by T.P. Wilkinson / November 28th, 2020
The Great Reset Hymn
I have heard a lot of discussion about when the war will end that began in April 2020.
Yes, war. I have spent the better part of the past ten months trying to determine what the best attitude or approach to the current unpleasantness ought to be taken.
A tension has been created over the course of the year between those who think about what has been happening and those who do not. I have alluded to this tension in previous articles. Meanwhile there are a few others who seem to have grasped not only the urgency but the necessity of appropriate language for the current situation.
As I argued in February, we are not faced with a health issue and never have been. The People’s Republic of China was faced with a health issue and acted accordingly. This is not the place to discuss that history. However, at no time from December 2019 to the present has any national or international authority in the West ever been in the least interested in health and well-being of the inhabitants of the planet or those particular political entities that comprise the Anglo-American Empire and its suzerain states.
In a recent conversation with my music teacher I remarked that I was never very good at memorising anything. In previous articles I have alluded to this quality. Hence my entire intellectual development could be said to have been devoted to observation and the construction of relationships. For relationships to make sense one has to have an appropriate perspective or context. One way to see this is as a kind of pyramid or hierarchy, as metaphor an explanatory regress. The point is to construct a sufficiently broad view of events so as to organise the observations as intelligible relationships.
One day several years ago I visited the battlefield of Waterloo, a tiny place in Belgium not far from Brussels. There the visitor will find an artificial hill topped by a bronze lion, symbolising the forces of the British Empire and its allies who defeated Napoleon’s armies there. Atop this hill, a kind of observation post, there were plates depicting more or less the topography of that battle. By chance while I was there I overheard a conversation by two British NATO officers in mufti discussing the battlefield. Of course, when the battle was being fought there was no such hill and hence no such perspective. One officer said to the other, look at that small space and imagine. First the artillery fires across that field. Then the cavalry charges. Hundreds of horses churn up the earth. Then the infantry in line has to try to advance through all these mud and holes, marching in formation, trying to reach the range from which to fire on the French lines. The conversation continued in a technical fashion which I certainly found informative. But the point here is that from the top of the Waterloo monument one could contemplate the entirety of practical, tactical and strategic difficulties of two massed 18th/early 19th century armies battling in a space comparable to the Champs de Mars in Paris or the Mall in Washington or Green Park in London. Thousands of soldiers could barely see in front of them — this was before the introduction of smokeless powder — trying to maintain the infantry line which constituted massed firepower in the age before the machine gun.
From the top of the hill nearly two centuries later, it was easy to adopt a perspective that would explain many details of the battle as well as the problems each belligerent had to confront. In 2020 it takes some concentration and perhaps audacity to find a “hill” from which to see what has been happening and where the fronts are. It takes no imagination if one has studied the plans and the operations of the belligerent — the aggressor — to see what has been done so far. It takes only a bit more work and analysis to determine what the probable tactical objectives of the aggressor are — his strategic objectives are a matter of record.
In the course of the 20th century a kind of “rule of thumb” has become established in strategic circles that says essentially, the destruction, displacement or demobilisation of about 20% of a country’s population is sufficient to subjugate the country as a whole. I seem to recall this point being made while Ronald Reagan was presiding over the subjugation of Central America in the face of democratic movements in Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. At the official conclusion of those undeclared and illegal wars fought covertly through US proxies in the respective countries, 20% of Guatemaltecans and Salvadorans were either dead or in exile — many of whom comprising part of the despised migrant labour force north of the Rio Bravo.
If, however, we look back at the period from 1936 until 1945, we find that conservative figures record a 20% loss of population in both the Soviet Union and China as a result of combined Allied aggression. Unlike some sentimentalists I do not believe it appropriate to treat dictatorships that were heavily funded by the Anglo-American Empire (whether residing in Rome or Berlin) as hostile to it. The relationship between the Japanese Empire and the American Empire was comparable to that prevailing between Britain and Germany. The details of those relationships have been discussed elsewhere so those who are interested and not dismissive can find them with a bit of effort.
So reviewing the 20th century, roughly from 1912 onward from atop the hill at Waterloo, I find one cannot avoid some conclusions or some forecasts.
After the longest economic crisis of the 19th century in which the greatest gangsters the world had ever known, Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, DuPont (just to name those in the US) had seized unimaginable fortunes, the accumulated and slowly consolidating organisations of labour were educating and mobilising people throughout the empires to demand economic and social justice. The parallel competition among the elite demanded conquest. While competing for empire, all empires were agreed that labour had to be disciplined. Some 4 million dead ought to do the job. Even if in 1914 there was no hill from which to see the Somme, Verdun or Yprés, the spirit of victory was there: victory over the competition and above all victory over the lower classes.
A hundred years later the same vile gangsters, some with other names and more plebeian sartorial tastes, have been faced — no later than 2008 with the same dire problem. Well, in fact, that is the absurd aspect of this war. Unlike in 1912, there is no organised lower class, no organised middle class. In fact, since 1989 class has ceased to mean anything at all except — until air traffic came to a virtual standstill — the section of the aircraft one happened to occupy. For thirty years there has been no opposition to the plutocracy that emerged victorious in 1945.
So what is driving the war by those same “types” against the rest of us? They have managed to organise most of our youth around MTV, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. What more do they want?
However, that is the wrong question. When in New York or some other city dominated by elected and unelected criminals you are cornered at gunpoint, there is no natural limit to what you are expected to surrender. When you are audited by someone from the tax office who has been told, “your retention or promotion depends on bringing home the bacon, without litigation”, there is no limit to what you may have to pay.
When, however, you are dealing with the descendants of those vile aristocrats and monarchists, the power of the feudal system, many of whom continue to resent the revolution of 1789 and its continuation in 1917, then you are also dealing with an equally irrational, rabid pack. When the GDR was annexed and the Soviet Union dismantled, their assets stolen from the citizens to feed vultures, this was not merely gratuitous capitalist enrichment. It was vengeance.
We are not faced with a war — with the attack of the 0.01% just for money and assets. In fact, since they destroyed our public service sectors, plundered our pension systems, and squandered whatever taxes we paid on wars to conquer what they had not yet stolen, they have nonetheless remained unsatisfied.
Why were Louis Capet and his Habsburg spouse Marie Antoinette beheaded? Not because the French would not have a king. Rather because that king refused to be French. Louis XVI refused to accept the end of a regime in which people and countries were dynastic property. He refused to accept the role of citizen rather than owner of people and land in France. For the same reason the somewhat more thorough Russian Revolution abolished the dynasty and not just its paramount member.
The British — all their insincere claims to democracy and constitutional monarchy notwithstanding — and their North American cousins in the Anglo-American Empire never accepted either the French or the Russian Revolutions because they violated their deep feudal convictions. I have omitted the Papacy here for the purpose of brevity. However, what we currently face is the monstrous vindictiveness of the Reaction to 1789 and 1917.
This is not a virus. It is not a pandemic. If we are honest what we face today is a plague borne by the vermin that never accepted the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity — the humanist values that drove ordinary people to overthrow the feudal order in which the Church and nobility owned us.
If you ask them what they learned from history they will surely tell you — just like the WEF — “back then, they owned nothing, and we were happy”.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
