Category: imperialism

Gods and Monsters

· 2 Comments ·
Image result for pics of frankenstein and god

By Daniel Margrain

In pre-enlightenment times, the earth was widely perceived as a stable force at the centre of the universe overseen by God. Theologians rationalized intellectual curiosity and any challenges to this prevaling orthodoxy as akin to bringing forth evil into the world. Dissenting ‘wrongdoers’ were required by the church to seek salvation in a deity in order to absolve themselves of their intellectual impulses.

But as theology eventually began to accede to scientific inquiry, salvation correspondingly began to take root in a system of ideas embodied in the philosophical writings of Aristotle.

According to Aristotle, the positions in society that individuals were perceived to have naturally occupied, all dovetailed together to form a pattern of the universe which gave everything its purpose. Aristotlian philosophy predicated on order, but underpinned by uneven relations of power, was to be one of the guiding principles of the enlightenment.

So although the enlightenment was a great leap forward from the idea that the power of Kings was historically fixed predicated on a grand purpose and design ordained by God, modernity nevertheless remained tied to the concept of progress as being that of the development of the human mind and of human nature as unchanging.

Knowing your place

The classical economists who arose out of the enlightenment were thus able to reinforce the notion that social and economic hierarchies and the establishment of private property were fixed and ‘natural’ consequences of progress borne out of intellectual endeavour.

Similar claims are made by evolutionary psychologists who reinforce the ideology that human behaviour or psychological characteristics are a biological adaptation shaped by natural selection hard-wired into the human brain.

The notion that human behaviour is genetically determined and that biology holds the key to solving social problems, has a long history going back to Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, in 1865.

Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology reinforce the ideological notion that the mass of ordinary people are conditioned to know their place within an ‘unchanging’ society even though the great changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution prove that power had transferred from feudal landlords to corporate grandees.

Alienation

By the mid 19th century, the supplanting of the aristocracy of land with money led to the transference of the great estates to commodities. Karl Marx was the first to analyse in detail the nature of the emerging capitalism in which the worker devotes his life to producing objects which he does not own or control. The labour of the worker, according to Marx, thus becomes something separate and external to him.

In the year of Marx’s birth in 1818, a young English author called Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published the first edition of the Gothic and Romantic science fiction novel, Frankenstein – the tale of a monster which turns against its creator. It’s the externalizing and uncontrollable forces Shelley describes in her masterpiece that draws parallels with the daily lot of workers outlined by Marx.

It was precisely the lack of any control workers had in the production process during the Industrial Revolution that led to the Luddites smashing up the machines that churned out the fruits of their ‘externalizing’ or alienated labour. For Marx, alienation is a material and social process that is intrinsic to society and nature in flux.

The dialectic

In dialectical terms, changes in nature are marked by a state of continuous motion driven by the struggle of conflicting and antagonistic forces. At some point, small incremental quantitative shifts in nature over time will eventually result in fundamental qualitative changes in appearance or form even though in ‘essence’ their nature remain one and the same.

An acorn, in becoming an oak, for example, will have ceased to be an acorn. Yet implicit within the acorn is the potential to become an oak. Equally, since humans are an integral part of nature, they cannot be excluded from the contradictory socioeconomic forces that interract with it. At some point these socioeconomic forces will eventually become something else and therefore cease to exist in their current form.

The ten-thousand year history of class-based societites from slavery to feudalism, through to capitalism, are indicative of these changes. Colonialism and imperialism, under capitalism, have been marked by the ability of the oppressors to suppress opposition to their rule using monsters as part of their strategy of divide and conquer.

But what the oppressors rarely factor into their strategies, is the potential for working people to break free from the chains that bind them. Attempts by the ruling class-owned corporate media to manipulate the public into accepting their oppression cannot be sustained indefinitely.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Similarly, there are limits to which monsters will be supine to their creators and many have been known to break free, and even turn the tables, on them. This, for example, was the case in Afghanistan during the 1980s when then US president Jimmy Carter’s covert programme financed tribal groups known as the mujahedin, including Osama bin Laden, against the common enemy, the Soviet Union, as part what was called, Operation Cyclone.

From this spawned other monsters, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, all of whom felt betrayed enough to turn their ire on their creator in the form of undertaking terrorist attacks, most notably and spectacularly in New York on September 11. The Zionists in Israel are an example of a US-funded monster that has managed to have been kept under relative control, despite its frequent attempts to break free from its masters leash.

