More than twenty years ago I published a study in which I argued that South Africa’s apartheid system was created by mission and land appropriation.¹ This obviously implicated the Christian churches, including those that had claimed to be opposed to the British policy enshrined in the National Party programme when it came to power in 1947. This study received one review which confirmed the experience I had defending it as a dissertation—namely that my thesis was not understood. The problem was not the clarity or evidence. That was clear from the review and the committee’s reactions. Rather it was a fundamental and paradigmatic issue. Neither the Church nor the land question was taken seriously as central to the policy of apartheid.

In the years following the demise of South Africa’s National Party regime, I watched and waited to see what would happen to the social and economic order that the Anglo-Afrikaner elite had created since the end of the 19th century. As I predicted none of the grand land reform measures, not even those stated in the new constitution or the ANC’s Reconstruction and Development Plan were implemented in more than token ways. One of the reasons for this was the victory of neo-liberalism in 1989 over every other form of economic programme. Another was, and remains, the absence of any social-political-economic praxis aimed at social transformation to counter the neo-liberal paradigm. Finally the nature of the NP’s withdrawal was to surrender form without surrendering power.

Actually my interest in these problems goes back to 1986, when by accident I was on a study trip to Brazil. It was the year after the formal end of the military dictatorship instigated by the US in 1962 and executed in 1964. During that trip I was able to interview numerous people involved in the drafting of a new civilian constitution to replace the Atos Institucionais that had formed the basis of military rule for two decades. It was by coincidence that I found myself in a similar position in 1991 when I arrived in Johannesburg.

All that said: I have been studying social engineering for more than thirty years. In the West—to apply a thoroughly worn and yet useful cliché—the DNA of social engineering is the Latin Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church. Since the 18th century but even more in the 20th century there has been a largely successful effort to conceal the extent to which the Latin Church remains the model for effective conquest. Wishful thinking, mendacity, and propaganda have obscured the mechanisms by which the West’s oldest transnational corporation shaped what is today often called the “globalized world”—a euphemism for the planet’s susceptibility to the central ecclesiastical technology—missionary conquest.

In The Art of War (5 BCE), Chinese general, Sun Tzu, explained, “to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” The method of mission is to break the enemy’s resistance.

Colonialism and imperialism over the past four centuries were not merely the extension of high lethality belligerence and larceny by Western barbarians. Numerically the population of the Western peninsula, aka Europe, was always far too small to fight and conquer the world that came to embody the British and now Anglo-American Empire. In fact, this inability of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and later Belgian forces to conquer and fully occupy all the territories they claimed is often used to explain the failures of imperialism and the ultimate victory ascribed to independence movements after 1945. In today’s comparison between empires supposed to have waned or atrophied, like the British or French, and the imperial quality ascribed to the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, invidious and fallacious distinctions are made. The persistence of the multi-ethnic quality of both great continental states is treated as evidence that they are imperial in nature—for which they are regularly condemned in popular and scholarly venues. These states whose alleged empires comprise immediately contiguous territory in which culture and populations have integrated over centuries are compared with the occupation of India, Africa, Indonesia and the Americas by small tribal kingdoms, like Spain, Portugal, France or the Netherlands, Belgium or Great Britain. These kingdoms and republics have supposedly withdrawn to their core principalities and liberated once subjugated peoples. Thus these states, which now constitute the EU, the Commonwealth and the USA, have attained the moral status entitling them to condemn other states for sins they committed and meanwhile allege to have confessed.

This is the general political context in which the empire of the West constitutes itself as the “international community” and the promulgator of “rules”. Those who are not part of this “community” are obliged to follow. Certainly there is a tiny, barely audible voice in that community that tries to assert the primacy of international law or the Law of Nations, as it was once known. Both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China make every effort to remind the world that the Law of Nations, as opposed to the “rules-based” order is the genuine foundation of human civilization and commerce between states.

