THE PINCER MOVES TOWARDS TOTALITARIANISM

I have been struck this week by Tom Woods’ interview with Michael Malice about Malice’s new book: “The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil”. The book, recently published, describes the story of the Soviet Union and the forces behind totalitarianism. I was quite impacted by the opening chapter, which features the story of Ayn Rand, the famous author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” - https://aynrand.org/novels/the-fountainhead/ , both of which I have recently re-read and are a tour de force. The books highlight the importance of the individual standing against collectivist thinking. The interview done by Tom Woods with Michael Malice is illuminating, and following the interview, I have been reading Malice’s book this week.

Ayn Rand (née Alice Rosenbaum) grew up in the early days of the Soviet Union, but by 1926 (when she was 20), she and her family could see the direction of travel of the Soviet regime and were able to get her to the U.S. when there was a rare period of Soviet citizens being able to travel abroad. Alice arrived in the U.S., changed her name to Ayn Rand and became involved in the fledgling Hollywood film industry. She wrote her famous novel “The Fountainhead”, to which she sold the film rights just after WWII for close to $1m in today’s currency. She had witnessed the impact of totalitarianism, but most of the academics and intellectuals in the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s were pro-Communist.  The Soviet Union was idealized as a workers’ paradise where all were equal. At the start of his book, Malice quotes from Rand’s testimony to the U.S. House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947.

The HUAC became active after WWII, when it was realised there had been extensive communist infiltration into the U.S. government. This was outlined in detail in Whittaker Chambers's celebrated 1952 book “Witness”, which every student of history and freedom should read. Chambers, a former committed communist himself, writes about the key Soviet Union agents who made their way to the top of the U.S. government – notably Alger Hiss. Hiss was a Soviet secret agent who became a top State Department official who was prominent in the Yalta talks involving Churchill, Roosevelt and Churchill and also played a key role in establishment of the United Nations. Modern historians regard the HUAC as a modern “witchhunt” but Chambers' book clearly establishes the extent of the influence and infiltration of the Soviet Union within the U.S. government.

Ayn Rand attempted to wake people up in the U.S. and in her 1947 testimony to the HUAC, she answered a question from a congressman, who had enquired if anyone in the Soviet Union smiled. Rand said – “Well if you ask me literally – pretty much no”. She then went on to try to paint a picture of life in the Soviet Union:

“Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning until night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind.”

Malice told a joke that did the rounds in the Soviet Union at that time. It was said that if you received a knock on your door during the night and it was a neighbour telling you that the house was burning down, it came as a relief because at least you knew you weren’t going to be taken away and shot.

Of course, Ayn Rand’s description of life under totalitarianism is still compelling because it is not an isolated event in history. Being in constant terror equally applied to the situation in Nazi Germany, all the former Soviet-bloc countries, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, China, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. In fact, freedom may be an idea that runs against the grain of human history.

With this historical background,  it may explain my concern that most people have returned (in their thinking) to apparently “normal” lives, despite experiencing the COVID-19 lockdowns and forced experimental injections, which have killed millions. Governments have done such a remarkable job of propaganda that rather than outrage, most people are grateful to the government for “saving them”.  

It seems that the majority of people regard the extraordinary pandemic period from 2020 to 2022 as a blip on the radar screen of no particular significance. However, to me, it is evident that we are being herded like animals towards a totalitarian fate, where our freedoms will be taken away and Big Brother will be watching and controlling our every move. Grasping our smartphones, we seem to be content being shepherded towards this future in a pincer movement orchestrated by the New World Order. Of course, this sounds paranoid but I offer some convincing evidence below:

1. The increasing influence of immensely wealthy non-profit groups, such as the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations in influencing government decisions to take draconian actions such as mandating vaccines and locking down populations. The sinister nature of tax-exempt foundations in the US was highlighted in the 1950s by the Reece Committee -https://www.winterwatch.net/2021/11/1954-reece-report-showed-foundations-funded-collectivist-capture-of-us-education/. Many left-wing foundations have been influential in education, health care and elections but have also played a role in pushing the West towards war, outlined by Norman Dodd.  Rene. A Wormser published a detailed analysis of the impact of various US tax-exempt foundations in the book: “Foundations; Their Power and Influence” (1958, The Devin-Adair Company, New York), which is difficult to obtain but worthwhile reading. The situation is much worse today with the large foundations influential in every area of life and promoting public-private partnerships and environmental-social-governance (ESG) frameworks – essentially the woke agenda.