In all cases, the monsters described have bitten the financial hand of Washington that feeds them resulting in often unintended and unpredictable, geopolitical consequences. Indeed, Faustian pacts with the devil have, largely by way of ‘blow back’, contributed significantly to the exponential spread of terrorism worldwide.

School of the Americas

There are, however, other monsters which their creators have managed to exert tight control. An example, is the extent to which Washington maintains leverage over terrorist fighters in central and south America who continue to emerge from what was formerly known as the School of the Americas located at Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia.

The SOA was responsible for training the regime that overthrew the Honduran government headed by Manuel Zelaya in June, 2009, as well as fomenting the March, 2016 coup that culminated in the assassination of the leading grass-roots Honduran environmental activist, Berta Caceres.

More recently, SOA-trained fighters have been implicated in ongoing attempts to destabilize Venezuela. In addition, ISIS and their various terrorist offshoots in Syria are trained and funded, either overtly or covertly, by numerous foreign mercenary forces as part of the imperialists’ geopolitical and regime change strategy in the country.

Saudi Arabia and Ukraine

Saudi Arabia, who is one of the key players in Syria, has also been bombarding Yemen since at least September, 2015 using weaponry sold to them by the UK-US governments’.

Also around this time – February, 2014 – the US instigated a violent coup d’etat in Kiev against the democratically-elected government of pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych.

From 2015 to the present, the policies of successive Ukraine governments’ have been their unwillingness to both ratify and implement the Minsk Agreement which in, part, is designed to guarantee the security of the people of the Donbas region and to secure a lasting peaceful resolution to the year-long Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Despite this, the Biden administration has not applied any pressure on the current Kiev regime under President Volodymyr Zelensky to negotiate in good faith, even though it is obliged in law to support the agreement.

Zelensky’s recent provocation in which he urged NATO to pre-emptively attack Russia with nuclear weapons, is not only indicative of somebody who is not serious about wanting a peaceful outcome to the conflict, but is also a potential danger to the world.

The fact that the US and UK continue to funnel weapons to paramilitary neo-Nazi’s and ultra nationalists such as the Azov Battalion and other fascist followers of Hitler-collaborator, Stepan Bandera, in support of their monster in Kiev, would indicate that the intention of the UN/NATO powers is not for a peaceful resolution but to prolong the conflict as part of a geopolitical proxy war.

In conclusion, the world’s most powerful and unrestrained monsters are not individuals who commit isolated atrocities but, rather, are the likes of the CIA, the Desk Killers in Washington and the kinds of terrorists linked directly to the British state.

Governments’, whose role is to facilitate the objectives of the military-industrial complex in matters of war, are also subject, more broadly, to imposing the policy agenda’s of their private-public policy-making partners – ie Central Banks, BIS, Chatham House etc – at the top of the global chain of command. These psychopaths will do anything in order to maintain their privileges in the service of naked self-interest, money and power. God only knows who will stop them.

No Time to Wait: The Climate Apocalypse Illusion

· Leave a comment ·

By Daniel Margrain

Climate activist, Mike Hudema, recently tweeted the following in response to a CNN report:

”An iceberg the size of London has broken off the Antarctic ice shelf. There is no time to wait. We must #ActOnClimate.”, he said. 

Another activist commenting on the CNN report, remarked:

”This is a grave reminder that climate change is happening now, and it’s happening faster than we anticipated. We must take meaningful action to reduce our emissions and limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

What both activists failed to acknowledge is that the article went on to state:

”This calving event has been expected and is part of the natural behavior of the Brunt Ice Shelf. It is not linked to climate change.’‘

The natural event described was confirmed by Glaciologist, Dominic Hodgson, who said that ”Ice separation naturally occurs in this part of Antartica.”

On the same day, Dr. Guy McPherson, Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, who is described in his biography as an ”award-winning scientist and the world’s leading authority on abrupt climate change,” claimed in a podcast that ”abrupt climate change will result in the extinction of humans within three years.”

Six years ago, McPherson wrote an article where he made a similar dramatic catastrophic prediction. The article included a timeline for virtual human extinction within 9-33 months from the date the article in question was published. Conveniently, the professor has since deleted the article.

According to McPherson, then, humanity should have been extinct three years ago at the latest. Apparently, it hadn’t occured to this ‘expert’ on human extinction, that researchers wouldn’t have had the temerity to recall his previous fearmongering claim.

