Winter Oak

1. Chomsky, Epstein and the CIA

by Crow Qu'appelle

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

We now know that Noam Chomsky, the venerable Dean of the American Left, was controlled opposition all along.

I know, I know, it's tough to believe. Didn't Chomsky write Manufacturing Consent, which exposed the American propaganda machine?

Well, yes, he did… but it now seems his true purpose was to establish the exact boundaries of what it was acceptable for a professional Leftist to say in public.

As the quote often attributed to Lenin goes: "The best way to control our opposition is to lead it ourselves".

I don't know whether Lenin ever said these exact words, but there's a reason that this quote has circulated so widely. Controlled opposition has been part of the statist toolkit for a long time.

CHOMSKY, EPSTEIN AND EHUD BARAK

On April 30, 2023, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Epstein's private calendar listed multiple meetings with Chomsky in 2015 and 2016.

These meetings included a scheduled flight to Manhattan for a dinner with filmmaker Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, as well as a meeting involving former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

That's right. Jeffrey Epstein introduced Noam Chomsky to Ehud Barak. Man, that's off-brand.

When Chomsky was asked about his relationship with Epstein,: "First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone's. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally."

But here's the thing, Noam. It is our business. Although coverage of Epstein has mostly focused on his long career of pimping and pandering, he was also a political operative who was working for Mossad.

If Noam Chomsky is hanging out with Israeli intelligence assets, that kind of casts a wee bit of a shadow over his life's work.

Back in 2023, Whitney Webb wrote a stellar expose of Chomsky called Unraveling the Epstein-Chomsky Relationship.

According to the Journal, Chomsky's meetings with Epstein took place during the years 2015 and 2016, while Chomsky taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT. Chomsky told the Journal that he met with Epstein to discuss topics like neuroscience with other academics, like Harvard's Martin Nowak (who was heavily funded by Epstein).

On a separate occasion, Chomsky again met with Epstein alongside former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, allegedly to discuss "Israel's policies with regard to Palestinian issues and the international arena."

A separate date saw Chomsky and his wife invited by Epstein to have dinner with him, Woody Allen and Allen's wife Soon-Yi Previn. When asked about the dinner date with Woody Allen and Epstein, Chomsky referred to the occasion as "an evening spent with a great artist."

When confronted with this evidence, Chomsky initially told the Journal that his meetings and relationship with Epstein were "none of your business. Or anyone's." He then added that "I knew him [Epstein] and we met occasionally."

Before continuing further, it is important to note that aside from Epstein, both Ehud Barak and Woody Allen have been accused of having inappropriate sexual relationships with minors. For instance, Barak was a frequent visitor to Epstein's residences in New York, so often that The Daily Beast reported that numerous residents of an apartment building linked to Epstein "had seen Barak in the building multiple times over the last few years, and nearly half a dozen more described running into his security detail," adding that "the building is majority-owned by Epstein's younger brother, Mark, and has been tied to the financier's alleged New York trafficking ring."

Specifically, several apartments in the building were "being used to house underage girls from South America, Europe and the former Soviet Union," according to a former bookkeeper employed by one of Epstein's main procurers of underage girls, Jean Luc Brunel. Barak is also known to have spent the night at one of Epstein's residences at least once, was photographed leaving Epstein's residence as recently as 2016, and has admitted to visiting Epstein's island, which has sported nicknames including "Pedo Island," "Lolita Island" and "Orgy Island."

Whitney Webb also includes a synopsis of the extremely disturbing case of Woody Allen, but I'm guessing most people reading this are already aware what a total creep that guy is.

Also in 2017, The Daily Beast reported:

Wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein moved hundreds of thousands of dollars for two academics in the years before his 2019 arrest, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Linguist Noam Chomsky told the Journal that he sought financial "advice" from Epstein, who in 2018 transferred $270,000 to him. Chomsky claimed the transaction—which was related to the disbursement of funds from his first marriage—"did not involve one penny from Epstein." He added: "The simplest way seemed to be to transfer funds from one account in my name to another, by way of his office."

Wow. That's the worst excuse I've ever heard. We're supposed to believe that the simplest way for Noam to move funds from one account to another was by getting a Mossad agent (and convicted sex offender) to send him $270,000?

I think it's fair to say that Chomsky is completely senile by now. How did he think that anyone would believe that?

It gets better (or worse).

According to an article in The Harvard Crimson:

Chomsky wrote the March 2015 meeting took place at [Harvard professor Martin] Nowak's office in the 1 Brattle Square offices of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which was established in 2003 through a $6.5 million grant from Epstein. The office was subleased from the Harvard Kennedy School, which leased the space from a private owner.

"Like all of those in Cambridge who met and knew him, we knew that he had been convicted and served his time, which means that he re-enters society under prevailing norms — which, it is true, are rejected by the far right in the US and sometimes by unscrupulous employers," Chomsky wrote. "I've had no pause about close friends who spent many years in prison, and were released. That's quite normal in free societies."

During the meeting in Nowak's office, Chomsky wrote, the group discussed neuroscience and computer science. Chomsky declined to provide names of other Harvard faculty in attendance, adding that "it would be improper to subject others to slanderous attacks."

"I've often attended meetings and had close interactions with colleagues and friends on Harvard and MIT campuses, often in labs and other facilities built with donations from some of the worst criminals of the modern world," Chomsky wrote. "People whose crimes are well known, and who are, furthermore, honored by naming the buildings in their honor and lavishly praised in other ways. That's far more serious than accepting donations, obviously — and these are huge donations."

Wow. That's his defence? This guy is officially out of his mind.

CHOMSKY AND COVID

By the time the news about Chomsky and Epstein's weird bromance broke, the Chomsky name had already lost much of its former gloss.

That's because Noam Chomsky revealed himself to be a closet authoritarian during COVID, when he took a hardline pro-compliance position.

Although Chomsky had portrayed himself as a free speech advocate earlier in his career, he did not raise a peep about censorship of dissidents justified in the name of biosecurity.

On the subject of anti-maskers, he had this to say:

"Do you have an individual right to take an assault rifle and go to the supermarket or mall and start shooting randomly? That's what it means not to wear a mask."

In 2021, he said this about "people who refuse to accept vaccines":

"I think the right response for them is not to force them to but rather to insist that they be isolated."

We're not "forcing" you! We're just insisting that you obey… or else.

When asked how unvaccinated people should get food if isolated, he responded: "That's their problem."

CHOMSKY AND 9/11 TRUTH

Chomsky also encouraged his followers to swallow the official story about 9/11 hook, line, and sinker.

When questioned about the mysterious collapse of WTC Building 7, Chomsky said that he had "no opinion" on that subject.

His answer included the statement:

"There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn't work like that… There's a reason there are graduate schools in these departments."

Throughout the War on Terror, Chomsky discouraged people from questioning the nonsensical official narrative of 9/11.

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

CHOMSKY'S CHUM AT THE CIA

One of the dead giveaways that Chomsky is controlled opposition comes from the fact that he was literally pals with the CIA director.

In December 1995, The New York Times reported that Noam Chomsky approved of the appointment of his fellow MIT academic, John Deutsch, as head of the CIA.

According to the report, Chomsky said:

"[Deutch] has more honesty and integrity than anyone I've ever met in academic life, or any other life. If somebody's got to be running the CIA, I'm glad it's him."

In his 1996 book Class Warfare, Chomsky elaborated on his relationship with Deutsch:

"We were actually friends and got along fine, although we disagreed on about as many things as two human beings can disagree about. I liked him. We got along very well together. He's very honest, very direct. You know where you stand with him. We talked to each other. When we had disagreements, they were open, sharp, clear, honestly dealt with. I found it fine. I had no problem with him. I was one of the very few people on the faculty, I'm told, who was supporting his candidacy for the President of MIT."

Nothing suss about that!

THE CHOMSKY RABBIT HOLE GOES DEEP!

Despite having been exposed for literally taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from a Mossad agent, hanging out with Ehud Barak, and supporting John Deutsch's bid to become president of MIT, Chomsky has received surprisingly little attention from the truth movement.

I think part of the problem is that there are very few conspiracy theorists who are also into linguistics, and if you want to understand Chomsky, you have to know a thing or two about linguistics.

But in the light of the revelations about Chomsky's intelligence connections, the legacy of Chomsky MUST be reassessed.

Although Chomsky is credited with "revolutionizing linguistics", few people outside linguistics understand what a giant crock of shit Chomskyan linguistics is.

Fortunately, the Chomskyan paradigm has basically been completely debunked in recent years, although many still cling to it.

So, I plan to begin an investigation into long career the man who may be the most successful academic fraudster of all time.

Stay tuned!

for the wild,

Crow Qu'appelle

2. London meeting 2025: a most controversial conference

by Paul Cudenec

A new ideological language, beyond the old left/right polarity, is required as the foundation of our future resistance to global tyranny.

That was the broad consensus that emerged from an important meeting in London, UK, on Saturday May 3, 2025.

But the occasion also showed that before this can be achieved, certain psychological barriers have to be overcome.

In her introduction to the all-day event, Emily Garcia of organisers Real Left (formerly Left Lockdown Sceptics) said this promised to be the dissident group's most controversial conference to date – an assessment which was to be confirmed before the end of the day, as I will explain.

Garcia's contribution also usefully reminded us of the stakes involved in our struggle.

In particular, she showed a slide, produced for the internal consumption of the ruling caste, outlining the many ways in which they are seeking to exert total control over us and our lives, with everything from sensors inside our bodies to digital geofencing of our movements.

She explained that in many ways this assault on our freedom is in plain sight – such as the laying-down everywhere of the fibre optic cables needed for the construction of the digital prison – but also hidden from view in that most of the public are completely unaware of the nefarious aims behind all this.

The purpose of the gathering was to try to bring together the anti-imperialist side of the freedom movement, opposed to the transhumanist agenda, with those focused on the pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist cause.

With this in mind, Garcia highlighted the major role played by Israel-linked businesses like Palantir and Faculty in the building of population surveillance and data-gathering systems under the guise of remote healthcare, including the massive mining of data during the Covid operation.

Also very relevant was her mention of Matthew Gould, once private secretary for foreign affairs to the Prime Minister, with both Rothschild-linked Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, a trustee of the zio-imperialist Rockefeller Foundation.

As Britain's first Jewish ambassador to Israel, Gould set up the "UK-Israel Technologies Hub". And he became the chief executive, for the duration of its operation, of NHSX , which in April 2020 commissioned NHS COVID-19, the notorious contact-tracking app.

Garcia remarked that those "conspiracy theorists" calling out the threat to our lives posed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution face exactly the same kind of censorship as those who dare to criticise Israel and Zionism.

She commented that the inextricable connections between Zionism and the digital New World Order suggest that we are looking at the "same multi-headed hydra", against which our real struggle is therefore one of decolonisation.

Chris Rea of Real Left, presenting the morning's Palestine Liberation panel, described the scamdemic moment in 2020 as announcing a new stage in the class war.

But despite the significant resistance to Covid fascism by workers such as the Italian dockers opposing the compulsory "Green Pass" (vaccine passport) and the Canadian truckers' revolt, this mass insurgency was totally ignored by the mainstream "left".

We need to build a broad resistance in our "extended struggle for freedom", he said.

The first contributor to the panel was Chris Williamson, former Labour Party MP and now a deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain, who warned of the power of the Zionist lobby.

He concluded his video message to the event by pointing out that the forces behind the slaughter of children, women and men in Palestine are the same as those oppressing the working people of Britain.

Yael Kahn, a London-based Israeli critic of Israel, did not make this connection in her talk.

She did, however, describe how she had been persecuted in the UK for her condemnation of what she calls "Nazi Israel" and warned of the Zionist "weaponisation" of anti-semitism smears – an observation whose accuracy found a strikingly ironical echo in a later intervention on her part.

Ang Swee gave a talk with slides, from her many years of helping the people of Palestine as a doctor, which reminded the conference of the utter barbarity of the Zionist entity's activities.

Young Palestinian campaigner Yayha Abu Seido said the scale of the slaughter, which can justifiably be termed a genocide, has been reflected in the sheer numbers of family members being lost by exiles like himself – in his case some 170 relatives have been murdered by Israel since October 2023.

In the face of this he remains admirably positive, even optimistic.

He told the conference: "When you're speaking for truth and justice, things will work out and people will wake up".

Seido argued that the tide has now turned against the Zionist entity, with very little support for Israel in the UK. He added: "We have more power than we think we do".

The afternoon session kicked off with a powerful video presentation from David A. Hughes describing an "omniwar" being waged against most of humanity.

He warned that a smart-city "gulag" is being constructed around us and identified lines of continuity between Nazi concentration camps, Palestine and the biopolitical prison camp now threatening our future freedom.

In his presentation, Piers Robinson focused on the strange positioning of much of the "left" and the "right" over two big issues of recent years – Covid and Palestine.

While the majority of the "left" remained silent about the assault on freedom launched under the pretext of the "pandemic", many of those on the "right" who challenged that authoritarianism are now silent about Israel's crimes, he said.

He displayed a Venn diagram showing a slender overlapping area representing those of us who support both our own domestic freedom and the freedom of people in Palestine.

A smaller part of that group consists of those who understand the connection between the two issues and the deep state entities involved in both.

Robinson (pictured) warned that behind all this has been "a profound concentration of power over a considerable period of time" – the corruption of our society and the "hollowing-out of institutions".

We need to recognise these power sources, he said, and seeing the bigger picture allows us to overcome divide-and-rule strategies and avoid the pitfalls of a shallow, superficial, critique.

He agreed with a comment from Piers Corbyn, who told the gathering that we have to completely get rid of the left/right division.

Robinson said that we need a new vocabulary with which to frame the conflict between "elite networks" and the people, a new way of talking which does not fall into the left versus right trap.

Heather Brunskell-Evans provided a good example of the manner in which criticisms of the system are sectioned off and bound in by labels, in order to prevent the expression of a clear and holistic opposition to its domination in its entirety.

She described how her opposition to the transgender industry led to her being "cancelled" as a right-wing "transphobe" by the "left" and how she was subsequently rejected by anti-Woke but pro-Zionist circles as a left-wing pro-Palestinian.

I would add that the smearing of campaigner Jennifer Bilek as "anti-semitic" for having named those behind the transgender industry provides some additional context to this issue.

For my part, I explained to the conference how I have come to the conclusion, through years of intense research, that our society lies under the domination of a Rothschildian criminocracy that I have taken to calling the zio-imperialist mafia, ZIM for short.

I said that it is essential to recognise the reality of this entity and to build our new resistance not on the old "left" or "right" models but as a direct and specific opposition to ZIM.

The main thrust of this movement, I said, will be its commitment to real democracy – this being the essence of any anti-imperialist struggle, of any bid to wrest power from the hands of an external oppressor and restore it to the people itself.

This should be combined with a fight for cultural self-determination – the battle to preserve our own specificalities, diversities and autonomies from the globalist bulldozer – framed within a humanist, universalist vision that recognises our belonging to the human species as a whole and indeed to the natural world and to the cosmos.

I stressed that this outlook is opposed to all forms of bigotry and supremacism, not least Jewish supremacism, aka Zionism.

I explained that I am opposed to white supremacism for ethical, political and personal reasons.

However, black and brown people do not need to go through that thinking process to arrive at the same stance – it would be insane for them not to oppose a belief system that regards them as second-class citizens, as somehow less than human, as people whose lives matter less than those of the supremacists!

By the same token, I said, there are Jewish people who oppose Jewish supremacism (Zionism) for ethical, political and personal reasons.