There are several clear reasons why these efforts have failed to date. First, the historic balance of political-economic forces, including military, had remained for the better part of the 20th century and into the 21st century in the hands of the barbarian West. (For readers who may wonder why I consistently use the term “barbarian”, let me say that it has been these countries, the collective West, that have constituted the most warlike and destructive forces on the planet for the past five hundred years, including the only state to have deployed atomic weapons.) Second, the control of nearly two thirds of the world’s land mass and the inhabitants of those areas has magnified the impact of the barbarian tribes reinforced by naval and air power developed to dominate those territories. This has had the effect of isolating the two huge Asian nations of Russia and China. Third, and probably most importantly, the West developed the most powerful psychic technology for conquest of hearts and minds throughout the planet. This technology is cultural, proprietary and, above all, religious.

It is on this last aspect of Western barbarism that I will focus.

The Latin Church bequeathed to its semi-secular partners in conquest the technology of mission. Previously religion was based either on geography or ethnicity. There were no universal gods and monotheism was a rarity at best. Sigmund Freud offered an explanation for the latter in a late and brief essay called Moses and Monotheism (1939). However, it is not his thesis that concerns me here. In the course of recorded history, to the extent we can rely on it, deities were confined to places and peoples. Travellers, even armies, brought their religions with them while paying due respect even homage to the deities they met on their travels and campaigns. Of course, what this meant was that the sacred places of others were generally treated respectfully even if they did not coincide with one’s own religious worship. When people moved they either brought their own deities or adopted the ones they found in their new homes.

The establishment of cults based on a universal deity was the product of global imperial expansion. However, it first only supported the imperial conquerors by granting that the local god now was free to accompany the soldiers of a marauding army far from its own cultural and ethnic community. The next stage of development was for the universal deity to be adopted by soldiers recruited from territories that had been invaded and conquered. This left the peoples dominated by military conquest possessed of their local and ethnic deities while integrating the foreign troops into an ideologically (religiously) uniform command structure.

When the Latin Church was founded by what was essentially a coup against Hellenistic Christianity based in the Balkans, Black Sea basin and Asia Minor, monotheism acquired a virulence inconsistent with what we know about original Christian praxis and aggressiveness which arguably triggered the militancy of Islam, too. That virulence and aggressiveness was disproportionate to the numbers actually following the Latin deviation. Yet within less than a thousand years this Christian deviation led to the global dominance of the business corporation and the missionary propaganda technology as means of psychological conquest independent of territorial occupation.

How does mission really work?

If one reads any of the standard histories describing the expansion of Christianity in the Western peninsula of Eurasia, the Americas or Africa, great attention is given to the preachers of the Gospel. In some narratives they travelled alone preaching; i.e., orally transmitting—from Scripture and working miracles; i.e., performing acts deemed supernatural or divinely supported. Then there were the preachers accompanying invading armies who not only preached to the soldiers but also construed the results of battle either as divine victories or punishing defeats. Hagiography, the stories of saints, is replete with accounts of wonders that led to conversion of princes and nations to the Holy Church. The precise mechanics of these conversions is generally omitted because it is expected that the readers already accept the divine attributes of the Church and the will of god to increase his flock.

However, the core of the technology of conversion is already recognisable in the myth of Christ, itself. In fact, the true intent of this myth has been marvellously characterised by Jose Saramago in his scandalous novel The Gospel according to Jesus Christ (1991). In a dialogue between the god in question and Jesus of Nazareth, Saramago recounts how this god, aware of all the other competing gods and determined to be the top god, needs people to fight for him against the other gods. He explains to Jesus that people would not fight just for a god—but they would fight for him. Jesus is furious at this revelation and refuses to participate in the god’s plan for domination. The god replies that Jesus is powerless to resist. He can refuse to perform miracles but he will be unable to prove that he did not perform the miracles god stages.

Saramago uses this fable or interpretation of the Gospel to explain the dynamics of “victimhood”. The god sets up Jesus as an ordinary man who suddenly can perform miracles, which draw a following. Then he creates the conditions by which Jesus is persecuted and killed by the State. This galvanizes the cult around Jesus the miracle-worker. The cult angered by the murder of its divine leader seeks revenge. This it can only do by the threat of, or use of, armed force. To exact revenge it must align with those who have the necessary force and win them over to the cult. As members of the vengeful cult they are now in a position to exact revenge or alternatively conversion to the cult. It is this basic materialistic contradiction that fuels the cult’s expansion.