Heads above the parapet

Thankfully, scientists in increasing numbers have been prepared to stand up against the prevailing climate narrative in a similar way that the Great Barrington Declaration declared a challenge to the scientific consensus about lockdowns, and the flawed modelling that was used by governments’ to justify them.

The alarmist narrative began to collapse in earnest from August last year when over 1,100 scientists and professionals put their names to the ‘World Climate Declaration (WCD). The authors, drawn from across the world, led by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever, reject the claim that there is a ‘climate emergency’.

The WCD posit that the ‘scientific consensus’ on man-made climate change is part of a politically-driven media agenda and that grant-dependent academics have degenerated the discipline into a discussion based on beliefs, rather than sound self-critical science.

In particular, the WCD are critical of climate models, noting that they ”are not remotely plausible as global policy tools.”

The WCD contend that these models exaggerate the negative effects of carbon dioxide. They instead emphasize that the gas is beneficial for nature and agriculture; that it increases global crop yields, promotes growth in plant biomass and is essential to all life on Earth.

It is also the contention of the WCD that, historically, climate models have overstated the projected negative impacts of climate change compared to real world events and note that insufficient emphasis is placed on the empirical scientific method.

In addition, the WCD declare that there is no statistical evidence that climate change is intensifying hurricanes, floods and droughts, or making them more frequent.

Gore and Greta

Arguably, the world’s leading climate doomsayer and establishment critic of the WCD thesis, is Al Gore. The former US vice president has reportedly made $330m as a result of advocating on behalf of the alarmist cause. Gore made his fortune when he set up a green investment firm that’s now said to be worth $36bn, paying him $2m a month.

In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Gore’s hyperbole was off the scale. In the speech, he warned about ”rain bombs” and ”boiling oceans.”

Much of what Gore had to say is indicative of the kind of moral posturing synonymous with ‘climate justice’ often expressed by delegates at COP climate summits.

Gore’s psuedo-scientific hyperbole and the appeals to moral authority championed by his acolytes, have rarely been critiqued by journalists. Meanwhile, catastrophic warnings about the alleged impacts of ‘runaway climate change’ and the moral imperative to act against it, have become normalized across the entire panoply of social media.

Climate activist, Greta Thunberg has become the leading moral crusader and public face of a fear-based climate cult whose disciples have become besotted by her every utterance and stage managed media appearance.

In September, 2019, Greta announced to the world, that ”We are at the beginning of a mass extinction.”

This was probably the moment when the idea of catastrophic climate change became cemented into the public consciousness and when fear and emotion overrode rationality and reason.

Almost certainly, her speech marked an emotional call to action of a kind that had never been heard up until this point.

Greta won’t be the last celebrity to utilize a narrative of fear in this way. But it’s unlikely that others following in Greta’s footsteps will be able to successfully galvanize young people in the furtherance of a nefarious global political agenda the way Greta has.

The key question, is what lies behind the alarmist agenda?

Ehrlicht and Malthus

Essentially, climate change ‘science’ has morphed into a political project, underpinned ideologically by Malthusian eugenics and the science of control. The aim of those who support this agenda is to reduce the global population under the guise of saving the planet.

While much of the public are now familiar with the manipulation of predictive modelling during the Covid event, Malthusian ideology has been the catalyst driving the agenda of elite power for the better part of a century.

Biologist, Paul Ehrlich, has been a historically key figure in helping to spearhead and popularize the man-made global warming hypothesis. Even though his dire anti-humanist prophecies that underpin it have been repeatedly proven wrong, Ehrlich, regularly gets invited on to mainstream TV programmes to promulgate his nonsense as if he was an expert.

Last month, Ehrlicht appeared on the US show, ‘Sixty Minutes’ where he made the bold claim that ”Humanity is not sustainable.”

Fifty eight years ago, the same Ehrlicht exclaimed, ”We are very close to a famine disaster in the United States”…and…”in the next fifteen years the end will come.”

Ehrlicht added, ”And by that I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

If this wasn’t embarrassing enough, the biologist also claimed that by the end of the last century, ”England will not exist because of climate change.”

The editor of Human​Progress​.org, Marian Tupy, has posited the reason why Ehrlicht has been able to pursuade a huge swath of the public that his dire prophecies have legitimacy:

”If you sell the apocalypse”, says Tupy, ”people feel you are deep and that you care. But if you are selling rational optimism, you sound uncaring.”