But for those of us who are not Jewish, no such conscious decision is required – it would be insane for us not to oppose a belief system that regards us as second-class citizens, as somehow less than human, as people whose lives matter less than those of the supremacists…

What this means, I continued, is that we do not need to build, from scratch, a movement to convince people to oppose ZIM.

We simply need to expose its existence and activities and thus unleash the natural and inevitable opposition of the 99.8% of the world's population who are not Jewish – a tsunami of revolt that will end Zionist domination for once and for all.

While this seemed to go down well with most present, Israeli activist Kahn was not happy.

She took the microphone at the start of the questions session to describe my naming of the Rothschilds and ZIM as an "anti-semitic trope", directly accusing me of being "anti-semitic".

She thus weaponised that all-too familiar smear to attack an opponent of Zionism – the very trick that she had earlier been warning us about.

Ignoring my assurance that I am not in the least "anti-semitic" and refusing to engage in reasoned discussion, she stormed out of the conference.

So there are clearly some important ideological taboos and blockages still to be overcome in the struggle against ZIM domination.

It is worth pointing out that other Jewish anti-Zionists in the audience did not share Kahn's point of view.

However, I can't help thinking that this self-righteous and all-too-common denunciation of all identification of, and opposition to, Jewish supremacism as "anti-semitic" is itself very much a reflection of the supremacism in question.

In a society in which it is perfectly acceptable, even obligatory, to oppose white supremacism, I do not see how it can justly be considered unacceptable, even forbidden, to oppose the Jewish variety – not least in view of the horrific suffering and the innocent lives at stake should we fail to defeat it.

[Audio version]

3. Treebeard’s Razor: The Ents Weigh in on AI Art & Writing

by Jordan Henderson

First we need to equip ourselves with a philosophical razor, Treebeard's Razor.

Treebeard is an Ent, a tree man character from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Treebeard doesn't like AI art, he thinks it's crap.

In the following excerpt from the Lord of The Rings, Treebeard explains something about his tree people's language, Old Entish.

"It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to."

– Treebeard

From this I'm going to formulate Treebeard's Razor, which you can use to trim away and discard AI art and writing. You can also use this razor to trash ghostwritten celebrity work.

Treebeard's Razor:

If it wasn't worth the speaker's time to say it, it's not worth our time to hear it, or read it, or, in the case of painting, look at it.

My formulation is much more moderate then Treebeard's original statement (technically then I should call it the NeoTreebeardian Razor but that wouldn't be as catchy). I'm not going to say that you have to take a long time to say something. If you can say something briefly that's just as well.

However, what you say must at least be worth taking the time to actually say. If a speaker is saying something of so little value that it is not worth their own time to say it, then it is not worth our time to listen to it.

"What?" you think, "Treabeard's Razor is unnecessary because if it wasn't worth their time to say it, and they knew that, then they simply wouldn't have said it!" No, no, you're wrong. Many people will attempt to occupy your time with something that wasn't worth their time to say, and they won't waste their own time saying it, they will only appear to say it. The saying of it they will have delegated to something else. A ghostwriter or AI.

Now, we are armed . . . with Treebeard's Razor. Let's start applying it. First we'll apply it to painting. For painting we do not even need to modify Treebeard's words into my more moderate NeoTreebeardian Razor; painting can withstand full-strength Treebeardian scrutiny.

Painting is a language, a visual language. It can be a beautiful language. Like Old Entish, it takes a long time to say anything in the language of painting. It doesn't matter if you paint fast, that's still slow compared to how we generally communicate.

What does this tell us? It tells us that one of the statements a painter is making by choosing to communicate through Old Enti . . . I mean painting, is that the statement being made is worth taking a long time to say.

For example: look at this painting by Stanhope Forbes:

What is this artist communicating to us? Many things, but not least of these is that the artist has told us that commoners, out and about on a shiny beach during a gray day, doing their ordinary fish market tasks, are so important, such worthy subject matter for study and contemplation, that it is worth his time, attention, and hard-won skill, to carefully portray them as he has done in this great work. The observation, time, and energy the artist dedicated to this portrayal is a major statement in itself.

Now let's look at another painting:

Maynard Dixon isn't merely stating that the desert landscape is worthy of dedicating years of his life to studying, feeling, learning from, and sharing what he has found with his audience (us) – he has proven that he believes this, for he did indeed spend years of his life doing just that.

Is it worth our time to contemplate and be transported by paintings? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on the painting, BUT, odds are good that the answer is in fact yes. Why? Because the artist doesn't merely profess that the painting is worth looking at, the artist had to put their time, and if they used high end materials, a chunk of their money, where their mouth is. So we very nearly have proof that the artist is in earnest. They really did think their statement was worth taking a long time to say.

The Ents would approve.

Yes, I know, lots of celebrated artists this past century or so have been deluded and their judgment can't be trusted on much of anything. But, for those whose judgment is at least halfway decent (this is an important caveat), the painting is strong evidence that they thought the statement worth taking a long time to say – and while this does not guarantee that it is worth your while to look at it, it does increase the odds that it is.

Now let's take Treebeard's Razor (just the more moderate NeoTreebeardian formulation) and apply it to AI art. Is it worth our while to look at AI art? In general, no.

If it's not worth the artist's time to say it, it's not worth our time to look at it.

The great innovation of AI art is that it allows you to make visual statements that aren't worth taking much of anytime to say.

"Want to say something, but don't think it's important enough to bother investing your own time, thought, and energy into saying it? Boy have we got the answer for you!" – AI art.

This same principle applies to AI writing too.

The purpose of writing isn't content generation, it's communication. Ideally you put your work in front of people because you had something worth telling them. Content generation for the sake of content generation is an act of vandalism that pollutes the information commons with garbage that people have to wade past, making it more difficult for them to get to meaningful writing (or imagery).

Imagine someone creating a machine that can churn out semi-plausible-sounding gibberish and using it to fill books with plagiarism and derivative hackwork, and then putting nice-sounding titles on them and stuffing a library with them. Patrons would then have to sort through all the junk to get to the original works, thereby making the library less useful. That's the equivalent of having AI generate content and then diluting the original work on the internet with the AI derivatives.

For someone to put a platter full of AI content in front of us for our consumption is an insult to the audience. Let me give you an example of why with a little story:

Mr. Busy Calls his Mother

Mr. Busy's mother was surprised to receive a phone call from her only child on Christmas. He never called, he was too busy. She used to invite him to drop by for coffee or lunch to catch up but he was always too busy. They met maybe once a year despite living in the same city.

She was pleased that he had made time for her at least on Christmas. She answered the phone and they talked for, to her surprise, 20 whole minutes. The next month he called again; at first she was worried that maybe an emergency had happened.

"Ha ha, no no, I'm fine mom, I just wanted to check in, see how things are going and chat a little."

Later that year at the family reunion Mr. Busy's mom asked him about the sky diving trip. Mr. Busy looked perplexed.

"Sky diving trip?"

"Yes, you said that you were going to go sky diving when we last talked, remember."

"Oh, no, that must have just been an AI hallucination."

Now it was Mr. Busy's mom who looked perplexed.

"AI hallucination? What are you talking about?"

"Ah, well you see, I felt bad about never making any time for you mom; I'm just too busy you know, but thanks to technology I can call you every month despite my busy schedule. The program is called KSAI or Keepintouch Solutions AI.

It uses information from all my previous phone calls, conference calls, and social media to recreate my voice, and converse with you like it was me. Don't tell her, but I have it call Samantha and Johnny (Mr. Busy's wife, and son) when I'm away on business trips too, it saves me a lot of time. Of course they're probably using Keepintouch to answer my calls too; in which case it would just be AI talking to AI, ha ha, imagine that! I've even been using it for courtesy calling my less important clients, makes them feel like they're important."

"Oh, now mom! Don't act all hurt and offended like that. You said you were delighted to hear from me more often. Don't let the knowledge that it's AI ruin it for you, it's still based on me."

— The End.

I think that gets the point across well enough at just how offensive it is to pretend to say something to someone by delegating the task to a machine. This demonstrates that you in fact had nothing to say, and value their time so little that you occupied their time by pretending to talk to them anyway.

This deep insult to the audience is much older then AI. Politicians and celebrities have long expressed unadulterated disdain for their audience by doing something like this by using ghostwriters.

For example, Kristi Noem (Current Secretary of Homeland security and former South Dakota governor), received blow back from her now notorious story about shooting her puppy or something, in her book No Going Back. But far more interesting is that the book also included an anecdote of Kristi Noem's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un – a meeting that never happened. The controversy then revolved around whether or not Kristi had told her ghostwriter and publisher to include this story or if it was an innocent mistake with the ghostwriter and publisher having taken liberties.

That there could even be any question as to whether or not this was written without Kristi Noem's knowledge of it, reveals just how uninvolved Kristi Noem was with the writing of her book; not only did she not write her book, she might not have even read it.

The biggest scandal of Kristi Noem's book No Going Back isn't the puppy (rest in peace) or the potentially blatant lying, the deeper scandal is how little she values other people's time, and that she polluted bookstore shelves with garbage. I've never read her book and never will, because I already know that it is not worth anyone's time to read it. She didn't have anything to say. Or at the very least, whatever she may have had to say was so unimportant that it wasn't worth her own time to say it.

Had she had anything worth her time to say she would have said it and would then have had no need for a ghostwriter. (I sort of want to like Noem for having not gone crazy on Covid-1984 like the other governors, but I've chosen to use her as an example anyway, and denounce her crime of polluting the information commons because I don't feel like finding another example from another politician or celebrity).

So AI is in some ways the poor man's ghostwriter (or ghostpainter, or ghostphotographer). Now rich and poor alike can pollute the information commons with visual and verbal statements of so little value that they're not worth the author taking their own time to say them.

This is the pointlessness of generative AI: Do you have something to say?

Yes – Then say it.

No – Then don't occupy people's time and or visual space (in the case of AI art) by pretending to say something.

"But if you can say something faster and more efficiently why not?"

Why not indeed. Look at this vivacious work by Fragonard painted in 1761 (sorry about the "fish eye" camera lens distortion; the colors and resolution on this image were better than others available online).

On the back of this painting was an old note stating painted in one hour's time. Whether that boast is true or not Fragonard was fast, and the painting is great, but Fragonard still said it. This visual statement is Fragonard's statement. It was worth his time (one hour), and his intense focus (necessary to pull this off), to make this visual statement.

If Fragonard had been alive today, and had saved himself the trouble on this painting by entering a prompt into AI along the line of "Painting of young man in colorful clothing," then Fragonard would have saved himself an hour and some energy. He also wouldn't have said anything at all; he would have merely prompted a machine to churn out some visual content.

Entering a prompt into an AI program to generate visual content is no more painting then hiring a ghostwriter is writing. We come back to the same pointlessness of generative AI. If you have something to say, and it's worth your time to say it, then just say it, you don't need AI or a ghostwriter. If you have nothing to say, or it's not worth your time to say it, you still don't need AI or a ghostwriter, because it simply doesn't need to be said at all then.

A Couple Possible Objections that I'm Going to Preemptively Address and Dismiss

1^st Objection: Not everyone can paint, AI lets everyone paint, it democratizes painting.

No it doesn't, it's not letting anyone paint, because the user isn't painting at all, and no, the image prompt doesn't count as painting either or anything like it. Here is why:

First, look at this painting:

Why did the artist go through all that trouble of actually painting the image? Wouldn't it have been easier to make a simple written statement like: "woman kneeling at a grave with an umbrella, hills and building in the background, green grass and some wildflowers in the foreground"? There, see, that required next to no time for me to write that, yet it must have taken Nono weeks or more to paint that painting. So why did he go through all that trouble?

Because the artist is trying to do something that cannot be achieved with a simple written statement. Whatever the artist is exploring/channeling/expressing requires going beyond a simple written statement or else the artist would have saved himself the trouble and given us a simple written statement instead of a painting.

But what do you put into an AI image generator? A simple written statement like the one I just provided. So everything beyond the written statement isn't you speaking, it's the image generator filling in based on its programing. That's what I mean when I say that you aren't saying anything at all with AI art. Your part is the written prompt; everything beyond the written prompt for the image generator doesn't have to do with you. But everything beyond the written prompt is everything that matters, because painting is getting at things that you can't get at with a simple written statement: otherwise no one would bother painting to begin with, but would instead just make simple written statements.

2^nd Objection: "But many people do use AI art, especially for illustration work – article and editorial illustrations, children's books, and so forth, so clearly it must be serving some value or else so many people wouldn't be availing themselves of what it offers."

Yes, clearly it is performing a function, but what is that function? I'm going to argue that that function isn't primarily to make imagery, but to get (access) imagery. AI art programs serve as a stand in for a sophisticated search engine, access to most of the world's images, and a magical copyright begone wand.

If the same money put into AI art programs had been put into scraping all the images off the web, but instead of using them as the basis of AI art using them as a free-to-everyone image library searchable with an extremely responsive search engine, then I bet that this would be even more useful for most purposes (especially article images and illustrations) than AI. Most of the time when someone uses an AI image there's a very good chance that there is an original painting or photograph out there that would have been even better for their purpose, but they either couldn't find it (save by finding it as a derivative in the form of AI art) or they could find it but couldn't use it because of copyright, watermarks, or too low resolution.

So a massive repository of images, a very responsive search engine, and a magical copyright begone wand are all real functions of AI art programs, but none of those actually have to do with creating artwork; they all have to do with archiving, retrieving, and removing copyright.

Let me show you a hypothetical: suppose I wrote a space science fiction book, decided I wanted a nice dramatic cover for it, and so I wrote a prompt into an AI image generator. All I say is in the style of John Harris, that's it: I literally wrote that right now and got this:

Okay, well, clearly the image generator has in its data base the works of the English artist John Harris, known especially for his science fiction covers, because I didn't say space based. The image generator mostly kicked out space-ish sci-fi though, so they must have his works tagged along those lines. Some users are probably getting derivatives of John Harris without even realizing it when they put in space-related prompts, not to mention many other artists whose works are being copied with enough machine alteration that we'll never learn whose art we're actually looking at (in derivative form).

But I didn't need that derivative image above; nobody needs it; it added nothing to the world, there already existed something much better:

The AI-prompted derivative is nowhere near on par with the original John Harris painting (above) that it appears to be somewhat based on, and the same could be said for all manner of AI art – on the rare occasions when you can figure out what the source material is for the AI, the source material is almost always better. But, in my hypothetical situation the AI is serving a purpose . . . as a copyright begone wand. The original John Harris above is copyrighted, whereas the AI derivative would be unlikely to face a copyright challenge.

Provenance

Messages generally do not exist in a vacuum. Who said it, when they said it, where they said it, and how they said it, are all aspects that can contribute to, and alter the meaning of the message. AI black boxes that do not allow us to see what the imagery is based on strip away all this information. Multiple layers of meaning are removed. AI images are atomized images. In contrast paintings are enmeshed within the webs of human societies, individual lives, and specific times and places.

Let's look at some examples:

The Raft of the Medusa (above) was controversial, because it is a dramatic, vast painting (16 by 23 feet), of proportions and seriousness usually reserved at the time (1819) for high, noble, biblical, mythological, and historical depictions. But what this painting depicts is in fact scandalous. A sensational shipwreck with the captain's competence called into question, that led to the death of most of the crew, with survivors resorting to cannibalism.

Was it worth this artist putting an immense amount of time, energy, research, and expense, into creating a monument to that tragic and sordid event? An open question. I like the painting, though personally I'm with the critics from two centuries ago on this one — I don't think the subject justifies the monumental proportions and effort.