As a rule, and this can be found throughout the missionary activity of Western churches (the Latin Church and its reformed derivatives), local cults and their deities are not easily abandoned. First of all, under the conditions of ethnic or geographic religion there is no reason for an established ethnic group or the traditional inhabitants of a region to “change gods.” Sedentary peoples who remain together as tribes or occupy agricultural and pastoral regions for centuries do not “evolve” their religious beliefs into monotheism. This notion of monotheism as an evolutionary product is part of the 19th century myth of progress many associate with Charles Darwin and sociological followers of his historical interpretations.

As said before military expansion or nomadic barbarism are the social formations from which monotheism emerges as soon as territorial and population conquest require.

The expanding Latin Church overcame this inertia by the refinement of the “victimhood” and its transformation into a method of psychological warfare. The invading Church, let us call it the Church militant, sought and isolated minorities in the targets of conquest. These minorities had little or no power in the communities to which they were attached. Thus they were amenable to preaching—if for no other reason than the allied power to which they were then joined. The adoption of the cult by these minorities endowed them with “purity” compared to the complex majority communities with their geographic and ethnic deities, now viewed as corrupted and sullied by mundane practices. The pure status insinuated virtues proclaimed to be absent among the majority. Naturally in any established community there are various sources of discontent. No system functions perfectly. The longer any system has been in place the more incoherence is certain to have appeared. Hence the first tactic of the new “pure” is to find and recruit the discontented among the majority. It is not necessary that these discontents join the cult of the pure. In fact, it may be detrimental to the overall strategy if they do.

What is important is the capacity of the discontents to be sacrificed for purity. They must be sufficiently dissatisfied that they will act in concert with the pure, wittingly or unwittingly. Here a number of options are possible but to keep it simple we will stick to the “Jesus model”. The potential “Jesus” has to be perceived as a member of the community as a whole. Then he has to articulate grievances that all but the most hard-core defenders of the status quo will admit—even if this admission has no immediate consequences. Then this “Jesus” has to be sacrificed. That means the “Jesus” has to conspicuously suffer and perhaps even die at the hands of the supporters of the status quo. This does not by itself trigger a revolt or overthrow of the prevailing system. In fact, that is not the aim of this strategy. Instead it creates a breach in the perceived legitimization of the extant religion. That breach arises from the fear that the insignificant “Jesus” becomes more than exemplary of the threat to everyone else who harbours the doubts or critiques for which this “Jesus” was persecuted. A latent choice is introduced into an inertial system: align with the pure or risk punishment.

It is important to say that this only works when the pure already enjoy a preponderance of force, even if that force has not yet been applied. Therein lies the difference between missionary conversion and revolutionary mobilisation. For example, it is also the fundamental difference between Maoism and “Sharpism”.

The Christianisation of the western hemisphere and Africa relied on this model. Sometimes this was simplified by the mass extermination of Western barbarian conquest, like in the Americas. Another argument used to explain the effect of missionary conquest is that the defeat of the besieged population on the battlefield discredited the extant religion and deities, leaving the survivors to convert to the “winning god”. However, this argument is insufficient to explain conversion where no such massive battlefield annihilation occurred. Nor does it explain the continued success of the “Jesus” model without explicit armed force.

In this brief essay I would like to apply the “victimhood” or “Jesus” model and by implication its 20th century adaptation in the wake of the “second thirty years war” that was interrupted in 1945.² For more than 30 years—to keep it simple starting in 1989—the world has been subject to an accelerated conversion or social engineering process, euphemistically called “globalisation”. The acceleration or metastasis was made possible by the defeat of the Soviet Union. Every history book one can find today will recount that the Soviet Union failed due to what might be called the errors of its underlying religion; i.e., Marxism-Leninism. Those with less antagonism toward that body of theory will argue that the Soviet Union was bankrupted into collapse. Then ridiculously sentimental will say that “communism failed because even communists realised it was wrong”.

An objective examination of the economic conditions of the two superpowers in 1989 would demonstrate that the Soviet Union did not collapse because it was bankrupt and its economy no longer able to function. The Soviet Union and its antagonist the United States were both in demonstrably ruinous economic condition. In fact, the economic condition of the US never improved after 1989—only the FIRE sector did.³ Moreover there was no military defeat of the Soviet Union. The war started under President Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan was far shorter (for the Russians) than the thirty some years that the US waged war throughout Indochina. The Soviet Union had none of the debt the US accumulated carpet-bombing and murdering millions in Korea between 1950-53.

