideas.
Respectfully,
Bun
Thank you. This post was written by Helmholtz Smith. I’m sure he saw your comment.
The poor, the working poor and the American battlers struggling too hold their families together are silenced by Government free, welfare money.
Come the Great Default.
Starvation, lights out and thinking brains become switched on.
A revolution like no other explodes. Only in America could a revolt be unleashed with such speed and ferocity.
Weak men of pronouns and ugly women to the bone, will destroy each other fighting for shelter in a safe room.
The À LA LANTERNE moment…..indeedy.
It doesn’t need to end this way, but it will.
Most people are psychologically naive. We each have a human brain stacked on top of a mammalian brain stacked on top of a reptilian brain. That means we’re all capable of “evil”, “predatory”, “narcissistic” or “psychopathic” behavior. Once you understand that, it’s easy to recognize the MSM, politicians or bureaucrats are gaslighting propaganda mongers. The west is disintegrating on many levels because of the lack of trust in our society.
IMHO, their will be a revolution as a result of an economic and banking crisis arising from bad loan collateral that makes the depression of the 1930’s look like boom times. The mandate of heaven arises from the unconscious/Tao training the ego not to behave like a narcissistic jackass and our society is full of narcissistic savages with corrupt value systems.
We will see how ugly it gets.
Bread and circus only keeps reality at bay for a while.
Most conservatives I know are, well, conservative. So they fall back on the notion that that the system will right itself and don’t do anything crazy in the meanwhile. Be cautious! Keep a level head, etc. So they’re useless, slow boiling frogs. They just can’t accept that the people that put them in the pot and that are turning up the heat really have seized power and really want to kill them. Conservatives like war, for some strange reason. They think that WW2 was the USA’s greatest moment and they want to recreate it at every opportunity. But one would think that they would realize that war is the most radical insane thing a nation can do.
The liberals are just nuts (often literally/clinically) and they want the constitutional republic to collapse so it can be replaced with the socialist utopia they dream will come about in the aftermath. And yes, it is very surreal watching liberals side with the CIA et al and top down authoritative governance and war (now that there’s not a draft).
IMO, there all full of shit. Just walking around quacking like so many mindless ducks on the banks of the pond at the park. One is unlikely to be wrong by fundamentally assuming a low level of human intelligence. An average IQ (100 +/- 10) isn’t too smart, capable of being a low level supervisor for a manufacturing job; that kind of thing. Half of the population is below that. Only 2.5% are considered gifted/truly bright to genius. It is a real challenge to deal with the IQ distribution in a society where technology allows the truly gifted to propagate their minds and their control over everything and everyone else. Also, being of gifted IQ doesn’t mean that one is ethical or wise. What to do with all of the dummies? How to control the highly intelligent from abusing their capabilities?
I would like to add, that most of the people are emotinaly only on the level of 17 year young person. At least social sciences believe this to be the case.
And with the social media networks, where everyone is only consuming the people are easily manipulated, because too little people are using them for research. So no learning and no growth of real personalities.
So it is simple to put thoughts into them, that they believe to be important, which are not. Like racism, where geneticists found out, that there are no human races but only one human species, which is very diverse. But racism is on the rise, again.
Yep. Social media is accelerating the trend toward emotional retardation, as is the dissolution of the family structure. Used to be that a man of average intelligence had a critical role in society. He worked the farm or he worked the factory to provide for his family. The wife supported him and raised the children. If the country needed it, the man went to war to defend his nation. Face to face social interactions were how business and community happened. People had to work out real issues, together. Now the farm and factory are gone. The family is gone. Wars are wars of choice for volunteers, not the citizen soldier. Machines have replaced the average man’s labor and the government has taken over raising the children. Social media has replaced actual human interaction and it is a poor simulacrum of what humans are designed to do.
Moreover, spirituality, which was a key feature of human life since before recorded history has been replaced by the cult of “science”; the same science that brought us the machines that are killing humanity. We are entering an era that Asimov predicted. It is not a coincidence that Zuckerberg looks like a robot and a useless egomaniac like Elon Musk is a cultural hero.
The revolution, should it occur, will really be more one of humans fighting back against the robot masters that are seeking to stomp out the human soul, more so than wealthy elites versus the commoners. It’s just that the wealthy happen to be the same as the technocracy.
Thanks for the reply.