No AI art will ever lead to such a scandal and such a debate because there is no threshold at which something becomes worthy of being painted with AI.

Late 19th century paintings celebrating ordinary people, farmers, fishermen, children, and peasants, have sometimes been derided as "sentimental" by ivory towered – art world – air headed – smooth brained – know nothings. On the contrary, there is nothing wrong with sentiment, and these late 19th century paintings are remarkable. These paintings represent artists dedicating the same time and skill that used to be reserved primarily for paintings of kings and queens and high subjects – to painting peasants. So I think you can see some very positive social significance to that.

AI art does not have such social significance. The medium cannot convey a comparable message of loving time, care, skill, and attention dedicated to the subject.

Even when it comes to weirdness, AI art can't match the weirdness of real art. Anyone can get a weird image by prompting AI, and what of it? That's just goofing off. In contrast it takes a real weirdo to dedicate hard-won talent and and skill to envisioning and summoning into this world a weird vision to be shared with the audience. For example: knowing how serious and dedicated Cormon had to be to plan out and see through to completion his epic painting Cain is part of what makes it so delightfully deranged.

Direct Experience

Every artist's work will be partly derivative, based on influence and inspiration from other artists who provide the foundation that they're building on. But their work will also involve their own observations of the world. Real life and the real world are breezes that continually freshen up and ground the artist's work. For example, we can feel Maynard Dixon's own experience of moonlit nights informing his painting Roadside.

But of course AI is never going to draw upon its own experience of a moonlit night. Rather than combining inspiration from other artists with its own experience, AI is entirely derivative.

In Summary

Mediums are there to convey messages. Nobody needs content for the sake of content. There exists already a vast quantity of written and visual material. The principal issue isn't a shortage of content; the issue is quality content getting swamped by junk content. The main contribution of generative AI has been, and most likely will continue to be, making the problem worse, by increasing the quantity of junk derivative work that we have to wade through to get to high-quality original information and imagery.

Ah, the wonders of big tech – right when the internet was already drowning in garbage from clickbait and hackwork they came along and provided us with a state of the art junk generator like no one had ever seen before.

Speakers (as in communicators) who have something of value to share with us will share it by saying it themselves through writing, painting, speaking, photography or some other medium of communication. If someone delegates the task to generative AI, that is a sure sign that they either had nothing to say, or that what they did have to say wasn't worth taking their own time to say, and consequently isn't worth our time to listen to or look at.

P. S. If you are a writer/content creator, you are more than welcome to use images of my paintings off my website as illustrations for your own blog posts, and videos as needed. I only have some 50 or a 100 images up online, but still, every bit helps to reduce the use of generative AI. Should you take me up on this, please just credit the image source with my name and a hyperlink to my website page where you found the image.

Conciliatory Note:

In this essay I have shown no mercy in my trashing of AI art, and I should have kept it that way because that was fun. But unfortunately I struggled with my inner angel (damn him). He got the better of me, marched me back to the keyboard, sat me down, seized the controls to my arms and hands, and forced me to write this conciliatory note (that's the real danger of letting my essays sit for so long before publishing as I generally do; it gives that nasty little goody two shoes too many openings to slip words in edgewise).

So here's the thing – many independent writers, podcasters, and documentary makers, whose work is of a high quality, and clearly a labor of love, do use AI for much of their imagery. I would not want to demoralize, or denigrate these hardworking communicators, and to be fair (and it looks like I'm going to be fair now, I guess . . . because of my whiny, killjoy, oversensitive, conscience that keeps intruding on my writing) they have a legitimate (?! . . . Well, how about at least understandable) reason for their use of AI.

Namely, they are usually verbal communicators, who use written and spoken words to convey their message, not visual artists. They are under no obligation to provide any imagery at all to accompany and enhance their verbal message, meaning that even when they use AI for their imagery, that represents them going above and beyond and putting in more work, not less, into the crafting and delivery of their message. They are creating multimedia productions and delegating to AI the visual imagery part at which they are not themselves specialists.

So maybe I should appreciate their effort rather than harshly condemning them? Well I do in fact appreciate their efforts, and I enjoy many indie media productions, but appreciating their use of AI art? That's a bridge too far, but I'll compromise; I'll hold off on the condemnation . . . or, well . . . I won't heap it on so thick. They don't have my blessing for their use of AI art, but they do have my understanding.

I understand that they are still playing an active role in their use of AI through selective editorial decisions and using the imagery to set the tone and visual ambiance. For the same level of effort they may be getting more exciting, personalized, and appropriate imagery than what they would get by hunting through free stock photography and clip art which look like they might be getting sloppified by a flood of AI junk anyway.

As I mentioned earlier in this essay, AI has had so much money and effort poured into it that in many ways it is a huge image library (maybe the biggest ever) with more images, and a more responsive search engine than other image repositories. And of course the copyright begone magic of AI art lets you draw upon even bodies of modern sci-fi and fantasy art (in derivative, degraded form) that would otherwise be protected by copyright.

So there, see, I am understanding, merciful, and magnanimous. Can my inner angel please let me go now and end this commie struggle session? Good, thank you. So all that being said, I encourage content creators to think about the imagery they use not just as a decoration, or ambience setting; instead think about doing this:

When you can, use your illustration needs to draw attention to original works. The images free of copyright concerns are usually going to be older works of art and photographs. Where applicable use them instead of AI. Credit the image source and drop a few details in (name of the artist, year of the work). I don't think that I am alone as a reader in being more impressed by an article illustration where the author or editor used an old artwork instead of AI – because suddenly it's not just a decoration on the article – it's a curated selection, it's a historical connection, and it's a step in re-popularizing painting.

Again, AI art is atomized and disconnected – paintings, on the other hand, are enmeshed within human society and history. We have lost much of the connection with the bodies of visual work from the past. That's not AI's fault. Painting was cast down from its prominent position that it held in the late 19th century, not by any new technology, but by the hostile takeover of the artworld by anti-art Emperor's Tailors (after their success making him his new clothes they set about popularizing the Emperor's New Art) who alienated the public from painting.

The public, from all walks of life, used to crowd into the salons every year to see the works of their nation's visual artists. The hostile takeover of the art world by the Emperor's Tailors drove out the good art, and elevated Emperor's New Clothes style art (blank canvases, upturned urinals, sharks in formaldehyde, Campbells soup cans, etc.) and through this they alienated the public from painting.

Good art never stopped being produced, it just lost most of its official, and institutional patronage. A contemporary artist like John Harris, for example, (who we looked at earlier) found patronage for his work through science fiction book covers. In two books published on John Harris's work (Beyond the Horizon, and Into the Blue) the introductions mention that John Harris drew inspiration from the Romantic art movement of the 19th century, and the Orientalists, so we can see that a modern science fiction artist is connected to the historic flow and web of a visual art movement stretching back centuries.

Let's pause a moment to appreciate Meckel's painting above. The original is over six feet across the long side, so of course we're not going to get the full impact from a picture of the painting, but we can still get a lot. The composition is strong, and stands out clearly even at a thumbnail scale (so it would grab your attention from across the room when seen in person). There's plenty of breathing room, it's bright and airy. Yet, when we inspect the details (which Meckel wisely concentrated/grouped so that they contribute to, rather than ruin the composition) we find ourselves enjoying an almost Where's Waldo? [Where's Wally?] type of fun.

The woman in the lower left of the composition smoking a cigarette is smiling at something funny or mischievous said by someone with their back to us. The rocks behind her are lit from beneath with warm light bouncing off the sand back into the shadows. The man to her left, the most prominent figure in the piece, looks like he has stopped in to chat while about on other business. Deeper into the painting we find women washing clothes, and goats and donkeys on the bank. A brilliant extravaganza.

Continuing with the contemporary artist's connection to the past: the artist Steve Henderson (my dad) has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of artists and art movements, stretching from renaissance Italy and 19th century Russia into early 20th century American illustrators. So he is deeply informed by and connected to the historical flow of visual communication.

(In the Witching Hour above, I like it that, despite the title, there are actually no overt symbols of magic; all the magic needed in this case, is in the gathering dusk, the dark trees, and the shimmering water surrounding the woman's central figure.)

The flow of realist imagery, in for example, oil painting, runs unbroken from headwaters in the late middle ages right down to the present day – for some. But for much of the public the connection is broken.

That's where writers can elevate their article illustrations beyond mere decorations. Each illustration, if you can find a suitable pre-existing image, is an opportunity to re-familiarize and reconnect the audience with the flow of visual communication – a place where you can use those visuals to highlight great original creative works rather than merely generating more machine-made derivatives.

For old artworks, no problem, if they're old enough to be in the public domain, high resolution images through Wikimedia commons, auction houses, and museums, are getting easier and easier to come by. Late 19th century works tend to be especially accessible to, and easily appreciated by, a modern audience.

For contemporary artists – well, it's up to us, the copyright holders, to give permission to indie media creators to use our art as illustration in their blog posts and videos. And I would encourage contemporary artists to consider doing that, because the AI programs have probably already scraped your images off the web and are using them to make derivative artwork; wouldn't you rather that your original creative work go out instead of anonymous derivatives of it? And that way you at least get credit for your work.

Closing Thoughts

I really am going to end this essay before wandering off on another tangent, so don't worry, any paragraph now I'll end this essay. But first, a couple last thoughts:

Encouraging Snobbery

The public tends to hate AI art. They've become art snobs. That's wonderful, and I hope that my essay here will serve to embolden the AI art haters. While not all uses of AI art are damnable offenses (maybe just purgatory), any attempt, though, to place machine-made derivative art images alongside natural intelligence, man-made art, is a crude insult to human agency and organic sources of inspiration.

Expecting the audience to take machine-made derivative art seriously is unreasonable and the audience is right to be offended by this.

I encourage people not to let fears of hypocrisy get in the way of practicing snobbery towards AI art:

Let's say that someone sees an image and they love it. But then they find out it's AI. Now they want to withdraw their approval, and instead actively dislike the image, but they think that might be hypocritical of them. That now they are somehow bound to continue liking the image. But no, they are under no such constraints.

It is always acceptable to change your mind based on new information. It is perfectly legitimate to begin disliking an image that you initially liked after you find out it's AI.

Remember, communication doesn't happen in a vacuum. Who said it, how they said it, and so forth, are factors that can change the meaning of a statement, such as a painting. As you find out more about an artistic statement, it is natural, and right, and healthy, that your opinion of the work evolves and changes.

For example: I initially disliked Frida Kahlo's work – wasn't my cup of tea, but as I found out more about the pain and struggle Kahlo endured and used her canvases to express, my opinion changed, now I can appreciate her work to some degree.

A terrible bus accident with a trolley impaled Kahlo's pelvis with a handrail, broke her spine in multiple locations, crushed her foot, and a long list of other injuries left Kahlo with recurrent pain and illness from that point on. The Broken Column is an example of her working through her pain on canvas:

As another example of someone reasonably changing their view of an artwork based on new (to them) information, let's look at Fragonard's The Swing.

My sister used to love this painting . . . till she found out that the man in the bushes is looking up the skirt of his mistress, while her husband in the shadows propels her on the swing. Then she wasn't so enthused about this painting anymore. That's a reasonable reassessment. The painting at first seems sweet and enchanting but upon closer inspection is sullied by the questionable subject it portrays. It seems to me to represent upper class moral rot, but celebrates and trivializes it rather than criticizes it.

The first artist approached with the commission, Gabriel François Doyen, is said to have refused the commission, and it would have been to Fragonard's credit if he too had turned it down.

As a final example of why it is appropriate to dislike something you initially liked, upon finding out more about it, such as that it is AI, there is of course the story I provided earlier in this essay Mr. Busy Calls his Mother, where Mr. Busy's mother went from being happy about her son touching base by phone, to being offended when she gained new information about the phone call – that it was AI. And I think we would all see her change of mind in the hypothetical story to be justified.

Honest to Goodness, Final Paragraph(s), For Real This Time

By this point it's probably started to dawn on you that this essay doesn't have much to do with Treebeard. You may be wondering how much it really even has to do with AI art. That only 1 image in this essay, out of 22 images, is AI art is perhaps a little suspicious.

Well, AI art provided a good foil for discussing real paintings. If you weren't enthusiastic about paintings before, I hope that some of my enthusiasm has rubbed off on you. If your snobbery towards AI had begun to waver I trust my arguments will have renewed your aversion to it. And finally (really), if the pretentious word salads of the art establishment had alienated you from paintings I hope that my plainspoken essay will have brought you back.

Jordan Henderson is an artist from the Northwest of the United States. His original paintings can be Viewed Here, Art Prints Here, and Essays Here.

4. Adolf Hitler and the zio-imperialist mafia

A book review by Paul Cudenec

If I had to name one revelation that would rock to its foundations the conventional understanding of recent history, it would be that Adolf Hitler was a tool of the same criminocratic cabal that today runs Britain, the USA, Israel and just about everywhere else.

And now here it is, on the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, presented in sumptuously undeniable detail by Jim Macgregor and John O'Dowd in their book Two World Wars and Hitler. [1]

Such notions are not entirely new, of course, and the two Scots authors give due credit to Professors Antony Sutton (Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler) and Guido Preparata (Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich).

But the strength of their newly-published work, and the reason why it stretches to 700 pages, lies in their careful construction of the historical context, enabling us to see exactly who was behind the Hitler manoeuvre and how it was carried out as part of a long-term plan.

They explain that Hitler came the attention of the victorious "Allies" just after the end of WW1 because of "his powerful voice, that could readily incite large crowds to fever pitch". [2]

They add: "Anglo-American banking and political elites responsible for the war, chose Hitler for a major role in post-war Germany.

"To that end they placed two of their senior intelligence agents (one English, one German-American) directly at Hitler's side in the early 1920s and funded him, groomed him for power, and helped him promote his despicable Nazi philosophy.

"Having actively manoeuvred Hitler and his Nazi party into dictatorial power in Germany, those same Anglo-American elites proceeded to fund them and build their massive new military machine in preparation for another world war.

"Those elites planned another war, wanted another war, and would ensure that it happened". [3]

"Elites" is not a term I personally favour to describe the ruling clique, implying as it does some kind of merit, but to whom exactly are Macgregor and O'Dowd referring here?

Among many sources, they cite Edwin Knuth's book The Empire of "The City": The Secret History of British Financial Power in which he explains that British foreign policy is not decided in a democratic fashion but by massively wealthy and powerful individuals involved in international finance in the City of London. [4]

The City is a law unto itself, to the bankers that control the Corporation, and Knuth insists that it is so rich and powerful that no incident occurs anywhere in the world without its participation in some form or other.

He asks: "How has it been possible to erect this Internationalistic structure of misrepresentation and deception in our midst and to protect it from exposure?

"Why have not our professors of history, our college presidents and educators, our crusading newspapers exposed this monstrosity?" [5]

Knuth goes on to answer these questions himself, when he describes the "propaganda machine of 'The City', and its almost absolute control over world news and sources of public information". [6]

Macgregor's two books on the First World War, co-authored with the late Gerry Docherty, were a great help for me in understanding not just the reality of that conflict, but also the nature of the entity that manufactured it. [7]

Here, he and O'Dowd confirm this information and, while often using Professor Carroll Quigley's term "The Anglo-American Establishment", make it quite clear that the ultimate hidden power is that of the Rothschilds and what I have personally taken to calling the zio-imperialist mafia – ZIM for short.

This has long been a difficult truth to speak, but with the horrendous crimes against humanity now being carried out, with apparent impunity, by Israel, people all over the world have decided that they can no longer ignore it.