Three factors led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first was the accumulated damage done by a century of economic and armed war against the country. US “experts” like George Kennan wrote accurately that it would take the Soviet Union at least twenty years to recover the lost population and economic capacity destroyed by the West’s German-led war against it.⁴ That was with all things being equal—which they were not. Despite the non-stop war against the Soviet Union the country was able to reach nearly its full pre-war capacity by the mid-1960s. Scarcely a common source in the West explains that the occupation of Europe east of the rivers Elbe and Danube was conceded by the West to the Soviet Union in Yalta as an alternative to reparations from Germany. To the extent this is mentioned at all the excuse given was to prevent a situation arising like the one when the West drained Germany like a vampire after the 1918 armistice. The conditions at the end of World War 2 were quite different. Namely, the Western “allies”, mainly the Americans, had encouraged the destruction or theft of every useful capital asset in what became the Soviet zone of occupation and the transfer of anything of future economic value to the West.

The subsequent, at first secret, re-arming of Germany under command of American and Nazi general officers and continued brain drain led to the erection of the fortified border between the Soviet zone and the rest of the Western peninsula. Thus the Soviet Union had to fortify and subsidize the countries ruined by the Wehrmacht campaigns while trying to reconstruct its own economy and restore the 20 million plus killed during World War 2. While the Soviet Union was working to recover a relatively weak status quo ante, the United States was able to expand its markets and power over the rest of the globe. Thus from 1945 until 1989 the United States economy was fuelled by the elimination of every other meaningful competitor whether it was for sales or purchases. It is worth noting—given the recent release of an atomic bomb hagiography called Oppenheimer—that this weapon was devised under the leadership of rabid anti-communists/anti-Soviets for use in wiping the Soviet Union off the face of the Earth after it was clear that the Wehrmacht had failed. At no time during World War 2 was Anglo-American aerial bombardment directed to support the Soviet Union’s self-defence. It was explicitly waged to destroy economic competitors to the British and American Empires.

The third factor was the missionary strategy. I have always found it bitterly amusing when Americans or the natives of the Western peninsula complain about Soviet (or Chinese) propaganda. The first thing I ask them is how much Russian or Chinese they have learned? Then I ask if they can name a Russian or Chinese pop musician or film star or what Chinese or Russian clothing items they most prefer? The only food and drink they can associate with Russia are vodka and caviar. How effective could their propaganda be?

Coca Cola and Pepsi (thanks to negotiations by Richard Nixon on behalf of his friends) are known throughout the world and were imported or bottled in the Soviet Union. Denim trousers (Levis) were coveted goods from Magdeburg to Vladivostok. Despite technical countermeasures there was little that could be done to suppress the vast global propaganda machine combining films, music, and consumer goods of every kind. This all served to amplify the ideology of consumerism as a pure form of economic and social well being. This pure form—available only to the “middle class” countries on any scale—was presented and seen everywhere as the virtue which a struggling economy and political system was expected to produce for young people. There was no question of converting the heroes of the Soviet Union, the survivors of the civil war and non-stop foreign invasions since 1918.

However, the young, the desperately needed replacements to rebuild the Soviet Union, could not simply be inculcated in the moral sacrifices of their parents and grandparents. There had to be space and a future for these people. The capacity to compete for the hearts and minds of the generations that by 1989 had no immediate recollection of the Great Patriotic War was not only challenged within the Soviet Union but throughout the countries it had occupied since 1945. These countries, especially the GDR, Hungary and Poland, were able to benefit from overt and covert support from the West. Moreover there had been an intensive and to date still largely unacknowledged level of penetration and sabotage under the guise of technology transfer agreements that in the final years weakened the system considerably. Defective control technology for industrial infrastructure led to serious destruction of pipelines.⁵ It takes no fantasy to imagine that intentionally defective control components—merely improperly calibrated meters would have done the trick—led to the Chernobyl meltdown.