2. The impact of Big Tech in censoring what can be posted on the internet. It is clear from the Twitter files that there has been active collusion between Big Tech and governments to promote a government narrative and to skew various algorithms so that viewpoints deemed to be misinformation are excluded. Mainstream media or what is called by some, the Legacy Media, also has been purloined by government, evident in the billions of dollars spent by governments on advertising and promoting government views during the pandemic.

3. Big Media is virtually all media and just a few corporations now control all the television networks and newspapers. James Corbett has a wonderful course on the history of mass media. Increasingly it is challenging to find independent analysis of news and most news has an extreme left-wing bias. Notably, this was recognized by Roger Ailes, the bête noir of the left. As the boss of Fox News, his appeal to at least half of America brought enormous revenues and profits for Rupert Murdoch over the last 25 years.

4. Big Pharma has gained control of the regulatory process in determining drug safety, by providing the majority of funds for government audits. This has happened slowly and nothing has been said about the conflict of interest that makes all government evaluation processes, now suspect. Furthermore, Big Pharma buys billions of dollars in advertising on the mainstream media which is most evident when watching US television. Big Pharma also is very influential in political lobbying and it is possible to understand their influence when examining the silence in the mainstream media about the negative impacts on health of the experimental COVID vaccines.

5. Government “Emergency Legislation” enacted some years before the “pandemic”  which allows draconian powers without normal appeal processes. This was seen throughout the world but was at its worst in New Zealand and various Australian states. People were arrested for walking in parks and for protesting. In the Australian state of Victoria a mother was handcuffed arrested in her pyjamas merely for organizing a facebook group protest. Emergency legislation can be enacted with little or no oversight and eliminates normal freedoms. Government has various extreme powers and in the U.S. the current “emergency” is still in play until May this year. Novak Djokovic is unable to play in the current Indian Wells tournament in the U.S. because of this “emergency”.

6. Prevention of “terrorism” legislation has been used to monitor protestors and those who have spoken against the government overreach. This has been done on the basis that such people are spreading misinformation and are then likely to be right-wing extremists and terrorists. The Patriot Act brought in under George W. Bush has provided these extreme monitoring powers. Extraordinarily in the US, 20 FBI agents broke into a family home to arrest a father who had demonstrated outside an abortion centre. Location data also was used by the FBI to track those who were at the January 6^th 2021 Capitol protest in Washington DC. Governments everywhere are using anti-terror legislation for individual surveillance.

7. Police forces have become politicized. This is evident in the shocking way the FBI has been used against political opponents of the Biden government. We also experienced this in Australia with the draconian actions of the police force in Victoria during extended forced population lockdowns.

8. Healthcare has become a government-controlled entity. Doctors became a target in all Western countries and governments warned that any who spoke out against the experimental vaccines would face de-registration. This happened at the same time in most Western countries and was clearly a coordinated process. Horrifyingly, most doctors immediately caved into the government overreach and most simply did what the government required. The whole idea that doctors have only the welfare of their patients in mind, has been completely lost. Doctors and hospitals are now simply another tool of the government. President Reagan foresaw this effect when he said 60 years ago, “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project”.

9. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The full quote from Lord Acton is, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority”.  We have been able to see this clearly with the UK Lockdown Files – from the Telegraph Newspaper. I have followed the remarkable WhatsApp messages that were released to the newspaper and involve more than 100,000 messages and several million words. From the messages, we can see the manipulation of the population by the government, selective release of information and lies told for the self-interest of government ministers. In the link that I’ve provided, it is possible to see the shocking series of stories that have come from the WhatsApp message analysis and it is worthwhile simply examining the headlines to have a sense of what happened.