The injunctions from on high against exposing ZIM only confirm its role. As Macgregor and O'Dowd advise: "Remember the old saying: if you want to know who controls you, guess whom you are not allowed to criticise!". [8]

In the context of Hitler's funding by Wall Street, it was important, in this book, to have firmly established the true, although concealed, identity of those bankers – something that unfortunately eluded Professor Sutton, for example.

The authors, citing Quigley's warning that this group was after "world domination" [9] explain that its bid to control the American political system "would largely be achieved by Rothschild control of US finances via affiliated banking fronts on Wall Street that served to disguise and obscure their activities there.

"Officially appointed Rothschild biographers tell us that the dynasty had little influence in the United States, but the reality, as we shall see, was very different". [10]

They trace the Rothschilds' involvement in American banking back to 1837 when they sent an agent to New York "to open a front bank for the dynasty and get involved in politics". [11]

This man, born Aaron Schönberg, had been trained at the Rothschild banks in Frankfurt and Naples before being sent across the Atlantic.

On arriving in the USA, he mysteriously turned into August Belmont. Author Stephen Birmingham relates: "Furthermore, he was no longer a Jew, but a gentile, and no longer German but, as people in New York began to say, 'Some sort of Frenchman – we think'". [12]

"With the United States in the grip of a financial panic in 1837, 'Belmont' organised large Rothschild loans to shore up debtor banks there.

"He was able, thanks to the hugeness of the Rothschild reservoir of capital, to start out in America operating his own Federal Reserve System". [13]

Macgregor and O'Dowd add: "Belmont organised massive Rothschild loans to the United States government – at considerable profit to his masters – and for years was Chairman of the Democratic National Committee that governed the Democratic Party". [14]

On Belmont's death in 1890, his son August Belmont Jr (pictured) took over the role of Rothschild agent and was, in the words of John E Morris, "not only a leading banker, but played a larger civic role. He helped bail out the United States government when it was on the verge of default in 1895; he financed, built and ran New York City's first subway; and he constructed the Cape Cod Canal". [15]

Macgregor and O'Dowd observe that the Rothschilds thus already had considerable influence in the USA and that the American government "was in considerable debt to them". [16]

But this was just the start.

"From 1890 on, the leading bank on Wall Street, the JP Morgan bank, played a far greater role for the Rothschilds in the United States than August Belmont ever did.

"No bank the Rothschilds controlled in the United States had their name above the door, but through Morgan – and other banks – they had a massive, albeit covert, presence on Wall Street.

"Their modus operandi was to step in with large injections of cash to save banks and companies that were struggling and facing foreclosure, then operate them as fronts under the original company name and directors.

"With virtually unlimited Rothschild resources now behind these rescued banks – and there were others in the US beside JP Morgan – they quickly recovered and became highly profitable.

"In this way, the Rothschild dynasty was able to keep its all-encompassing wealth, influence and power in the United States hidden". [17]

This generally unacknowledged reality is, in itself, of vast historical significance, as Macgregor and O'Dowd make clear.

They marshal the judgement of Ellen Hodgson Brown, who states that while Wall Street bankers were controlling politics, leading universities, and the writing of history, it has to be clearly understood that "behind the Wall Street bankers were powerful British financiers". [18]

And they add: "JP Morgan was the most powerful banker on Wall Street, but behind him was the hidden power of the Rothschilds. [19]

"Morgan was as close to the Rothschilds as King Edward, and with the dynasty's resources behind him, he played a major role in creating massive industrial trusts, including US Steel in 1901.

"He controlled at least one-fifth of all corporations trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and had huge investments in American railroads.

"Morgan didn't build, he bought. Monopoly, not competition, was the name of the game, with competitors simply being bought out". [20]

Nomi Prins explains: "Morgan spread his control across the First National Bank, National City Bank, the Hanover Bank, the Liberty Bank and Trust, Chase National Bank, and the nation's major insurance companies". [21]

He also created a fleet of more than 120 merchant ships and owned the White Star shipping line, which included the Titanic. [22]

Macgregor and O'Dowd describe how the Morgan enterprise and the likes of Kuhn, Loeb & Co [23] and the Warburg bank [24] were "simply an extension of Rothschild in the City, London". [25]

They stress: "Through the corrupt Money Trust, industries, insurance companies, railroads, transportation, and public utilities across the United States were gobbled up, leaving virtually the entire nation in the hands of a few men on Wall Street.

"Those few men were themselves in the hands of a much greater power across the Atlantic in London". [26]

The creation of the Federal Reserve System was a crucial prelude to WW1 and was, the authors point out, engineered by financiers who "were all linked to Rothschild in one way or another" [27] and funded the First World War "on a mountain of debt". [28]

I have already written about the lies and manipulation that created and prolonged that horrific bloodbath in 'A Crime against humanity: the Great Reset of 1914-18', a 2022 article greatly inspired by Macgregor's previous work. [29]

So I won't cover all the same ground here, while stressing that the central theme of the current tome is that the two wars form part of the same story.

Take, for instance, the strange family continuity involving Henry Morgenthau, an oligarch who "worked closely with the big insurance companies controlled by JP Morgan" and "mixed with a group of elite families in the New York area, including the Kuhns and Loebs of the Kuhn, Loeb & Co Bank on Wall Street, and Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg, the bank's directors" [30] – a group once referred to as the "Jewish Grand Dukes". [31]

Morgenthau (pictured) bankrolled Woodrow Wilson's presidential campaign and then became US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

He says in his memoir that Wilson told him: "Constantinople is the point at which the interest of the Jews of Palestine is focussed, and it is almost indispensable that I have a Jew at that post". [32]

It is clear here that ZIM was already manoeuvring for the creation of its settler colony "Israel", built on what was at that time still Ottoman territory.

It is interesting to note, as an aside, that the House of Commons debate about Britain's declaration of war in 1914 was closed down by none other than Lord Balfour, whose 1917 Balfour Declaration paved the way for the Zionist state that came into existence as the result of WW2. [33]

Morgenthau's son, Henry Morgenthau Jr, did a similar job to his father in the run-up to WW2, funding the presidential campaign of ZIM-friendly Franklin Roosevelt.

He was duly appointed US Secretary of the Treasury (1934-45) and in 1944 he presented his "Morgenthau Plan" for post-war Germany, which demanded that "Germany and the world accept the collective guilt of the German people as the explanation for the rise of Hitler's New Order and the Nazi war crimes". [34]

I note from Wikipedia that he was also appointed temporary president of the Bretton Woods Conference, which established the Bretton Woods system, the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank). [35]

On the strong connection and parallels between the two world wars, Macgregor and O'Dowd write: "The masses had been encouraged to view the carnage of 1914-18 as 'the war to end all wars', but it was neither the end nor the beginning of the end, for the so-called First and Second World Wars were not unconnected entities but a continuum.

"Professor Guido G. Preparata relates that the so-called 'First World War' had merely been Act One of what was essentially a Thirty Years War between 1914 and 1945". [36]

It was for this reason, the authors explain, that Hitler was selected and groomed by the zio-imperialist mafia – to enable the continuation of this war.

There was nothing new about this kind of international political manipulation by the London-based ZIM deep state.

Macgregor and O'Dowd refer, for instance, to Cambridge University historian Dr Peter Markland's 2009 revelation of "British secret intelligence documents which clearly indicated that Benito Mussolini had been a richly rewarded asset of British secret intelligence (later named MI5)". [37]

The documents revealed that, in addition to Mussolini, the British deep state was running 100 agents in Italy towards the end of WW1. [38]

The primary ZIM agent guiding Hitler, from 1923 to 1937, was Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, "a German-American Harvard graduate and friend of leading politicians in Washington and top financiers on Wall Street". [39]

The authors say that the part this man played in grooming and preparing Hitler "cannot be overstated" and "was absolutely crucial for his rise to power". [40]

"That so few today have even heard of Hanfstaengl is testimony to the success of the Anglo-American Establishment's fake history in whitewashing him and his true role from the record". [41]

Hanfstaengl's connections to the ruling mafia are set out in great detail in the book and there can be no question of what he was really was.

Macgregor and O'Dowd insist that Hanfstaengl was "not simply an outsider who just happened to be passively connected to all of these individuals involved in the murky world of Anglo-American secret intelligence, spying and false flag outrages, he was one of them". [42]

Hanfstaengl himself relates in his memoir how, while in London, he visited former prime minister David Lloyd George – a key figure in ZIM's WW1 racket – who gave him a signed photograph of himself to take back to Germany, inscribed "To Chancellor Hitler, in admiration of his courage, determination and leadership". [43]

And, in case of any lingering doubt about the ZIM/British connection, when the deputy head of MI5, Guy Liddell, flew to Berlin for a ten-day stay in March 1933, his host was none other than Hitler's great pal Hanfstaengl! [44]

Eventually, much too late, it seems that Hitler saw through him and in 1937 Hanfstaengl fled across the Swiss border and on to England, fearing that the dictator was going to have him killed. [45]

But it seems strange to me that Hitler, or somebody in his entourage, did not smell a rat from the start.

Why did Hitler – a penniless, shabbily-dressed minor agitator – imagine that this upper-class socialite, who was regularly invited to play piano at the White House and is said to have been a friend of Winston Churchill, [46] would want to invite him into his life?

Did he really fall for the fib that Hanfstaengl, along with powerful figures in the US and the UK, supported him in his hatred of communism and that those states would therefore back him, or at least not oppose him, in his war on the USSR?

Or maybe he didn't care. Flattered by all the sudden attention; enchanted by Hanfstaengl, his wife and child, who became his godson; installed in a posh new home; chauffeured around the place in a Mercedes limousine [47] – little Adolf from Austria wasn't going to ask too many questions.

His fantasy of fame and power was coming true and – despite the incessant nationalistic rhetoric that he spewed forth in his rabble-rousing speeches – the interests of the German people were evidently of much less importance to him than his personal ego trip.

The first task facing Hanfstaengl and his ZIM accomplices was to ensure that their man, Hitler, came to power in Germany.

With his education in theatre and music, Hanfstaengl taught Hitler how to speak well in public, using his hands to dramatic effect, and he even composed or adapted tunes to serve as Nazi marching songs. [48]

At the same time, vast amounts of money mysteriously materialised to fund the "National Socialist" cause.

Although Hanfstaengl officially had no job and had reportedly lost much of his personal fortune, say Macgregor and O'Dowd, he was "somehow able to provide important funding to the Nazi party's newspaper, the Völkische Beobachter (People's Observer), turning it from a modest four-page once or twice weekly newspaper into an influential full-size daily" [49] and a palace in Munich was converted into a prestigious new party HQ, "the Brown House". [50]

Hanfstaengl was very close to Hitler right from the time of his early abortive coup attempt, the "Beer Hall Putsch" of 1923, and after the agitator was released from Landsberg prison in 1924, his first port of call was Hanfstaengl's home. [51]

When the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei's fortunes were on the rise in 1930, Hanfstaengl was placed in control of its foreign press department and thereafter arranged all foreign press interviews with Hitler and other leading Nazis, some days receiving more than a hundred calls from journalists across the world. [52]

Meanwhile, a second ZIM agent gained access to Hitler and his inner NSDAP circle – Baron William (Bill) Sylvester de Ropp of British intelligence, who posed as a journalist for The Times. [53]

Macgregor and O'Dowd explain: "It is important to recognise that Putzi Hanfstaengl and Bill de Ropp were not placed directly alongside Hitler to discourage him from war, but to continually encourage him into preparing for it while at the same time making him believe that Britain would not intervene.

"It was almost an exact re-run of the charade played out by Sir Edward Grey, King George V, and other leading players in July 1914 to convince Kaiser Wilhelm II that Britain would not intervene". [54]

De Ropp's role was to act as a "pipeline" between London and Berlin, persuading the Nazis of this fake narrative. [55]

It has also been suggested, by Welsh author Gwynne Thomas, that he played a part in raising funds for the Nazi election campaigns from the City of London. [56]

By 1932 the wealth of the Nazi party meant Hitler and Hanfstaengl could fly back and forth across Germany in a private aircraft, in their electoral campaigning. [57]

It also meant it could afford to pay party officials and to maintain the brownshirt SA militia, which alone cost two and half million marks a week. [58]

Once Hitler had accessed power by electoral means, the door had to be firmly shut and bolted behind him and ZIM agent Hanfstaengl appears to have been closely involved in the notorious Reichstag fire which served as the excuse for the imposition of dictatorship and the Enabling Act which allowed Hitler to bypass parliament and rule by decree. [59]

I was very much struck by the account of how Hanfstaengl immediately summoned to the scene of the fire a journalist from Britain's Daily Express, to whom Hitler declared, with no evidence whatsoever: "Without doubt this is the work of the communists". [60]

This is so similar to the declarations of ZIM puppet-leaders straight after false flag atrocities such as 9/11 and 7/7 – in those instances "the Muslims" being "without doubt" responsible – that it is frankly impossible for me not to regard it as issuing from the same playbook.

The evidence presented by Macgregor and O'Dowd suggests that Hitler was a dupe, a useful idiot, rather than a conscious accomplice, because there seems to have been a constant need to deceive him as to UK/US intentions.

He would not have expanded the Reich eastwards and invaded Russia if he thought there was any chance of the English-speaking states turning against him and opening up a war on two fronts that the Germans could never win.

Macgregor and O'Dowd explain how the "appeasement" narrative was rolled out to advance this deception.

They write: "Virtually every message in Hitler's ear told him that Britain supported Germany's position as a bulwark against Bolshevism and would back him.

"This encouragement – deliberately mislabelled 'appeasement' – was geared to ensuring that Hitler would be bold enough to move against Russia". [61]

Preparata writes on the subject: "To make him dream even more wildly, the British Services cast Edward VIII, the Prince of Wales and successor to the British throne, as an outspoken, fervent Nazi partisan.

"The Nazis are thenceforth made to believe that there truly is in England a wide and pervasive Nazi-phile underground headed by a royal scion, and fed by deep capillaries inside the political apparatus, the near totality of the corporate structure, and vast sections of the intelligentsia.

"It is all stupendous make-believe; in truth, not one of such British 'sympathizers', not even those few homegrown gangs of fascist copycats, appears to be wholly genuine". [62]

Since we are all-too familiar in the 2020s with the fake "left" and the fake "environmentalists" deployed to advance ZIM's agenda, it should be no surprise to learn that they also historically used fake fascists for the same purpose.

Zionist funding for anti-Muslim and pro-Israel "far right" groups demonstrates that the practice lives on today. [63]

The financial aspect of ZIM's backing for Hitler was not confined to the activities of its agents Hanfstaengl and de Ropp.

It had installed one of its own men as president of the Reichsbank in Germany.

Hjalmar Schacht cut his bankster teeth working for the Dresdner Bank in Berlin, which was linked to the Morgan/Rothschild entity. [64]

Sutton states: "In brief, Schacht was a member of the international financial elite that wields power behind the scenes through the political apparatus of a nation. He is the key link between the Wall Street elite and Hitler's inner circle". [65]

Schacht pretended to be a genuine admirer of Hitler and helped raise money for him, boasting privately in 1932 that he had the future Führer "right in my pocket". [66]

Add Macregor and O'Dowd: "He was a central player in creating the group of German industrialists and landowners that pushed Hindenburg to appoint the first Nazi government in 1933.

"Although Schacht never joined the NSDAP, he would serve in Adolf Hitler's government as President of the Reichsbank from 1933 to 1939 and as Nazi Germany's Minster of Economics from August 1934 to November 1937.