The Helsinki Accords (1975), still considered naively as an important step toward peace, were a major propaganda victory for the West. Despite the creation of NGOs in the West, the only governments consistently subjected to its conditions were those in the “Soviet bloc”. By treating the conflict between the US and the USSR as competition when, in fact, it was covert aggression by the United States, every international treaty presented the US as the generous human rights and peace defender and the Soviet Union as conceding its power both domestically and abroad. To this day there is no general admission in the West that no later than 1945, it was the US that waged non-stop war against the Soviet Union, making all these treaties essentially acts of extortion against the country and its people all of whom were aware of the US first strike and second strike atomic warfare strategy and what it would mean for any reconstruction and development.

By the time a wholly compromised Mikhail Gorbachev gave his country to the US raiders under Yeltsin, the moral legitimacy of the Soviet Union had been so seriously undermined that no party or military effort could rescue it from the locust swarms that devastated the country after 1990. With the borders open, the government in disgrace, and the youth able to join what they thought would be the saving purity of the cult held back for seventy years, the potential for converts was enormous. The cost was immeasurable. Only with the election of Vladimir Putin did the bleeding stop.

The conversion of the Soviet Union into the neo-liberal Russian Federation was made possible not by some catastrophic failure of Marxism – Leninism or even the inadequacy of the CPSU government. It was accomplished by 44 continuous years of covert war against a country struggling to recover from the previous decades of war waged against it. It may be added that Russia has always had a conflict between its Russian (Slavic Orthodox) and its Francophile/ Anglophile partisans.⁶ The October Revolution did not overcome this contradiction. Before 1917 there were also factions that believed that the Russian economy should rely on Germany, France and Britain for its industrial products and export its raw materials (like any third world country). Lenin’s vision for the October Revolution was to transform Russia into a self-sufficient industrialised nation capable of using its own resources for development. As a result the conflicts in revolutionary Russia were very much like those that persisted in the so-called Third World where leaders like Nkrumah wanted national electrification to make the country capable of producing and exporting aluminium for hard cash instead of just cheap bauxite for peanuts. The Generalplan Ost was not just an expression of Hitler’s attitude toward the Soviet Union but also the West’s plans that had been frustrated by Stalin’s “socialism in one country”, so poorly understood by ultraorthodox Marxists in the West. Altogether then the constant war, covert, diplomatic and economic waged against the Soviet Union, directly and through the Comecon states, combined with the global propaganda campaign directed at the vulnerable youth to undermine the last pillars of an independent Soviet Union. And for the Russian Federation the war is far from over.

The Woke and the Dead

Just as the war against Russia did not end with the destruction of the Soviet Union, the war against humanism, whether liberal or Marxist, has continued.  No one doubts that the end of the Soviet Union also meant that the independence struggles that began in earnest and seemed promising until 1975 were going to be reversed wherever possible. Absent the military or diplomatic challenge from Moscow or Beijing, every liberation movement that was not subdued was forced to reach a neo-liberal compromise to avoid being neutralised. While the US economy was just as much in tatters as that of the Soviet Union, the US could use the IMF, World Bank, and UN (also NATO) to transfer the costs to Rest of World. That was an option always unavailable to Moscow.

However, the unimaginable concentration of wealth that has continued since 1989 would have to consume what was left of the US economy too. The Chinese strategy for accelerated industrialisation using what was essentially a modified treaty port system permitted the Anglo-American financial oligarchy to relocate all its meaningful industrial capacity—whatever had not already been moved to Indonesia or some other client state—to China.⁷ This deindustrialisation—following the British model—left the US with only one industry of any size: weapons systems.⁸ The steady impoverishment of the US since the 1970s has always been concealed behind a wall of credit cards and second mortgages. Thus the illusory American standard of living is maintained by charging the difference between 1973 salaries and 2023 prices. Already by the time the Bush-Clinton dynasty obtained control over the presidency and the electoral machinery to deliver congressional majorities, popular resistance was growing. Initially deceived by the Reagan-Thatcher shell games, the inability to continue debt payments and the rising cost of everything, aggravated by massive privatization in a system already dominated by business corporations, were pushing increasing numbers of conservative, church-going, Americans into opposition to what they identified as the status quo.