To: “We are entering an era that Asimov predicted”
I once hoped, that sci-fi in films, movies and tv-series would enrich the thoughts of the peple in great quality and quantity. But most people are not even interested in the theme how our future might look like. Or what kind of future we, as multiple societies in an big World like ours, should strife for.
And to make it even worse, most people do not even think of sci-fi as the illustration, as warning or positive example, of what might be.
It has become just stories. People do not understand the difference between sci-fi or fantasy. One example: Fantasy stories can take place in a futuristic setting, like star wars. And star wars is saying this right in the beginning: “A long time ago, in a Galaxy far far away….” Saying clearly that it is a faerie tale, like the stories Brothers Grimm sampled. I allways ask everyone and allways everybody thinks star wars is sci-fi.
And watch the 7th to 9th part of the star wars movies. Does a story worthy of a faerie tale of the Brothers Grimm, which star wars clearly achieved, look like that? So even the people who make stories and live of that trade do no longer understand it.
Some people do not even comprehend this simple facts. What can we expect from them?
(Dear mr Lukas, I am crying with you, I believe to have understood what messages you are telling with your movies. True stories of right and wrong, high morale and what evil is motivated by. Like it is in the tradition of german faerie tales. It is a timeless ingenious work of art. Your critics do you wrong!)
What I fear is that the masses are so massively brainwashed, that they will follow and persue every command by the righteousness of the leaders, that are so popular, that they can never be wrong. If I am thinking of China under Mao and the cultural revolution, which was only 56 years ago, it gives me the creeps. In the last two years, here in Germany, I have seen how fast the thin shell of civilized behavior can be broken.
“Well, best to fear for worst and hope for the best, but what ever happens, try to be prepared!” my grandfather ones told me. More than that and trying to help the people around me to educate themselves I can not do.
We will see.
Also, Huxley wouldn’t be the least surprised where we are now, Brave New World, etc. How did he know? If one objectively reads history and studies the experiences of one’s own life, it becomes clear that people remain unchanged since the beginning. Same demons. Sames angels. So what would happen with more advanced technology? What would we do? Same as what we have always been driven to do; that’s the good and the bad. Modern tech was going to create a utopia because the demons behind it sold it on that and starry eyed believers waned to believe. hardly no one wanted to think about what our demons would do with it. And it’s the demons that seek power and control over others. Always. The few who understood that knew that the tech era was going to be very dangerous. There is a story I need to tell one of these days about what you’d now recognize as DARPA and this human programming effort that began when PCs and the internet was brand new. The pursuit of mass brainwashing by the government, using new tech, was a thing before anyone knew it was a thing and while everyone still happily believed the internet was going to bring us together in one harmonious world.
No, Huxley would not be surprised at all.
As far as I know, He wrote the book for others to see, what some people of “higher social status”, found acceptable to do to other people, which ment the people of “lesser social status”. The history of his brother is a key to Huxley’s motivation to write the book. And now the WEF wants us to be happy by the year 2030. “You will own nothing and you will be happy!”
How do they want to achieve that I sell my house and my belongings? And by making me give away what I love on this earth, they want to make me happy?
Does that sound like something that would make anyone happy?
To me it sounds pretty demonic: We will take everything away you have and then we will MAKE you happy!
I suddenly must think about Frank Herbert and the Dune Universe. In the backstory, thousands of years before the time of Paul Atreides, some humans seized control about all technological advanced machinery via ultra fast internet like worldwide connection. Everyone else was a slave. How did Herbert got that Idea? And, or who got the Idea from him?
The Internet, smartphones, personal computers and apps are just tools. These tools are missused to get data of everyone using this devices and programs. That comes at the cost of any anonymity for the average person. So it allready is nightmare. But also the solution, because used as the tools they are and not for spending time for doing nonsense with them, they improve live immensly. We just need to care for these technologies and stop the monopolising. What happend to Standart Oil of Rockefeller should be considered for the tech giants. That would be a big step to more democratic conditions.
And then a lot of people need to relearn that they can not be married to a smart phone, real life means real people and real fun. Not just funny videos.
Or, in another manner of speaking . . .
“Liberalism is the mental condition that allows one to call for the invasion, occupation and colonisation of a defenceless country on the opposite side of the earth, the mass murder of the husbands, sons, brothers and fathers of the women there, the destruction of their cities, and the looting of their resources, in the name of freeing those women to lie naked on the beach.”