"Schacht was tried at Nuremberg for 'conspiracy' and 'crimes against peace' (planning and waging wars of aggression), but not war crimes or crimes against humanity".

Thanks to British judges, he was acquitted of serious charges and although sentenced to eight years' jail in post-war Germany, he was released on appeal and opened a new bank, Deutsche Aussenhandelsbank Schacht & Co.

Remark the authors: "Schacht's long and intimate relationship with City and Wall Street bankers saved his skin". [67]

Just to complete the conspiratorial circle, as well as being a very good chum of Bank of England governor Montagu Norman – described by Macgregor and O'Dowd as "one of the greatest financial evil geniuses of all time" [68] – Schacht was also a "close friend" of ZIM agent Hanfstaengl! [69]

Another key thread in the financial strings controlling the banking mafia's puppet, Adolf Hitler, was the Bank for International Settlements, established in Basel, Switzerland, in 1929.

Quigley says it was set up to create "a world system of financial control" [70] and Charles Higham describes its initial role as a "money funnel for American and British funds to flow into Hitler's coffers and to help Hitler build up his war machine". [71]

Macgregor and O'Dowd explain: "The BIS conducted this business in total secrecy, without political interference, and beyond democratic control". [72]

The bank "was owned and controlled by the small group of astronomically wealthy and powerful men in the City, London, and Wall Street, New York, who were responsible for the First World War, and were now creating the right conditions for igniting the Second World War". [73]

Having seen how ZIM used Hitler to manufacture the Second World War, we should now ask why this aim was so important to them.

I have already addressed this general issue in the 2024 essay 'Wars, resets and the global criminocracy', so I won't repeat myself here. [74]

Suffice to say that making lots of money in every conceivable way always forms an important motivation in the murderous mafia's lust for war.

For instance, William Engdahl writes: "By 1917, the British War Office had placed purchase orders totalling more than $20,000,000,000 through the House of Morgan". [75]

He adds that, by the end of WWI, Britain and its allies owed "the United States" – or rather the Wall Street banks controlled by the Rothschildian mafia – $12,500,000,000 at five per cent interest. [76]

This would represent a phenomenal sum in today's money – comparable, perhaps, only to the billions of dollars constantly flowing into the coffers of Rothschild-controlled Ukraine… [77]

Macgregor and O'Dowd write: "To finance the 1914-18 war, Britain and France had taken loans from American banks – mostly JP Morgan – and from 1919 had to repay the loans plus interest.

"The difficulty, not least for the JP Morgan bank, was that Britain and France had been virtually bankrupted by the war and were struggling to pay their war debts to the United States.

"After the United States' forced entry into the First World War, the US provided Britain and France with loans amounting to $8.8 billion.

"The total sum of war debt owed to the US, including loans offered between 1919 and 1921, reached $11 billion.

"To solve their own financial problems Britain and France went after Germany, forcing it to pay enormous sums in reparations under extremely difficult conditions.

"The rigged Treaty of Versailles war reparations demands had effectively made Germany responsible for everyone's debts.

"She would be obliged to pay enormous sums of money to Britain and France who would then use it to pay their debt to Wall Street". [78]

A veritable heist was carried out by ZIM against Germany, with a plan concocted which would enable the country to pay the outrageous WW1 reparations by borrowing vast amounts of money from Wall Street (ie ZIM itself) through the sale of German bonds. [79]

"Financial manipulation was required," add Macgregor and O'Dowd. "Germany's sovereign national currency, hitherto backed by gold reserves, was replaced by US bank-based debt currency. Quite a trick!

"The bankers got Germany's gold, Germany got the bankers' paper! And all the while the bankers took control of German industry and the German economy". [80]

A second reason why ZIM likes wars is that they enable it to advance its industrialist agenda – the great death-machine that converts living matter and vital energy into yet more fuel for its own imperial-financial domination.

Macgregor and O'Dowd note: "From 1924, American banks – JP Morgan in particular – started pouring money into Germany to create a number of giant industrial cartels which would generate vast profits for Wall Street and help set Germany up for the second phase of the Thirty Years War". [81]

"Germany was like putty in the hands of the international bankers… It would be reconstructed according to the wishes of the bankers". [82]

As I have been at pains to point out in recent years, the process known as "development" or "modernisation" is the carefully planned increase of ZIM's centralised power and control at everyone else's expense. [83]

Industrial development is the means by which we have all been dispossessed, torn from the land, exploited and enslaved in mines, factories and offices, reduced to units of human capital to be farmed or culled by our imperial overlords, as they see fit.

One of the big players in the Nazi-industrialist racket was General Electric.

Both Charles Dawes and Owen D Young, who gave their names to the post-WWI "build back better" plans, were linked to this vast business.

Macgregor and O'Dowd write that "the giant General Electric Company in the United States with which James Dawes was connected, was a JP Morgan entity" – and that Dawes was a "puppet of JP Morgan" and therefore of ZIM. [84]

They continue: "Owen D. Young, after whom the Young Plan was named, was a JP Morgan man and deputy chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at 120 Broadway. At that same address he was a director of International General Electric". [85]

This address also hosted the "American International Corporation" which conducted pro-Bolshevik activity in Russia, as exposed by Sutton. [86]

Totalitarian communism in Russia and Nazism in Germany were both ZIM projects.

This is why, as Preparata explains, ZIM's "red" proxies were also in on the game of manipulating Hitler.

"None of this would have been possible without the unreserved collaboration of Soviet Russia.

"The Soviets worked in unison with the anti-German directives of Britain as if they were her most faithful ally.

"They, like Britain, appeased the Führer, and contributed abundantly to the Nazi war machine by shipping provisions to Germany throughout the entire length of the Nazi rearmament". [87]

Our authors also expose the role in Nazi Germany of ITT – a "Morgan-controlled company" [88] which provided, among other things, parts for the rocket bombs that sent my own parents scurrying for cover in the London suburbs during WW2. [89]

Chemicals giant I.G. Farben, notorious for its proximity to the Nazi regime, was controlled by directors who included ZIM stalwarts Max Warburg of the MM Warburg bank in Hamburg and his brother Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co in Wall Street, one of the original planners of the Federal Reserve System at Jekyll Island. [90]

"A massive new corporate headquarters for I.G. Farben was built on Rothschild land at Frankfurt am Main, and with Wall Street funding it became the fourth largest company in the world". [91]

Ron Chernow writes of the Dawes Plan period: "American capital and companies poured in: Ford, General Motors, E.I. Dupont, General Electric, Standard Oil of New Jersey and Dow Chemicals… This revival would provide Adolf Hitler with a splendid industrial machine and money to finance massive rearmament". [92]

I would say that a broader ZIM aim with the two wars was to destroy Old Europe and in particular the cultures and values that could enable its peoples to resist the plan for global enslavement.

Additionally, by using a toxic fake "nationalism" as its vehicle, it was able to construct a narrative in which any opposition to its globalisation programme could thereafter be dismissed as dangerous and fascistic.

Both wars were also used to bring about the creation of the state of Israel, a cause close to the cold hearts of the Rothschilds and their accomplices.

Once again, massive reparations were extracted from "guilty" Germany, this time to finance ZIM's settler colony in Palestine.

What has been happening since October 2023 is a shocking reminder of the horrors which this ruthless mafia is always prepared to unleash in its pursuit of total world domination.

Starting massive wars and committing genocide to pursue your agenda is bad enough, but what always sticks most in the throat regarding the global criminocrats is the utter hypocrisy with which they not only falsify history but inverse morality.

When ZIM agents accused Germany, in both wars, of advancing "plans for global conquest", [93] they were merely projecting their own intentions onto a scapegoat.

Write Macgregor and O'Dowd: "The 1914-18 war was the greatest crime in the history of mankind, and the narrative of German guilt the biggest lie.

"British elites had long planned the war, deviously started it, and ended it by blaming Germany for having caused it.

"At Versailles, reality was comprehensively turned inside out by the perpetrators to make them appear the victims, and by controlling the writing of the history of the war they now did everything possible to ensure that the truth never emerged". [94]

"Two disastrous world wars were generated by an immensely rich, powerful, and psychopathic Anglo-American cabal, but it was ordinary Germans who were painted as the outcasts of Europe and civilised society". [95]

"After the war, Germany was reduced to subservient vassal status: its people were maliciously burdened with guilt and became extremely reluctant to ask questions or speak truth to power.

"Sadly, it remains that way today, if not worse. 80 years on from the end of the Second World War, with some 40 major US military and air force bases still spread throughout Germany, when the US tells successive cringing German governments to jump, they ask 'how high?'". [96]

Part of ZIM's gaslighting of Germany has involved the serious playing down of the existence of the Widerstand, the resistance to Hitler within the country.

This was obviously very difficult to carry out under a brutal police state, but was rendered doubly so by the refusal of "the Allies" to give them support or reassurance.

The book details, for instance, how Carl Goerdeler, a German Resistance leader, "sought support in Britain and America but was spurned at every turn". [97]

In the light of all this, it is clear that the real guilty party is the global gang whose racketeering, lies and manoeuvring came at the cost of millions of human lives across the world – more than 70 million in WW2 alone.

The writers sum up in their conclusion: "They tell us that 'our' freedom and 'our' liberties need to be protected, but what they really mean is that their profits and their power need to be protected.

"And that is dependant on creating fear at home and war and terror abroad. In reality, we are in thrall to state terrorism". [98].

The problem, of course, is that most people have no idea what has really been going on, because of the full-spectrum domination of ZIM's fake news and fake history.

If we are to end the corrupt and murderous rule of the global mafia, a necessary first step is to shed light on their evil covert activities.

Macgregor and O'Dowd's superbly researched book is thus an important and invaluable weapon in our ongoing struggle for truth, freedom and a decent future for all of humankind.

[Audio version]

More info on Two World Wars and Hitler by Dr Jim Macgregor and Dr John O'Dowd can be found here.

A video interview with the authors can be seen here.

[1] Dr Jim Macgregor & Dr John O'Dowd, Two World Wars and Hitler: Who Was Responsible? Anglo-American Money, Foreign Agents and Geopolitics (Walterville, Oregon: Tine Day, 2025). All subsequent page references are to this work, unless otherwise stated.
[2] p. 12.
[3] pp. 12-13.
[4] p. 9.
[5] E.C. Knuth, The Empire of "The City": The Secret History of British Financial Power (California: The Book Tree, 1944), p. 9. cit. p. 10.
[6] Knuth, p. 104, cit. p. 11.
[7] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War (Edinburgh & London: Mainstream Publishing, 2013).
Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty, Prolonging the Agony: How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WWI by Three-and-a-Half Years (Walterville, Oregon: Trine Day, 2018).
[8] p. 665.
[9] p. 27.
[10] p. 74.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Stephen Birmingham, Our Crowd (London: Macdonald & Co, 1967), p. 26, cit. p. 74.
[13] Birmingham, p. 28, cit. p. 74.
[14] p. 75.
[15] John E Morris, 'August Belmont Jr, the Forgotten Financier of the Gilded Age', Financial History, Winter 2021, cit. p. 75.
[16] pp. 75-76.
[17] p. 76.
[18] Ellen Hodgson Brown, The Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System (Louisiana: Third Millennium Press, 2007), p. 19. cit. p. 83.
[19] p. 83.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Nomi Prins, All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power (New York: Nation Books, 2014), pp. 2-5, cit. p. 83.
[22] p. 83.
[23] p. 87.
[24] p. 88.
[25] p. 84.
[26] p. 85.
[27] p. 92.
[28] p. 97.
[29] https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/10/14/a-crime-against-humanity-the-great-reset-of-1914-1918/
[30] p. 368.
[31] Birmingham, pp. 8-9, cit. p. 368.
[32] Henry Morgenthau, All in a Life-Time, Chapter IX, cit. p. 369.
[33] p. 240.
[34] Webster Griffin Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (Washington DC: Executive Intelligence Review), p. 55. cit. p. 372.
[35]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgenthau_Jr.#Bretton_Woods
[36] p. 406.
[37] p. 436.
[38] The Guardian, 13 October 2009, cit. p. 436.
[39] p. 437.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid.
[42] p. 472.
[43] Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler: The Missing Years, p. 212, cit. p. 520.
[44] Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (London: Penguin Books, 2009), p. 189, cit. p. 519.
[45] p. 663.
[46] Peter Conradi, Hitler's Piano Player (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004) pp. vii-viii, cit. p. 471.
[47] p. 494.
[48] p. 483.
[49] p. 486.
[50] p. 496.
[51] p. 492.
[52] p. 495.
[53] p. 497.
[54] p. 498.
[55] p. 499.
[56] Gwynne Thomas, King Pawn or Black Knight (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1995), p. 26, cit pp. 505-06.
[57] p. 506.
[58] William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London: Arrow Books Reprint, 1998), p. 175, cit. p. 510.
[59] pp. 516-17.
[60] p. 518.
[61] p. 568.
[62] Guido Preparata, *The Incubation of Nazism: A Tale of Extreme Measures Undertaken by Britain to Safeguard Imperial Primacy 1900-1944 (Perugia: Ad Triarios Press, 2023), pp 99-102, cit. p. 583.
[63] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/far-right-extremism-terrorism-tommy-robinson-funding-international-a8937116.html
[64] p. 534.
[65] Antony C. Sutton, *Wall Street and Rise of Hitler* (Sudbury: Bloomfield Books, 1976), pp. 17-18.
[66] Andrew Nagorski, Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), p. 92, cit. p 537.
[67] p. 536.
[68] p. 538.
[69] Conradi, p. 135, cit. p. 536.
[70] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (California, GSC & Associates. First printing New York, the Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 324, cit. p. 556.
[71] Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 (Authors Guild 'Baninprint.com edition, 2007), p. 2, cit. p. 557.
[72] p. 557.
[73] p. 556.
[74] https://winteroak.org.uk/2024/06/10/wars-resets-and-the-global-criminocracy/
[75] William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London: Pluto Press, 1992), p. 52, cit. p. 275.
[76] Engdahl, pp. 55-56, cit. p. 345.
[77] https://www.declassifieduk.org/britain-wants-ukraines-minerals-too/ https://www.rothschildandco.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023/06/ukraine-business-compact/
[78] p. 526.
[79] p. 530.
[80] pp. 530-32.
[81] p. 526.
[82] p. 527.
[83]
https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/08/02/a-developing-evil-the-malignant-historical-force-behind-the-great-reset/
https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/01/31/modernisation-means-pillage-and-profit/
https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/04/09/the-big-plan-and-the-great-gaslighting/
[84] p. 529.
[85] p. 546.
[86] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (West Hoathley: Clairview, 2016), p. 171, cit. p. 545.
See also Paul Cudenec, 'The False Red Flag', in Against the Dark Enslaving Empire.
https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/against-the-dark-enslaving-empire-online.pdf
[87] Guido Preparata, Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich (London: Pluto Press, 2004), p. 204, cit. p. 570.
[88] p. 547.
[89] p. 549.
[90] p. 550.
[91] p. 552.
[92] Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (New York: Grove Press, 2001), pp. 249-50, cit. p 533.
[93] p. 384.
[94] p. 385.
[95] p. 601.
[96] p. 605.
[97] p. 622.
[98] p. 666.