This presented a serious problem for the country’s ruling oligarchy. It was the Christian, moral majority that had put Ronald Reagan in the White House. Despite wars initiated by both Bush presidents and Clinton to stir that majority’s patriotic fervour, both the wars’ failures and the fallout in terms of major wealth transfers and obvious corruption were threatening to alienate that core upon which the nation’s owners depend for consent. A revolt in the Republican rank and file, also known as the Tea Party, not only articulated some of this resentment but also led to upsets in the previously comfortable GOP election machinery. Attempts were made to stigmatise the Tea Party as a fanatical right-wing minority. In fact, it looked for a while like some self-appointed Tea Party leaders in the Establishment would perform some rhetorical moves and vent the steam that threatened to dislodge the mainline Republican Party.

This appeared to work until out of the “red,” the New York City real estate mogul, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for the 2016 general elections.⁹  Worst of all, Donald Trump won the election, soundly defeating the anointed successor from the Bush-Clinton gang. It should be remembered this implosion was delayed by the CIA’s invention of Barack Obama as a candidate to defuse all the opposition to George W Bush. Obama had dutifully served/ saved the financial oligarchy when its massive financial derivatives scam collapsed in 2008. Together with Hillary Clinton, Obama kept the US at war for eight years so that the patriotic majority had to swallow its antipathy to the polyester POTUS.

The panic that ensued among the Establishment was clearly not really aimed at Trump, since his personality and ignorance of the bureaucratic system he was entering posed no immediate threat. Rather it was the conservative, populist core that his election empowered which the Establishment had to check. For the better part of a century this majority of the population could be relied upon to support the Establishment in the cause of anti-communism. However, after 1989 this cry was inconsistent with the proclamation that the West had won and communism along with the evil Soviet Union had been destroyed. A new strategy was needed.

Until the Six Day War (1967) not much attention had been paid to Israel and certainly nothing significant to the forced labour, slave labour and mass murder perpetuated in Germany and those territories it had occupied during the Second World War.¹⁰ Obvious reasons included the need to avoid shining the light on perpetrators the US had installed in West Germany or in cushy jobs stateside; the need to focus attention on the evils of the Soviet Union, and more subtly because the massive death toll of the Soviet Union alone would have tarnished the on-going campaigns to destroy it. With the Israel attack of Egypt, a relatively benign public opinion was at risk of turning into outright hostility toward the Euro-Zionist colony under British administration in Palestine that had declared itself the State of Israel in 1948. Israel not only launched surprise attacks but also occupied territory in every direction more than doubling the area under its control.

In the wake of this public relations disaster, a campaign, which became massive in scope and continues to this day, resurrected the stories and history of the Second World War and retold it as the war by Germany to exterminate world Jewry and the centre of this war, “the holocaust” was the mass murder of an estimated six million Jews in concentration camps run by the German Nazi regime. Since the Second World War had been fought to defend Jews from extermination, Israel could not be blamed even for pre-emptive measures since these all served to prevent another “holocaust”. The fact that even were one certain of the numbers of deaths and could be convinced by data, the figure of six million pales in comparison to the twenty plus million killed in the Soviet Union alone and another twenty million that died in China during the war. So without diminishing any deaths whether due to slave labour or mass murder, the re-writing of the history of World War 2 as the prologue to the foundation of Israel required heavy-duty propaganda and convincing political force. All of this was brought to bear. The scope of distortion and outright mendacity needed to establish the state of Israel as the “Victim” par excellence and its Jewish citizens, living and dead, as the ultimate victims, have been treated extensively elsewhere. The point here is that this is probably the greatest example of the “victim” strategy for social engineering since the “Jesus” strategy as deployed by the Latin Church.

The structural analogy I propose is as follows: It is not sufficient that there is a victim. This victim must be chosen; must be the ultimate victim. This victimhood also means that the victim is the embodiment of purity in comparison to which all other victims are imperfect or not victims at all. A veritable hierarchy of victims follows with the chosen victim at the top. This victim is entitled to reverence, even adoration, and the victim’s purity must be defended absolutely. The cult of this victim endows the true believers with the charisma of purity—even if they are not, in fact, pure in any meaningful sense. The cult then reaches into the majority of the impure from which it recruits or implicates those either aspirant to purity or touched by the guilt of the “impure”. Together these two elements when combined with material force, whether political, economic, military or combinations thereof, create a minority of the pure positioned to defend purity and the victimhood even from imputed threats by the majority who are by definition impure or victims of lower status. The aim of this strategy is to subjugate an indigenous majority by creation of a morally pure and hence powerful minority. This minority cannot show the physical force upon which its attack relies without creating a majority reaction that could repel it. The moral-psychological power is expressed through the implication of guilt or sympathy among unorganised members of the majority who in dispersion seek confirmation of their moral position. Thus latent outliers may work to strengthen the minority assault or undermine any emerging consensus to defend the indigenous culture.