– Me.
Great overview. Worth people sending to normies.
As Harari told the WEF, most people are no longer needed and are useless eaters. The ruling class is stuck keeping them entertained with games and porn. So there is that.
In a way, I see guns and the NRA as part of the problem too. When I was a kid, people were apathetic to the Vietnam War unless their kids was over there but at least they would get involved with the local schools if they thought something bad was going on.
Since guns went from a tool to the only thing you needed to be free in the 70s, men on our side of the divide quit caring about the march through the institutions (not that they really cared all that much to begin with. They just wanted to be left alone). Why care about losing all your freedoms as long as the 2nd is strong? You are safe with a gun. You can simply warn the left that they better not push you any further or they will be sorry. Then you go out and buy guns and ammo. When the left advances again you repeat that process and they forward march unimpeded.
Now normal people are waking up but I suspect it is too late. Wanting to win and destroy your enemy trumps wanting to be left alone and grill.
Before the globalists can be defeated we really need a cultural revolution that arrives in time.
The plebs never overthrew Rome, either, but they were happy to have the barbarians running things once they took over. The invaders taxed them less and treated them like equals.
Larry, it is well-known that close to death related events, e.g. starvation level of hunger, make people revolt, historically. In some cases, the uprisings are a consequence of dire conditions, but in others is partial or fabricated. However, uprisings are usually stolen by the most ruthless groups in the society, who eventually reach power thereafter. Regardless, just a revision of all past self called “revolutions” and you will see the results, e.g. French “revolution” ended up, eventually with Napoleon, Iran “revolution” ended up with Ayatollas, Cuba “revolution” with communism directly run by the Castros. etc.
The inflation is the highest in 40 years but it is probably higher than that since 40 years ago the way to calculated was conveniently changed. Still, where are protests in the streets about it?. During Carter’s dire years, with inflation and queuing for gas, where were the protests that changed the leadership?. Do not expect uprisings or revolts due to the current events, unless they are manipulated, like the BLM.
The pain will not become unendurable until December. That’s when I expect things to start changing on the ground. UK and Germany already are suffering and it is going to get worse.
THANK YOU, Larry. As Caitlin Johnstone written:
“ The true left emphasizes the interests of marginalized communities with the goal of class solidarity. The fake left emphasizes the interests of marginalized communities with the goal of class division. You can sort out which is which by simple naked eye observation over time.”
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/they-demolished-the-left-and-burned?r=emvrd&utm_medium=ios
Great article Helmholtz, I always wonder if the majority of the people actually believe all the absurd propaganda you mentioned or if the propaganda machine and state control is so overwhelming in our time that they can give the impression of consensus even with minimum popular support.
The essence of revolution is centralized power. Engels knew this early, and reminded us of it for years. There is nothing more centralizing than a revolution. Every revolution in history has moved towards the centralization of power, including the American Revolution.
Revolutions mean the centralization of power. Until conservatives figure this out, they are not going to understand what is going on, and what has been going on for the past 500 years. Revolutions centralize power. In order to fight centralized power militarily, you must centralize power, and this only leads to a shift of loyalty to a new group of centralists.
You don’t need a revolution to escape the system. You need secession. You need a withdrawal of support for the existing systems. You need to revoke the legitimacy which you extended to these organizations. You need to do it, and everybody else needs to do it. Nobody organizes this. People just learn, scandal by scandal, bureaucratic snafu by bureaucratic snafu, that the system is irreparable. It cannot be reformed. It must not be captured. It must be de-funded. The secret of liberty is not revolution; the secret of liberty is to de-fund the existing centralized order.
https://www.garynorth.com/public/12619.cfm
Gary North:
There’s No Political Freedom Without Economic Freedom
If the victims cannot recognize tyranny when they are taxed by it, then they are blind indeed. They need additional experience with tyranny. They will get it.
The Bible is clear: When the central government collects as much in taxes as God demands in the form of a tithe — 10% — the nation has moved into tyranny.
colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775.
the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% of national income. It may have been as high as 2.5% in the southern colonies.
as a result of the American Revolution, the tax burden tripled.
The debt burden soared as soon as the Revolution began. Monetary inflation wiped out the currency system. Price controls in 1777 produced the debacle of Valley Forge.
It’s not economic freedom to steal 10% of people’s revenues for YOUR superstitions. It’s nothing more than another form of tiranny.