5. The Way It Is

by Mike Driver

50 observations from inside the belly of modernity:

1. If a politician of any stripe is speaking, even if truth, it will be in the service of a greater lie.
2. Everything you see, everything you hear and everything you feel via the glass of mass media, even if true, is in service of the lie.
3. Any accuracies in history are in service of the lie.
4. The ONLY consideration guiding the behaviour of multinational corporations is profit.
5. All 'global' crises are wealth and power transfers in disguise.
6. The use of any technology results in the loss of memory. The more powerful the technology the more profound the loss. At the apogee we will forget who we are.
7. Nature is abundant. There is no scarcity. Economics is bunk.
8. Everything is connected. Science is useful when this maxim is temporarily suspended, terminal when it is forgotten.
9. Knowledge at a high dosage can be fatal. The internet is an overdose.
10. The contention that the universe lacks purpose is consuming far more energy than the inverse ever did.
11. The quest for power is sufficient justification for its prevention.
12. Nearly all people are good. Unfortunately a tiny proportion of us have learnt how to manipulate the rest.
13. This few are hell bent on deceiving us into feudalism.
14. Digital identification and digital currency are the work of Satan and must be resisted at all cost.
15. The odds that we just happen to live at a time when all is revealed are vanishingly small.
16. It is highly likely that all our sacred cows will be slain, science is a temporary arrangement of current understandings.
17. The way in which we attend to the world changes the world.
18. We are pulled at least as much as we are pushed. This is everyone's experience.
19. Power is the exchange of freedom for fear.
20. Centralisation is the purest manifestation of fear. Be not afraid.
21. Freedom is so fundamental even love depends on it.
22. The internet is the tree of knowledge, the smart phone the apple and AI is the snake.
23. Artificial intelligence is the 'artificialising' of intelligence.
24. In any domain AI is superior only if we first submit.
25. The propaganda against having children is an attack on innocence.
26. Progress is a rebranding. We are Aztecs with a marketing budget.
27. All wars are lies. The ordinary human cannot conceive of war without prior deception.
28. Either humility or certainty is the correct response to the universe. The resolution of this debate will decide our fate.
29. The vacuum created by the removal of God attracts the very worst people.
30. Ground up has a chance, top down will always be destroyed by infinite possibility.
31. To understand the least thing fully you would have to perceive the whole grammar in all its accidence. Until everything is continuous.
32. Nothing is discrete, everything is continuous.
33. The words entertainment and propaganda are now interchangeable.
34. Politics may sponsor, but can never inform, art.
35. The left are weaponised by false compassion, the right by real prejudice. Both are wrong.
36. Democracy is too easily domesticated to fight evil, only anarchy is wild enough.
37. Bribery is now delivered mostly after the event.
38. The side effect is the intention. Look at the outcome not the tagline.
39. Everything with an acronym is corrupt.
40. Psychology is deception dressed as a science. Freud was a Fraud.
41. The soul is resilient, nothing else has ever come under such relentless attack.
42. Even the lost know there's something very wrong. Like a distant strain of music, lost, then heard again, their souls call out through the interference.
43. Thoreau was right: "In wildness is the preservation of the world".
44. All of our ecological effort should be focused on the local: caring communities, living soil, drinkable rivers, breathable air, clean oceans.
45. In a hall of mirrors there is no eye to catch.
46. Whilst reason never discovered truth or beauty it is shameless in claiming credit.
47. The purpose of the glass vampire is to separate us from our intuitions, from our very humanity, from our souls. As Rilke said "Du mußt dein Leben ändern," – "you must change your life".
48. We must turn the internet off.
49. We are surrounded by the continuous presence of the divine. All it asks is our attention.
50. Love is all. All will be well.

6. In search of the source: a personal journey against the flow

by Paul Cudenec

The southern French coast near Montpellier Airport is rather congested.

Holiday resorts have sprung up to profit from those heading to the lovely sandy beaches – as have, of course, the roads required to take them there.

Just to the east of La Grande-Motte – a product of the proudly modernising 1960s – the coastal road passes over a stretch of water which marks the boundary between the Hérault and Gard départements.

Between two banks formed of boulders, some kind of river passes under the bridge, across the sand dunes, past l'Hôtel de la Plage and into the Mediterranean.

You couldn't really say that it ends at this point, because its water is still there, but its essence becomes indistinguishable from that of the sea.

Local fishermen cast their lines from the boulders close to the bridge, as cars and cycles trundle by and Easter holiday visitors head down the footpath for their first dip of the year.

But what is this stretch of water and where does it come from?

The signs tell us it is called Le Vidourle and it visibly flows from an étang on the north side of the road, one of many lagoons in La Petite Camargue.

But there is more to Le Vidourle than this coastal manifestation, as we will discover if we take a mental and photographic journey along its 60-mile course.

We will, obviously, be moving in the opposite direction to its water.

That movement can seem to our human minds to denote the passing of time, the inevitable flight of the ephemeral moment, of all moments, as our individual lives rush on towards their necessary dissolution.

But the constant flow of the river is also a real and permanent connection, a vein in the flesh of the landscape.

When we step into the river a second time, we do not encounter the same drops of water but, contrary to certain wisdom, we do step into the same river.

A journey against the flow is a journey which knows this, which defies the superficial passing of river-time and sets out to grasp the timeless whole.

When we want to understand the meaning of something – a word, a tradition, a belief – we look beyond its current form and head up the waters of its becoming in search of its origin, its source.

Let's fly against the waters of the Vidourle and leave these Mediterranean marshlands, let's pass rapidly under the concrete industrial scar of the A9 autoroute to Barcelona and alight at Sommières, a beautiful place if you manage not to see the supermarket and its sprawling car park on the other side of the river.

The town was built up, a thousand years ago, around a 200-metre 20-arch bridge across the Vidourle built by the Romans a thousand years before that.

It is, perhaps, because of this historic imposition that when, from time to time, the Vidourle becomes swollen and angry, it is Sommières that tends to bear the brunt of its rage.

Plaques in the town mark the remarkable height of the flooding during these dramatic Vidourlades, the last of which struck in 2002.

A few miles upstream, the small town of Quissac has also been a victim of the Vidourle, even if most of the time the river enjoys a low profile.

From there on, we pass through one of the more beautiful stretches of the river, before arriving at Sauve, a medieval fairy-tale village in which I spent many a weekend a few years back.

Its undeniable charm has attracted a community of artists from all parts, including the veteran American countercultural cartoonist Robert Crumb.

We would often say a neighbourly "bonjour" in the street and we shared an all-too-brief email exchange after I popped copies of the French version of my Resist the Fourth Industrial Revolution! leaflet into village mailboxes in February 2021.

From our counterflow perspective, at Sauve much of the river leaps up into a hole in the rocks and seemingly disappears forever into the bowels of the earth.

But no, it has merely gone underground, like the heretical and dissident organic radical philosophy, its flow hidden from view but always present, even when the surface is dry.

From Sauve, Conqueyrac and beyond, sometimes we see it and sometimes we don't, although it always shows its face at Saint-Hippolyte-du-Fort.

This is the town in which I first met and interviewed the local Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) in 2018 and I still bump into some of them today.

Four members of the French Resistance were hanged from the viaduct over the Vidourle by the Nazis in 1944.

The occupation wears a different mask today, but the resistance is essentially the same.

Saint-Hippo, as it is known locally, also marks our entry into the hills which have sheltered me from the worst of the modern world for more than a decade.

Thank you, my Cévennes! I honestly do not know what would have become of me these last few years without your vital green embrace.

We rise, now, with the river, as it gathers pace on its journey home, plunging and resurfacing, gurgling and gliding past Cros – "cradle of the Vidourle" – and up into the valley of its birth.

Here someone has added a footnote to an official sign describing the Vidourle as a rivière, when strictly speaking it is a fleuve, the word used for a river that empties directly into the sea.

This is surely something to be proud of, that the plucky little Vidourle manages to find its own unique connection to the Mediterranean, without being gobbled up by either of the two big rivers that give their names to the départements that it divides down on the coast, the Hérault and the Gard, the latter itself being a mere rivière since it flows into the Rhône.

The underground/aboveground waters of our real resistance can never be recuperated by the mainstream.

As the hilltop village of Saint-Roman-de-Codières looks down in admiration, the Vidourle flees upwards into a multitude of little mountain trickles.

A helpful inhabitant points me down a road, beside a church, that zig-zags down to the valley below, where a bridge spans the Vidourle in its new-born form.

I find a sort of path through the undergrowth and negotiate the brambles to get down to the riverside.

I dip my hand into the Vidourle and drink, at last, its water fresh and pure.

[Audio version]

7. Renewed Humanism (Politics of the Heart, Part 5)

by W.D. James

In light of our reflections thus far, 'humanism' takes on a new significance. Previously, humanism indicated viewing the world from the perspective of human needs, human values, and human nature. It still does, but the very existence of the human reality is in question. Further, the concept was rather watered down over the past century in popular usage.

Hence, a renewed humanism, as defense of the 'human,' is a vital and urgent project. Further, the humanism of the present needs to be robust. It needs to encompass our spiritual nature, our idealism, our moral grounding, and our aspirational nature.

Across the precipice

In Lewis' view, when read carefully, we have already gone off the precipice into the post-human condition when human beings were subjected to human instrumental control via modern science. Though we could no doubt go quite a bit further. It is for this reason, I believe, that he somewhat cryptically says "repentance may be required…" (Lewis 1974, 78). Literally, 'repentance' means to turn around. We have already crossed the threshold, the order of the soul has already been overturned. The only good way forward is backward. He realizes this will be difficult, and he says "Perhaps I am asking impossibilities" (Lewis 1974, 80).

Here we return to Lewis' self-description as being a 'dinosaur' in that Cambridge lecture we looked at. As we saw in the last essay, Lewis felt it was possible to lose the wisdom of the Tao and hence the knowledge of our nature. In this essay we have seen how he thinks we have largely, though perhaps not irreversibly, crossed that line. The people he was addressing in that lecture are on the far side of humanity; post-human. As a dinosaur, Lewis was, I think, presenting himself as a living fossil of a human, someone schooled in the Tao, Natural Law, the wisdom of the species.

As he warned, there would not be many more. Within this frame of reference, I like to think of myself as not a dinosaur, there may not be any more, but at least a close reptilian descendent of them. If those 'genes' have been passed to me at all, it is due to two teachers I have had. One was my father, who I may talk about another time. The other was my primary teacher in grad school. He was, seemingly, a thoroughly modern, secularized Jewish guy, who was first a scholar of Marx, then Locke, then Hume. God help him. I say 'seemingly' because when I once house sat for him, I discovered books by Carl Jung – perhaps God did help him. He definitely didn't pass along any Jungian wisdom to me though.

What he did have was immense knowledge and intellectual integrity. He was a Harvard graduate and a 'great books' guy. Because of him, though they seem to have fallen far indeed, I have been hesitant to criticize the Ivy League schools. I did, in more plebian fashion, also derive the lesson that no matter how second rate my own education, I could still investigate the same texts he did and have just as much integrity. Further, my own 'egalitarianism' is rooted in the conviction that every human, as human, is capable of a great human life. At a very economically priced public university I used to teach at I would tell my students: what I'm about to teach you was taught me by a guy from Harvard; you can learn it, and if you do, you got the bargain of the century – don't think because you aren't paying much you have to limit yourself to third-rate thinking!

Though he thought what he thought, he taught us to study 'the greats' seriously. Also, always go to the texts. When I had questions about fascism this Jewish dude set me to reading Mussolini, Hitler, and the racial theories of De Gobineau. When I had questions about communitarianism, he made me write a paper on the concept of Sittlichkeit in Hegel. Most importantly, he taught me how to read Plato.

So, I am, no doubt, a second- or third-rate thinker. But I was given enough to be nostalgic (literally, 'homesick'). Hopefully, in these essays I write at Winter Oak and Philosopher's Holler, I can help kindle some of that in my fellow exiles. The 'holler' is, after all, one image of our homeland.

And, if we can remember what we are (Plato again), we can work on reviving our hearts and restoring the order of the soul.

Education

This humanist vision must become the center of our educational endeavors. The anti-humanists and post-humanists have learned that lesson well: education, and culture more broadly, shapes the next generation. They have done quite a nice job of taking control of those institutions.

This leads us back to Plato with whom we began these reflections. As I never tire of saying, Plato teaches us that the polis shapes the psyche: the community in which we grow up and receive our education and its culture which we imbibe with our mother's milk shapes our souls.

Plato always gives the utmost attention and concern to matters of education. The Greeks called education paideia: so, it's the three P's- polis, paideia, and psyche. On the Greek model, those were all informed, at least ideally, by a profound conception of the human and human excellence. Practically speaking, that should be our trinity. Ideology, propaganda, and conditioning are not substitutes. That's why C.S. Lewis cared so much about what was being taught in primary school English textbooks.

Life together

That is also why we should not give up on politics. That doesn't mean we need to be naïve or hold unrealistic hopes for what might be achieved in the short term via 'politics as usual.' However, at bottom, we are social or political animals (as Aristotle put it). We don't conceive, birth, or nurture ourselves. We don't create our own unique language. We don't generate an ethics out of thin air.

Politics is ultimately the art of our lives together. That deserves concern, care, and cultivation (can I have an 'Amen' for the three Cs?). Against the Promethean aspirations of the 'Conditioners' we need to remember what it is to be human and we need to carefully, very carefully, pass that primordial knowledge along to our descendants. They need to live in human communities so that they can receive human educations so that, in turn, they may develop human souls. The human heart must first be understood, then valued, then made the center of our lives together.

As Lewis taught us, that will require repentance, a turning around, as we have already crossed the threshold. Then we must remember the human and we must renew our communities, education, and culture (I couldn't resist three Rs).

We simply must have men and women with 'heart.'

Reference

Lewis, C.S., The Abolition of Man, HarperOne, 1974.

Previous articles in this series

The Order of the Soul (Politics of the Heart, Part 1)

The Assault on the Heart (Politics of the Heart, Part 2)

Written on the Heart (Politics of the Heart, Part 3)

Post-humanism and the Regime of the Heartless (Politics of the Heart, Part 4)

8. The Acorn – 102

Number 102

In this issue:

1. Zones of corporate tyranny
2. A message to the nature-hating bastards
3. London conference for freedom and Palestine
4. We Were the Shepherds
5. Walter Benjamin: an organic radical inspiration
6. Acorninfo

1. Zones of corporate tyranny

Campaigner David Powell has issued a new warning about the spectre of corporate tyranny facing the UK.

We reported in The Acorn 100 that he has been drawing attention to the dangers involved with the UK's deregulated Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Freeports first introduced by the global mafia's "Conservative Party" puppets and now being pushed through by their "Labour Party" marionettes.

In a new article, published in The Canary on April 8 2025, Powell writes: "Freeports and Special Economic Zones are variations on the same thing: deregulation, privatisation, tax evasion, and corporate governance.

"Complexity is their camouflage, and we must understand what they are, because they are carving up the UK into regions where corporations are protected from parliamentary and public scrutiny under secondary legislation".

With Keir Starmer's regime notoriously close to the Rothschilds, it is little surprise to know that one of their better-known fronts is involved in the dodgy scheme.

Writes Powell: "Blackrock has bought three British Freeports. In partnership with Terminal Investment Limited (TiL), a subsidiary of the shipping line MSC, it has acquired an 80% stake in Felixstowe, Harwich, and Thamesport, as part of a larger $22.8 billion deal with CK Hutchison.

"Freeports are bad news for the UK. They are playgrounds for predatory corporations, which are free to indulge in all manner of illegal and illicit activity, such as modern-day slavery, private banking, fraud, the suspension of corporate taxes and custom duties, discarding environmental protections, erosion of workers' rights, the smuggling of weapons, drugs, and people, hoarding of stolen art, installation of private security forces, extreme worker surveillance, acceleration of land-grabbing, and the trashing of regulations in favour of all-out deregulatory frameworks.