According to Tupy, Ehrlicht underplays the capacity for human beings to innovate, viewing them as a hinderence to nature rather than being part of a potentially holistic solution to an environmentally-degredated planet. The truth is, the positive notion that humans are helping nature isn’t consistent with a message predicated on panic that has culminated in the fact that four in ten young adults fear having children.

Super Abundance

Tupy’s book, ‘Super Abundance‘, shows that, counter-intuitively, population growth is beneficial for both humanity and the environment. Humans grow stuff. They don’t only consume it.

”What matters is new knowledge. Think about something as simple as sand. When we started melting down sand to create glass, we used it for glass beads or jars. But now we are using glass in fibre optic cables and microchips. Similar innovations occur in farming, transportation and genetic engineering”, says Tupy. This has resulted in an abundant natural world.

Take forests as an example. Tupy points out that, contrary to alarmist propaganda, ”forests have grown by thirty-five per cent in North America and Western Europe over the last twenty years.” Consequently, populations have found new and innovative ways to produce more food on less land.

Autonomous humans who are encouraged to make genuinely democratic and rational decisions will enhance the environment because they are an integral part of, not separate from, other species in nature who inhabit the same planet.

Climate fatalists, like Ehrlich, Gore and Thunberg, on the other hand, take the opposite view, positing that the planet is in danger and needs to be saved from humanities inherently destructive and ‘intruding’ overpopulating footprint.

Japan

These harbingers of doom and gloom must of been deliriously happy at news eminating from Japan last week. Time Magazine reported Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s claim that his country is on the brink of catastrophe due its contracting workforce, ageing population and low birth rates.

“Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions,” Kishida said as he announced last-ditch policy measures to increase the birth rate. He added, “It is now or never.”

The fatalists are hoping for the latter. They view any form of societal collapse as a price worth paying to ‘save the planet.’

The author of the Time Magazine piece, Ciara Nugent, is ‘on message’ with the alarmist perspective. ”Never, might be best,” she said.

Nugent’s sentiment is expressed more widely within the legacy liberal-left media and political establishment. These bulwarks of anti-humanism were also complicit in ensuring that governments’ implemented Covid lock down policies and, by extension, the inevitable societal destruction that developed in their wake.

It is surely no coincidence that liberal-left website, Medialens, who claim to ”correct for the distorted vision of the corporate media,” but who are nonetheless sympathetic to the prevailing alarmist orthodoxy, have remained silent with regards to the societal damage that the political response to Covid is causing.

The role played by climate activists and their media and political adjuncts in perpetuating fear is a crucial part of the armoury of the global powers to ‘sell’ their Malthusian and population control agenda to the public in a more palatable form. A key way that this is achieved is by couching climate in the language of ‘sustainable development’.

This strategy, however, has all the hallmarks of a new form of colonialism. Positive responses to climate action create relationships of dependency, that undermine the true interests of the colonized.

The Club of Rome

Commentator Hugo Kruger, points out that the Malthusian depopulation concept, promoted by The World Economic Forum, under the leadership of Klaus Schwab, is deep rooted in the colonialist project, manifested most recently as the ‘climate crisis.’

‘The Club of Rome, founded by the Italian Peccei Family in 1968 in David Rockefeller’s Italian Estate. Peccei was invited by Schwab to make the keynote speech at the 1973 World Economic Forum. After their “Limits to Growth Scenario” prediction that the world will be overpopulated and run out of resources failed, the focus shifted to emissions.’

Kruger continues:

In 1992, the Club of Rome released its book ‘The First Global Revolution’, which says:

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

To this extent, groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, as well as prominent activists like Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein and George Monbiot, have failed to grasp the dark side of the movement and what drives it.

Hugo Kruger, writes:

”Western intellectuals, with a few exceptions, have been blind spotted into giving the IPCC their unconditional support for the ‘Global Warming Alarm’. As the physicist Denis Rancourt argued in 2010, they look for comfortable lies so that they can settle into and feel good about themselves while ignoring actual environmental problems. Climate Change is the elite’s ‘Opium of the Masses’ and, as occurs all too often with religion, hucksters, fraudsters, tyrants and the ring leaders are quick to exploit the naivety of those with sincere convictions.”

Predicated on ludicrous armageddon forecasts and the unwitting actions of climate activists, the media and political establishment are exploiting the legitimate concerns the public have over environmental issues to weaponize and help push through a nefarious global societal command and control agenda.