10. Empowering the WHO and Vaccine “Passports”. During the lockdowns, vaccines were used as a weapon to obtain compliance and those vaccinated were able to travel because they had a “vaccine passport”. This idea has been endorsed for the future by G20 leaders and the WHO now is being armed to implement such a system and to be given the authority to declare a pandemic, power being removed from national governments. It’s only a small step from passports to currency control and surveillance.

We need to wake up from our slumber. While we had our backs turned, the New World Order has been able to gain control of healthcare, government, pharmaceutical companies, the military, police, national security, media and technology. Populations have been encircled by these draconian forces, to shepherd us towards a future where we have no freedom and no control. It’s why the World Economic Forum was so confident in declaring that by 2030 “we will own nothing”. Of course, they also asserted that “we would be happy” which clearly is untrue but they (who own everything) will be happy!

We need to be on the alert for the next “crisis” and be prepared to stand up for our diminishing freedoms. Otherwise, just as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, we will all end up confined to gulags.

STORIES THAT CAUGHT MY ATTENTION THIS WEEK

What Has Happened to the United Kingdom?

The UK seems to lurch from crisis to crisis but a worse crisis is to come – a UK Labour socialist government in 2024. The so-called Conservatives, currently led by technocrat Rishi Sunak continue to stumble around the dark searching for a policy that will lead them into the light. They can’t find one and their approach is to regulate more and kowtow to the European Union. Despite Brexit, the UK is still under the authority of the extreme left-wing European Court of Human Rights and hasn’t the authority to control its own borders. Meanwhile, radical anarchists are inflicting pornographic sex education on school children and the government seems unable to do anything about it. The police force is corrupt and has not solved any robberies in recent memory and has been obsessed with incidents of so-called hate speech. Conservative Party leaders go through a rotating door but none has any courage to stand for conservative values. Now the left-wing BBC has been skittled by a leftie soccer commentator who is an advocate for open borders. The Director General of the BBC showed himself to have all the spine of a jellyfish when he confronted his star commentator, who is reportedly paid £1.3 million per year, and had to grovel to keep him on side. To understand what has happened and the hand of Big Government in every part of UK life, it is worthwhile watching the amazon.com series “Clarkson’s Farm”. The series shows the horrific overreach of government upon the farming community and the authoritarian approach of council planners to crush any fledgling innovation. The situation can only get worse as the government has no clear plan apart from spending more taxpayers' money and seems to be intent on increasing the regulatory framework. Currently, there are 120,000 homes waiting to be built because builders are unable to meet the requirements of an old EU regulation.

I have also been reading the “lockdown files” put together by UK Telegraph journalists from more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages which were made available by journalist, Isabel Oakeshott. The stories make depressing reading and demonstrate the way that the government sought to manipulate the population during the COVID and rather than following the so-called science (which itself was flawed), they were following their own political ends.

As horrific as things are, they can only get worse under a Labour government led by Sir Keir Starmer. Labour is certain to return to power next year after 14 years of an incompetent Conservative Party government. The opinion polls look dire for the Conservatives and the UK, already teetering on the financial abyss, faces oblivion with a Labour government that will seek to regulate and spend more than the Conservatives and in addition, introduce every woke idea that they can seize upon.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Meltdown

The SVB crisis seemed to come out of nowhere. However, given the way that governments have been spending money they don’t have for the last two years, a banking crisis was overdue.

Tom Woods writes: “Let me start by saying: the present system of money and banking is really indefensible. It is the farthest thing from a free market.
There's no other way to describe it: what we have is a cartel, overseen by a non-market institution, the Federal Reserve System, which is a creation of Congress and has been given monopoly privileges by which it directs money and banking in the United States.”