"It should be noted that the UK's 86 free zones, unlike Thatcher's SEZs, are now embarking on something they couldn't do when the UK was an EU member: dishing out public money to their corporate friends to facilitate economic growth for the 1%".

Elsewhere, Powell refers to Starmer's use of the label "blockers" to designate the new bogeymen, in the proud totalitarian tradition of "extremists", "counter-revolutionaries", "conspiracy theorists" and "enemies of progress".

He writes: "Who do you think the blockers are? They are ordinary people who have business, agricultural, and residential properties that the UK Govt can seize under Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs).

"Where do you think CPOs are most likely taking place? Inside any one of the 86 deregulated free zones across England, Scotland, and Wales that were resurrected by Sunak and Truss immediately after Brexit, and signed off by Labour MPs, Mayors, councillors, Lords, and Baronesses who were part of a cross-party consortium with major stakeholders like Blackrock, Palantir, Amazon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Fujitsu, Deloitte, PwC, EY, Google, The City of London Corporation, BP, Goldman Sachs, Thames Water, BlackStone, Telstra Health, Macquarie, Meta, SGN, EDF, Leonardo, BAE Systems, Cadent Gas, National Gas, Natwest, Virgin Atlantic, Abrdn, Barclays, Coinbase, The British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association, Bluebird Care, and Edelman.

"These are just some of the firms that have met with senior Labour figures over the last 12 months; Labour recently announced they were handing over governance powers to 700 corporate lobbyists while the Government takes a 'secondary position'.

"6,000 people could have their homes torn down as part of a £2.2bn project in which 1,266 council houses and 567 properties belonging to private homeowners could be repossessed in a mass compulsory purchase order for the area".

This all amounts, warns Powell, to "government-by-BlackRock".

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2. A message to the nature-hating bastards

by The Stirrer

In a recent post – Something feels…off… 5.4.25 – I wrote that I was going to take my foot off the gas for a bit, rest up and take some time to reflect ahead of what I feel is going to be a heavy summer. I'd like to reassure my readers that I'm not throwing the towel in – all I want to do is look after myself to be as ready as possible for what's coming.

A fair-sized part of that process is taking long walks in the surrounding countryside. Walking across the fields, through the woods, taking in the views and enjoying the way spring is transforming the landscape is doing wonders for my state of mind. Getting closer to nature is a boost to mental health. As is getting away from the screens, the 'news' agenda, the rage baiting, the divide and rule merchants and all of the other crap that comes with life in the 21^st century.

The best part about all of this is that it's free. The only thing that isn't free is the end-of-the-walk drink at our adopted riverside local pub:)

The thing is, the bastards who presume to rule over us, and the banksters and corporations they serve, hate the idea of anyone getting closer to nature in their local countryside, and taking time out to think and reflect on what's really important in this life. We have the misfortune to have rulers that can only measure our worth by how much we contribute to their cherished bottom line. This is something I've reflected upon in a couple of recent(ish) posts:

Nature hating government gives green light to the Lower Thames Crossing 26.03.25

The Labour government exists to serve their corporate masters while we, the populace, have to suck up the consequences. Even if those consequences destroy the environment, take out productive farmland and damage human health, physical and mental. We're forced to live in an increasingly stress-inducing society, where wanting to take time out to reconnect with nature and heal, is viewed as an abhorrent aberration by a government whose only concern is boosting the bottom line for their corporate masters.

Is mental health now an acceptable target for demonisation? 15.01.25

We also live in a world that has increasingly lost touch with nature. This is a process that started with the Industrial Revolution and has been accelerating since then. When we lose touch with nature, we start to lose touch with who we really are. Disassociation with the natural world that supports us and worryingly, disassociation from our bodies, can only lead to a dystopian future where you have to fit in with the high-tech matrix just to survive. Which raises the question – just what are we surviving for?

My response to these nature-hating psychopaths is a poetic one, as follows:

This wood is my sanctuary

When the world grinds me down, I come to this wood for solace
I come to hear the rustle of the breeze in the trees
I come to feel the calming, protective presence of the trees
I come to restore my balance so I can face the world again

The bastards hate the idea of sanctuary, calm and reflection
They hate it when it comes for gratis, no money required
They want us working, stressing, spending, spending...spending...
They hate us retreating from their sordid world into the woods

I come to this wood, to escape, think, reflect and wonder
The bastards don't want us escaping, thinking or reflecting
As for wonder, the nature hating, soulless bastards despise it
All because it adds nothing to the bottom line they worship

You could almost pity them for their shallowness...almost...
But, I can't pity the bastards who would destroy what I love
They can't comprehend anything with a deeper meaning
They fear and loathe the secrets of life the wood could tell them

This wood is a web of life, more rich than they can ever understand
This wood has a spirit and a presence they can never understand
When the stress of modern life crushes my spirit and soul
This wood is my sanctuary, my salvation, my muse and inspiration

There's this as well regarding a physical reconnection with nature, something those who presume to rule over us not only have no understanding of – it's also something they would absolutely abhor:

The old oak in the woods

On a bright Spring day, the two of us came to these woods
We came seeking escape from the madness of the world
We came seeking connection with nature that would heal us
And...we came seeking re-connection with each other 

We stopped at the old oak to rest awhile under her boughs
We looked at her twisted, gnarled branches and trunk in wonder
We wondered about the history she has seen over the years
And all of the wisdom she has gathered in that time

We touched her bark and branches, seeking connection
We felt a calming energy that brought us together
We felt the cares of the world lift from our shoulders
Restored, we slowly walked away, thankful for her presence

We're in an existential battle as to what it means to be truly human in a world run by soulless techno-fascists. A big part of what that means is reconnecting with, and being a part of, nature. It also means a sense of belonging to community, place and the environment that sustains us. Thankfully, this is something that is taking place… Leaving on an optimistic note, this is happening in the region we live in: Taking action for the Avon 9.4.25. I'll leave you with these words from We Are Avon in The Thriving Avon Charter:

We are each invited to become a guardian of the Avon — whether you're a swimmer, farmer, artist, dog walker, or dreamer. This is a movement of many hands, hearts, and voices, working together to restore the soul of this land through care for its waters.

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3. London conference for freedom and Palestine

by Real Left

We are pleased to announce the final speakers line-up for our 'Uniting the pro freedom and pro Palestine liberation left' conference taking place in just under a month in central London.

To grab your tickets book on eventbrite here or email: realleftevents@yahoo.com to pay cash on the day.

Registration will open at 9.45am and the event will end by approximately 5.30pm with a 1 hour lunch break from 12.30-1.30, plus 1/2 hr coffee/tea break in the afternoon.

On the Palestine Liberation panel we present:

• Yahya Abu Seido. As founder of the student Society for Palestine at UCU and lately the Association for Student Activism for Palestine, Yahya has been deeply involved in the student movement for disinvestment. He has a number of extended family members currently fighting for their lives Gaza, but beyond this personal connection, Yahya believes the Palestinian struggle for justice is one of universal relevance and concern to us all.
• Dr Ang Swee Chai. Co-founder of Medical Aid for Palestinians, orthopaedic surgeon Dr Swee has undertaken multiple visits to Palestine to treat the wounded. She has authored a number of books including: 'From Beirut to Jerusalem' which documents her experience in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. She was awarded the 'Star of Palestine' by Yasser Arafat in recognition of her humanitarian work.
• Yael Kahn. Israeli born anti-Zionist campaigner for 50 years, Yael grew up witnessing, and from the age of 19 working to end, the injustices and oppressions faced by Palestinians over many decades. She has recently attracted viral attention due to a sustained campaign of police harassment in response to her peaceful demonstrations with unapologetically anti-apartheid and genocide signs.

Our research focussed talks of the day, with two of the three speakers coming specially from Europe to present, are as follows.

Anarchist, researcher, author and founder of Winter Oak publishing Paul Cudenec on: 'Mapping out the Ideological Terrain of the Struggle Ahead Against the Criminocracy aka the Zio-Imperialist Mafia'.

Journalist, researcher and founder of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies Piers Robinson on: 'Understanding Power Dynamics and Moving Beyond Divisions: Covid–19 through to Ukraine and Israel/Palestine'.

And via video presentation, ex-academic and author of 'Covid-19: Psychological Operations and the War for Technocracy' amongst other works David A Hughes: 'On Avoiding the Biodigital Concentration Camp'

Plus further contributions/special messages from Piers Corbyn, Chris Williamson, and Heather Brunskell-Evans.

An opportunity to participate in an event with this depth and breadth of speakers, sharing such a wealth of experience and ground-breaking information and analysis does not come along often, so don't miss out and reserve your ticket now! Prices start at £15 (concession), £25 full price or £35 solidarity. There are a limited number of free places for those who otherwise would be excluded from participating (realleftevents@yahoo.com).

We look forward to seeing you on the day and please consider sharing this post to help spread the word.

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4. We Were the Shepherds

by Red Pill Poet

We were the shepherds and sheepdogs
who tried to keep the wolves from the sheep
       but the sheep we'd tried to awaken
       took far too much pride in being wide asleep.


We were the thoughtful ever-watchful shepherds
who were cruelly abused for our selfless efforts
       to warn the unwary  smugly-unaware sorts
of the terrible perils of yielding to evil
              by blindly complying with a diabolic force

that had recently  increasingly poured forth
from the smothering swarm of incurably corrupt
orgs and organs   that formed the vicious system
              the flocks were taught to incuriously trust
from their first day in class  to their last day alive;

       that formed the despicable system
       that had finally  hit its highly-malignant stride
       in the booming all-consuming business
       of assiduously spreading the latest big lies.


We were the widely wildly-despised
shepherds   who were openly spat and shat on
       for trying to lead the sheep towards the light;
for trying to sever  the threads of a web
              of darkest deceit in this darkest of nights

       as half-caged we raged
       raged   against the dying of what's right
              fully engaged in a life-and-death fight
                     with a supremely malevolent spell.

We were the shepherds who caught a clear sight
of the devil's grand plans for a well-managed hell;
shepherds whose warnings  were firmly ignored
as sure as flooding rivers ignore their own banks.

We were the shepherds whose only thanks
              was "Thanks  but no bloody thanks!"
"Shut your damn trap!"  and "Keep your facts
to your damned daft self and your fellow cranks!".


We were the sheepdogs and shepherds
       who were decried for our tireless efforts
to reach those  we'd so desperately hoped
                     would heed our pressing message.

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5. Walter Benjamin: an organic radical inspiration

The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.

"That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art"

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a philosopher and social critic who was forced to flee his native Germany when the Nazis came to power and died on the Franco-Spanish border at the start of the Second World War.

Benjamin's position is difficult to tie down, as he was influenced by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, by Marxism, by German idealism and by Jewish mysticism.

Michael Löwy places him broadly within the tradition of "anti-capitalist Romanticism" which he identifies as being particularly influential among German-speaking Jewish intellectuals at the time.

One of Benjamin's early sources of inspiration was Friedrich Hölderlin (1) (pictured) and he also studied the work of organic radical thinkers such as Friedrich Schelling, (2) Georg Hegel, (3) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (4) Gustav Landauer, (5) Martin Buber, (6) and Ernst Bloch, (7) who became a friend.

Gershom Scholem says Benjamin was "a great metaphysician" (8) who was guided by a "deeply-rooted messianic faith" (9) and a concept of myth and tradition "which over the years was going to take on an increasingly mystic hue". (10)

"He declared that he still didn't know himself what the aim of philosophy was, given that there was no need to discover the 'meaning of the world', since this had been defined by myth, which, for Benjamin, was everything". (11)

Benjamin was a strong critic of industrialism. He denied, for instance, the authenticity of mass-produced art.

He wrote: "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition". (12)

He challenged the official story of 'progress' with his imagining of the angel of history, as inspired by Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus.

Wrote Benjamin: "His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.

"The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.

"This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress". (13)

For Benjamin, opposition to industrialism was part and parcel of his opposition to capitalism. His deconstruction of the ideology of progress was not carried out in the name of conservation or of restoration, but in the name of revolution. (14)

He pointed out that, in stark contrast, fascism involved the typically modern combination of technological progress and social regression. (15)

From this radical organic perspective, fascism is clearly revealed to be a counter-revolutionary force protecting the industrial capitalist system.

Benjamin stressed that being inspired by pre-industrial societies, and comparing those societies favourably with our own, does not amount to a simple yearning for yesterday.

We would never be looking at an impossible retour (return) to the past, but to a détour via the past to a future of our choice.

Löwy says that Benjamin believed that "revolutionary utopia is reached through the discovery of an ancient, archaic, prehistoric experience". (16)

In Benjamin's outlook, says Löwy, "the archaic societies of Urgeschichte [the distant past] feature a harmony between man and nature which has been destroyed by 'progress' and is in need of reinstatement in the emancipated society of the future". (17)

As a young man Benjamin was a leading light in the pre-WWI Jugendbewegung, (18) the Wandervögel often wrongly maligned as "the beginnings of the Hitler Youth". (19)

Scholem says that he and Benjamin later shared a kind of "theocratic anarchism" (20) which led them, on August 23, 1927, to attend a huge and angry protest in Paris against the impending execution, in Massachusetts, USA, of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Recalls Scholem: "The police, partly on horseback, charged the protesters. We were caught up in a human maelstrom and, near the Boulevard de Sebastopol, we managed to narrowly avoid the police batons by diving into a side street. Benjamin was very fired up". (21)

Benjamin was drawn to surrealism and then Marxism, under the influence of the dramatist Bertolt Brecht and the Frankfurt School.

But he found himself caught between two ways of thinking: metaphysics on the one hand and socialist materialism on the other.

Scholem writes: "The liquidation of magic in language for which he was calling, in conformity with the materialist theory of language, was blatantly at odds with all his earlier ideas on the subject, which were founded on theological and mystical inspiration". (22)

These poles were never fully resolved and remained a source of philosophical tension in Benjamin's work, lending his writing a unique flavour. Brecht remarked, somewhat disparagingly, that Benjamin was "mystic even in his denunciation of mysticism". (23)

Video link: Who killed Walter Benjamin?

1. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Histoire d'une amitié, trans. by Paul Kessler (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1989), p. 28.
2. Scholem, p. 24.
3. Scholem, p. 53.
4. Scholem, p. 117.
5. Scholem, p. 24.
6. Scholem, p. 52.
7. Scholem, p. 123.
8. Scholem, p. 111.
9. Scholem, p. 86.
10. Scholem, pp. 88-89.
11. Scholem, p.53.
12. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970) p. 223.
13. Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 259-260.
14. Michael Löwy, Juifs hétérdoxes: Romantisme, messianisme, utopie (Paris: Éditions de l' éclat; 2010), p. 36.
15. Löwy, Juifs hétérodoxes, p. 121.
16. Michael Löwy, 'Walter Benjamin et le surréalisme in Europe', Revue littéraire mensuelle, April 1996, p. 83.
17. Michael Löwy, Rédemption et utopie: le judaïsme libertaire en Europe centrale (Paris: Éditions du Sandre, 2009), p. 148.
18. Scholem, p. 11
19. https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/hitleryouth/hj-beginnings.htm
20. Scholem, p. 130.
21. Scholem, p. 208.
22. Scholem, p. 301.
23. Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, 1938-1955, cit. Scholem, p. 256.