Humanist by abolishing Christian God did not abolished god, they just substituted Christian God with another kind of god.
Man has taken the place of God.( Parliament,Congress, Supreme court,) –Vox Populi, Vox Dei (Latin, ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’)
tithe: [noun] a tenth part of something paid as a voluntary contribution.
You do not want to give voluntary to the real God than you are going to give to the false god– Caesar and similar.
Leonard E. Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946, used to say that Americans live in a country in which various levels of government extract over 40% of their productivity, yet they call this system freedom.
“They don’t know the difference between freedom and coercion.”
Huh?? Tithes have been mandatory almost always and everywhere they have been implemented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe
“Once upon a time, the left agreed that the rich should be overthrown, workers get more and that wars were usually bad. Now they argue about pronouns and which toilet stall to use while the rich become super-rich, the little guy is pushed to the edge and wars are everywhere. This is no small change. The more differences that can be created between individuals, the less chance there is that the people will unite.”
Well, saying that it’s bad that there are rich people and they should be dispossesed by force of what they have (money, power, whether obtained legally or ilegally) is not “creating differences between individuals and eliminating the less chance there is that the people will unite”?
And it’s nothing new. The left has been doing it from the beginning.
Even the 1789 revolution you praise gave birth to a left-wing government much more authoritarian and genocidal than the one they overthrew.
Such division-creating, hate-spreading tactics are the left’s usual tactics for reaching the power. What has changed now is that before, they directed the populache to hate only the rich, now the hate is also directed to the men, the white people, the heterosexuals, the Christians, … They can’t help but divide people into “oppressed” and “oppressors” and mark the suppossed oppressors as the enemy of the people that must be eliminated or devoid of any power or right. It seems that, since there aren’t so much poor people in democratic right-wing countries now, they must create new enemies apart from the rich/capitalists.
As for the rest of the article, I totally agree with it. I would only add that, apart from the widespread propaganda, another reason for people not revolting su much as before is that the difference in lethality between the police/military and the populache is now much bigger (specially outside the US). That’s why people in Venezuela, Cuba, etc. don’t massively revolt. It would be a sure death. Nowadays, only revolutions with the support, or at least indiference, of the army can succeed.
Revolutions are usually made by so called elites. In pre revolutionary France, for example, the state lost the support of the middle class partly as a result of high taxes to pay for supporting the US in 1776 and the nobility had much less of a political stake in the regime than their equivalents in England, for example.
Popular unhappiness without elite support typically leads to riots or protests but not revolutions. Think the Chartists or the more recent Yellow Vests in France.
The issue right now is that the so-called elites are all doing very well economically and are effectively using woke ideology to distract attention from their accumulation of excessive wealth. Public sector elites are then insulated from the coming inflation by index linked pensions.
Genuine change needs a significant portion of the elites to become disgruntled with the system. Unfortunately, I see no sign of that. It would require a collapse of financial capitalism to enable that. Governments will do everything they can to massage the economy to support the elites while saying that they are doing the opposite.
That and: Anything but the truth if that truth means the end of comfort.
People want, desperately, to believe the comfortable lie.
Yes, but its the best time to be alive:-)
WOW!
All I need to say,…
L.
Sir,
Your essay asks the question: ‘why do my neighbors believe lies?’ Well, why do any human beings find any argument true or false? The answer, is, I believe, because it satisfies some desire. Progressivism, for instance, is seductive to the ‘elite’ because it gives a justification for them to rule. In a government for and by the people, why should there be an elite at all? Because they [claim to] know what is truly best for the people (even when the people themselves disagree). “OUR democracy.” The people around us aspire to be in the elite, or, falsely believe the elite will give them free things. Wokeism, which is merely an outgrowth of Progressivism tells the elite that they can still be monstrously wealthy and selfish, but, they are nevertheless good people because they have the right opinions about race and sex.
As others have said, however, what happens when the elite argument can no longer reasonably satisfy the desires of large swaths of the population? What happens when we are repeatedly humiliated abroad by the people our regime claims are evil? When the rest of the world meets us with contempt, and then, open mockery? What happens when the economy collapses and no free things can be expected? No more positions of status and wealth? The propaganda regime they’ve established certainly is menacing, but lies do not fill stomachs or salve pride. The regime will fall, that is self-evident. The only questions left are the timetables, and how ugly things get as it thrashes about trying to survive.