It is difficult to understand all the implications of the SVB crash but The Blaze has published a good article called, “Six Things You Need to Know about the SVB Collapse”. In essence, the run on SVB was sparked by depositors because SVB had made a bad call in relation to long-term U.S. Treasury Securities, which became less valuable when the Fed substantially increased interest rates. SVB reported that it lost US$1.8 billion due to the decreased value of its Treasury investments. With the announcement of the big losses, there was a bank run with depositors withdrawing their money, followed by government regulators stepping in. The government is now effectively running the bank after guaranteeing the remaining individual deposits, up to US$250,000. There is concern amongst financial commentators that this could be the start of a wider contagion as it was in 2008 with the global financial crisis.  

What is AUKUS?

It’s likely that US readers have not heard of AUKUS, which is a big deal in Australia and UK. Here is a brief article from SkyNews. AUKUS also is a big deal in China which has strongly condemned this new security and defence alliance. I did enjoy an analysis by UK Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley - who wrote, “The Aussies will provide the subs, the Americans the atomic technology, and Britain will be manufacturing the digital watch worn by the captain”.

At its heart, AUKUS is simply an intention to spend enormous sums of money (currently more than $300 billion but I’m sure that this figure has no relationship to reality) to equip Australia with nuclear submarines to patrol the Pacific Ocean. Like the Scottish ferries, the cost is sure to at least double and the time frame will blow out. The submarines are said to become available in 2042 but don’t hold your breath. Many people are excited about this but not me. It is going to another example of a government disaster, particularly as the Adelaide shipyards in Australia are at the centre of construction. This is the group that a former Australian Defense Minister said that he wouldn’t trust to build a rowboat!

This week U.S. President Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak (U.K. PM) and Anthony Albanese (Australian PM) met in San Diego for a photo op. The whole idea has been sparked by China’s activities in the Pacific but it is a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. The AUKUS agreement also will provide Australia with three Virginia class submarines if Congress approves. There seems to be a lot of opportunity for many things to go wrong but at this stage, we are in the AUKUS honeymoon period. I suspect that this will look increasingly problematic in a few year's time and there will be a search for the AUKUS conspirators and promoters. Also it could well be that by the time the submarines are built that the Chinese PLA, by then stationed in Sydney, will be taking delivery of them!

You can read a slightly more positive view of AUKUS and the submarines in this column from the Spectator magazine.

The Men of the East Conspire

There has been little coverage that I have seen of an important event that took place in Beijing last week. You can read more at this link. China brokered an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, traditional enemies because of the Shi’ite (Iran) v Sunni (Saudi Arabia) versions of Islam. Relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran deteriorated following the execution by Saudi Arabia in 2016 of an important Shi’ite cleric. The agreement overseen by China will result in diplomatic relations being resumed and ambassadors appointed. China is involved for reasons of self-interest and the West is left on the sidelines. China’s interest is clearly the extensive oil reserves available in Saudi Arabia and Iran. While the West is closing oil refineries, China is shoring up its future. The UK Telegraph had an interesting analysis that is worthwhile reading by Azeem Ibrahim. China’s “one belt, one road” initiative is seen in the region to be positive in providing funds for development. Clearly, China has long-term ambitions to be the key player in the oil-rich Middle East. Ibrahim writes that China, “believes that might equals right. And that might affords the capacity to define words and concepts to their own advantage. Thus, any Chinese plan is a “peace plan”. Only Chinese-sponsored diplomacy is “legitimate”. Only international bodies that do Chinese bidding have true ‘rule of law’.”

There is a shift in the balance of power with Saudi Arabia moving into the camp of China, whose influence should not be underestimated. It is yet one more symptom of the decline of the West.

Conclusions

After reading this week’s newsletter myself, I feel depressed! And rightly so – we seem to be stumbling toward a technocratic future, waving our credit cards over electronic readers and feeling happy as long as we can order our soy lattes with a splash of vanilla. It is time to prepare ourselves for a challenging future. Orwell recognized what was coming when he published “Animal Farm” more than 75 years ago. He wrote, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.”