This is essentially pre-emptive counter-insurgency. That is why Gene Sharp was so interested in dissecting national liberation movements. He wanted to know how to re-engineer them to oppose mass movements. Before he published his infamous From Dictatorship to Democracy he published a study for the US Department of Defense on how to create popular forces that would effectively combat national liberation struggles by imitating them.¹¹

By 1975 the national liberation movements in all of the countries in the Western Empire had been either subdued or compromised. Their radical leaders, including those in the US, were murdered or driven underground. In their place came the civilian defence organisations Sharp had conceived now in the form of NGOs.¹²  These became the seeds for so-called astro-turf grassroots movements, collectively called “civil society”. Civil society replaced the mass movements with qualified experts able to promote agendas in the system. What that meant, in fact, was that mass politics and struggle were replaced by political management conducted by cadres modelled on Sharp’s understanding of the political commissar. Key positions were filled with the members of movements who could be rewarded after their unfortunate leaders had been eliminated. With time civil society became a career path for academically trained managers in social engineering. The financial support of the oligarchy either directly or through various conduits compounded with access to all the Establishment media outlets, not least of which are the educational institutions, would raise civil society to the supreme force for articulating purity and victimhood. Civil society became the cover for the merger of missionary technology and brute economic, political and military force in a world where the ecclesiastical model had become a vehicle for the popular movements; e.g., in the 80s liberation theology and in the 90s Christian revivalism. The papacy had succeeded in crushing the mass movements’ efforts to use the Church for the liberation struggle.¹³ However, there was no such central force capable of subduing the Protestant denominations. Although Pentecostalism had been very effective in Latin America for neutralising the popular church, the US was a far more complicated terrain than the Catholic countries. ¹⁴ Scandals had decimated the most reliable agents in the Fundamentalist movement already in the late 1980s. ¹⁵

This was the challenge that gave rise to the Fourth Awakening—or Woke, a tasteless appropriation of an expression from Black American dialect meaning “aware”. The term awakening is more appropriate because Woke is really another crusade. Awakenings were the Protestant equivalents of the Catholic Crusades, usually in some way also just as fanatical and bloody as well as profitable for the promoters. ¹⁶ Following the model applied after the Six Day War and working from the basis of Gene Sharp’s NGO-based counter-insurgency strategy, the Establishment through its extensive control over all mass media and educational institutions, accelerated the moral campaign to create a movement of purity and victimhood to be directed against the core working class population of the United States and other middle class countries in the empire. By appropriating the academically modified liberation jargon developed in the university and NGO labs, armed propaganda units like BLM and Antifa could be deployed in ways that thirty years ago would have been prosecuted as communist terrorism. This use of reconstituted liberation jargon was calculated to antagonise the majority as well as trigger reactions which moderately critical or liberal members of the majority would find difficult to defend.

This counter-insurgency campaign is being waged by the civil society cadre organisations and the kind of armed propaganda units conceived in the CIA’s Phoenix Program for Southeast Asia during the wars against Vietnam and subsequent wars in Central America. ¹⁷ The difference is that since the target is the conservative, patriotic majority, the language has to be that of the movements they had been indoctrinated to oppose since 1945. Combined with the very real corporate power behind this “moral minority” or pure (vicarious) victims and the effective use of legislation and police power (or its absence), the Woke Crusade aims to divide the majority of the American population, not only whites since conservative Christianity is foundational among Blacks and Latinos too. The Woke crusade is a carefully synthesised missionary project to completely re-engineer the conditions under which the vast majority of American citizens live in the mistaken (and insincere) belief that this serves social justice. This war against popular majorities is not limited to the United States. It is being waged throughout what was once called Christendom. In fact, that is why it is so effective thus far—it is derived from the modus operandi of the institution upon which all Christendom was based.

• First published at Seek Truth From Facts Foundation

END NOTES

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.