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6. Acorninfo

"The UK government wants to build Europe's first Universal theme park in Bedford," writes journalist Lewis Brackpool. "And guess who stands to benefit? BlackRock, Vanguard, JP Morgan, some of the world's most powerful asset managers who are major shareholders in Comcast (Universal's parent company). A complete waste of time, land, and public interest — all to serve the same global investment giants". Yes, it's the Rothschilds and their zio-imperialist mafia (ZIM), yet again. Trampling over everything we hold sacred in their demented pursuit of still more profit and power.

* * *

The UN's Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, while superficially benevolent, mask a deeper agenda of centralised control, author and scientist Gregg Braden has warned. "You read the fine print of how they plan to achieve those goals, and it is horrendous. It is a remaking of social structure of family and society—social engineering—to a degree we've never seen in our world before… leading to a world of centralised power and control".

* * *

"As protests against Israel continue to grow across America, U.S. police are being funded AND trained — by Israel — to shut them down. There's no other way to put it — we are an occupied nation". James Li explains how ZIM crushes dissent in the USA, identifying "a clear overlap between pro-corporate and pro-Israel causes, both of which benefit from the expansion of militarized policing practices".

* * *

"The moment you challenge the empire, the moment you challenge the war machine, the moment you call out the hypocrisy… they come for you". This is the reality of zio-totalitarian occupation, as described by Natalie Strecker, a Jersey human rights campaigner who is currently facing prosecution under the island's "terrorism" laws for expressing her pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide views.

* * *

"It's a compliment to be called a conspiracy theorist because it means your brain is still working". Candace Owens on Israel and Zionism, the military-industrial complex, the CIA, Mossad, blackmail, censorship, the Rockefellers…

* * *

"There has been infiltration, there has been compromise". Sabrina Salvati looks at the way in which certain so-called "independent" journalists are collaborating with war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and ZIM.

* * *

Rothschilds, on whose board sits former UK national security adviser Lord Mark Sedwill, has no less than $53bn invested in Ukraine, points out Mark Curtis on the Declassified UK website. He adds: "The corporation was invited to the 2023 Ukraine Recovery Conference held in London and is a member of the UK-Ukraine Finance Partnership. It has also been the main adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance since 2017″.

* * *

Anti-totalitarian rebels in London, UK, continue to cut down ULEZ cameras, a traffic surveillance system that seeks to control people's movements and penalise those who cannot afford authorised "green" cars. Meanwhile, in France, the threatened imposition of a similar system is being held up by massive public opposition. People power will defeat the global smart-tyrants!

* * *

A very useful resource providing links to lots of information about the "Manchester bombing" has been published by the Pighooey blog. It says: "The architects of this particular production are doing their best to 'disappear' the evidence which has been unearthed by a series of researchers since Day One, 22nd May 2017". Meanwhile, David A. Hughes has given a half-hour summary of his findings on the event in an interview by Sonia Poulton.

* * *

An excellent mini-documentary on like-minded spirit Hrvoje Morić of Geopolitics & Empire has been aired by the Grand Theft World podcast.

* * *

An interesting in-depth video conversation was recently held between the Freedom Conversation Podcast and regular Winter Oak contributor W.D. James.

* * *

Courier 3, the latest in our friend Ken Avidor's series of dystopian animated films, is now out and can be seen on YouTube.

* * *

"The book portrays development narratives as carefully constructed propaganda designed to legitimize global economic interventions that fundamentally serve transnational corporate interests rather than local populations". A very thorough analysis of Paul Cudenec's latest collection of essays, The Global Gang, has been published on the Lies Are Unbekoming website.

* * *

Acorn quote:

"Do not fool yourself by saying you would like to help usher in a free society, but you cannot sacrifice an armchair for it". Voltairine de Cleyre

(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)

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9. Ignore the gaslighting – ZIM is real!

by Paul Cudenec

The smears directed at those of us who expose and oppose ZIM (the zio-imperialist mafia) serve three distinct purposes.

Firstly, and most obviously, they aim to discredit and marginalise us in the eyes of the general public, thus preventing our message from spreading.

Secondly, they are used to justify concrete action against us by the system.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, they seek to gaslight us, to attack us psychologically as individuals and push us away from the path of truth.

Let me explain what I mean.

The most commonplace opinion that I come across regarding "conspiracy theorists" is that we are stupid – just gullible idiots who swallow any old nonsense we come across on social media.

I suppose this is being drip-fed into people's minds by TV, radio and newspapers to the extent that they end up regarding it as self-evidently true. Once this stage has been reached, attempts at communication become very difficult.

This form of discrediting seems to have been fairly successful, especially among educated liberal types who consider themselves "intelligent" and "well-informed" and who have therefore closed their minds to new insights.

The "concrete action" element is that social media or foreign media are blamed for corrupting the minds of these gullible fools and can thus be shut down in the name of "public interest".

The psychological effectiveness here is not very strong, I feel. Yes, I suppose some people might refrain from expressing certain ideas because they don't want to be thought of as stupid, but we all know inside that this isn't the case.

I, for one, find it rather amusing that I might be regarded as stupid and gullible by people so utterly stupid and gullible that they unthinkingly believe ZIM propaganda telling them that anyone who opposes the ridiculous official narrative must be stupid and gullible!

Another variation of the smear is that dissidents are insane.

Again, I think this works very well on a lot of "normies" because the reality we expose is so far removed from that which they have been programmed to believe in, throughout their lives.

We dissidents must be delusional, in their self-protecting minds, otherwise it would mean that they themselves had been seriously duped.

As far as action is concerned, there is a long history of using "mental illness" as an excuse to lock up dissidents – ZIM's USSR having been world leaders in that particular approach.

In 2020, in France, Covid dissident Professor Jean-Bernard Fourtillan was locked up in a mental hospital after exposing the scamdemic in the film Hold-up.

And in 2025 Robert F. Kennedy tried to depict opposition to ZIM's mass murder in Palestine ("anti-semitism" in zimese) as a "spiritual and moral malady" that fell under his "health" remit.

With regards to the psychological effect, I have to confess that I do sometimes wonder if I have been carried away by my imagination and the world is not really the way I have been describing it.

And then some new piece of evidence drops into my lap that once again confirms the big picture and I am forced to face the fact that the nightmare is all too real!

For instance, when Mark Carney became Canadian prime minister, I was reminded that I had written about his ZIM credentials in my 2024 piece about the Royal Institute of Foreign Affairs, aka Chatham House, of which he was a president at the time.

Like my booklet on the Rockefeller Foundation, the article fully confirmed the existence and nature of the single global mafia and documented Chatham House's historical and current-day connections to the Rothschild Gang.

I was therefore intrigued when a reader pointed me towards an event held by Chatham House in 2016 which set out "to convene future leaders in finance and economy ministries from across the globe".

How did they know who our "future leaders" would be? Don't they get voted in by the public in something called "democracy"?

The event was pursuing "the long term aim of supporting economies to respond more effectively to global change".

Global change yet again. As championed by Tony Blair's institute of that name…

This meeting of the "Waddesdon Club" was held at the Rothschilds' Waddesdon Manor.

The Rothschild Foundation, which hosted the "Chatham House at Waddesdon" event, described Windmill Hill, the specific venue for these so-called future leaders' discussions about global change, as "itself a celebration" of the "work pursued by the Rothschild Foundation".

I really don't know how much clearer this could all be!

In reality, you would have to be insane, in the sense of being wilfully blind, not to come to the same conclusions as I have, given exposure to the same evidence.

A third smear deployed against us dissidents is that we are bad people, motivated by "hate", "anti-semitism" and various forms of "denial".

This device is obviously intended to scare people away from having anything to do with us, not least because they might be infected by our badness and themselves be tarred with the same brush.

The level of concrete action justified by this approach is much higher than the previously cited examples, with laws being rapidly written everywhere to criminalise all opposition to ZIM, treated now as a special form of "terrorism".

This is not entirely new, of course, as I know from personal experience, having on several occasions been stopped and searched by UK police under "anti-terrorism" laws for the terrible crime of protesting and even detained at the port of Dover under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 because of my involvement in the 2013 Stop G8 mobilisation against one of ZIM's many globalist summits.

But how does the psychological aspect of the "bad person" smear play out?

It's a difficult judgement to hear, because most of us think of ourselves as good people and this is why we stick our heads above the parapet to express our opposition to bad things we can see happening in our society.

Unfortunately, it would appear that some individuals cope with this by internalising the insult and trying to neutralise its painful effect by embracing it.

I am thinking particularly here of those who effectively confirm an "anti-semitism" accusation by talking indiscriminately about "the Jews" rather than specifically about ZIM and sometimes even express admiration for mass murderer Adolf Hitler.

In so doing, they are playing the role allocated to them by the mafia they purport to oppose, reading directly from the script of its Great Racket in which all opponents of its empire are anti-semitic Nazis and in which all Jews therefore need to seek protection from their Zionist godfathers.

Personally, when I look into my own heart I find no trace of hostility towards Jewish people per se.

In the same way, I imagine, in which a black man might regard whites, I object only to the supremacists.

It is perhaps for that reason that it does admittedly hurt to be labelled "anti-semitic" and, no doubt, politically ostracised by some on that account.

I have to then remind myself that all I have done is to follow the evidence and share what I have found.

It is not my fault that the world is dominated by ZIM!

Why should I be made to feel like a hateful person for telling the truth, for describing reality as I have discovered it through years of careful research?

I'm not backing down on this and I invite others to join me in my stance. It's time to put an end to this gaslighting!

[Audio version]

10. Post-humanism and the Regime of the Heartless (Politics of the Heart, Part 4)

by W.D. James

C.S. Lewis was a realist in a double sense: he understood the reality of power and he understood the reality of morality.

In 1944, writing in The Abolition of Man, he saw that we already stood on the far side of the precipice of a post-human (his term) or transhuman future. He was not enthralled by any 'progressive' ideology that this would be just fine. In fact, he had very good reasons to think otherwise.

Knowledge is power

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) famously proclaimed "knowledge is power," by which he meant modern scientific knowledge represented the power of 'man' over 'nature.' Lewis understood this power and also understood that Bacon's optimism was naïve.

Foreshadowing some of the better observations of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) (who was no defender of the Natural Law, what Lewis termed the Tao), he understood that knowledge does not operate in a power-free environment. Knowledge as power did not serve some abstract 'man' or 'humanity'.

In fact, Lewis makes a double observation regarding the operations of power and humanity. First, "What we call Man's power is," he writes, "in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by" (Lewis 1974, 54). Ouch! You mean some people will wield this knowledge/power and may not use that for the common good of the community or species? Yep. In fact, they probably won't; they seldom do. So much for the 'right side of history.'

Secondly, given that this power 'over nature' extends to power over human beings as well (because we are a part of nature), "what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument" (Lewis 1974, 55). Double ouch! So, when we go to designing future humans we won't collectively decide on how that should go? No way. Some will decide for others. To the extent the decisions are made by the wealthy, we are not all equally wealthy. To the extent the decisions are made by the technocrats, we are not equally experts. To the extent that the decision is made politically, we do not possess equal political power. However you slice it, power is used by some over others. That's kind of the point of gaining it.

The outcome of taking human nature in our technological hands will turn out more like: "Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men…. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well" (Lewis 1974, 58). The 'billions upon billions' reflects Lewis' understanding that whenever this power is chosen to be utilized, all human beings born after that point are artifacts: they have been designed to be whatever the first generation of what Lewis calls the 'Controllers' desired for them to be. Sound vaguely familiar? Lewis saw this 80 years ago. I always feel really stupid when something hits me as a great realization and then I discover people 50 or 100 years ago said this is where we are. That has happened to me innumerable times in the past 10 years. I, or perhaps we, ask: why didn't we listen? Because, apparently, we're rather dense.

How did Lewis see this playing out? He writes, "The final stage is when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself" (Lewis 1974, 59). We have only added to the arsenal since Lewis' time, especially with genetic science and more robust digital surveillance techniques.

Beyond good and evil

In the previous essay we looked at what Lewis took to be the one consistent approach to the topic of existential totalitarianism: the Conditioners would jettison any concern for 'value' as values which were bound up with our human nature which was to be the subject of their control. They could just operate, as Nietzsche put it, beyond good and evil: they could just follow their will or their inclination with no attempt to morally justify their decisions.

Lewis elucidates: "To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty for my Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded, critics may ask, 'Why should you suppose they will be such bad men?' But I am not supposing them bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what 'Humanity' shall henceforth mean. 'Good' and 'bad', applied to them, are words without content: for it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived" (Lewis 1974, 63).

For these Conditioners, who have risen above 'humanity' to engineer 'humanity' henceforth, "All motives that claim any validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed them." And further, "When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains" (Lewis 1974, 65). Oh, let us listen! It helps explain a lot to realize that our overlords are not actually human!

Let's unpack why Lewis asserts that. If the Conditioners had remained within the operations of 'traditional value,' of the Tao, of the set of values required for human flourishing, they could not have consistently set about to reshape humanity itself. The norms are tied to human nature. To seek to go beyond human nature is, by definition on Lewis' thinking, to go beyond values. The Conditioners will be bold creators indeed. Nietzsche had prophesied, when we move beyond man, to what he called the super-man (the beyond-man): "shall we not have to become gods?" When it comes to designing human nature, there is no 'good' or 'evil' because those terms only make sense given human nature.

Yes, indeed, the Conditioners are gods. Unlike God, on consistent traditional accounts, there is nothing in being a god that requires you look out for the good of your creation: only that it be as you will it.

Hence, Lewis laments, "Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man" (Lewis 1974, 64). "At the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely 'natural'- to their irrational impulses [whatever they happen to want]" (Lewis 1974, 67). Ironically, "All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical withdrawals" (Lewis, 1974, 68). By reverting merely to their will, these 'gods' will have allowed a bit of 'nature' to triumph over the species. Let's return to Plato's original formulation of the architecture of the soul: the head (reason) directing the stomach (passions) through the heart (moral sentiment). As Lewis pictures the post-human condition, it will be the stomach (the passions, the inclinations of the will) of the powerful that have come to govern the head by abolishing the heart! Please let that sink in for a moment. The post-human situation is post-human!! That means not only in terms of our 'biology' but of our 'psychology,' 'morality,' and whatever we have meant by our 'humanity.' Can a human consistently wish to be 'post-human?' I think Lewis thought not. You must be possessed by some irrational impulse and that impulse will come to define what you and all the others are from here forward. This also coincides, in a more modern formulation, to how Plato had understood 'tyranny': the passions (eros) of one person or regime dominating the whole. That is also helpful in more fully understanding modern totalitarianism.

Lewis focuses in on the mechanics of the dynamic operative here. He observes: "We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them" (Lewis 1974, 71). By reducing things to 'mere Nature,' Lewis means viewing them under the auspices of Technik. "But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified…" (Lewis 1974, 71). Expressed more prosaically, "if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be; not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners" (Lewis 1974, 73).

Lest we think this would be some future event, let's reflect a moment. All of the 'human sciences' do just this: medicine, psychology, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, etc…. As Lewis pointed out in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge that we looked at in essay 2, this has already occurred: in fact, Lewis took it as the definition of what initiated the modern, post-Christian, West. We are already in the post-human condition!! That is how good Lewis is and how good this book is!

The Tao, again

How, if it is even possible, are the rulers and the ruled, the Conditioners and the conditioned in this case, to be placed on equal footing? Lewis asserts that it is only possible by appeal to the Tao, the Natural Law, the law of our shared human nature. "Only the Tao," he asserts, "provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike" (Lewis 1974, 73). He explains: "In the Tao itself, as long as we remain within it, we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application" (Lewis 1974, 74-75). This is the only alternative Lewis sees to "the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity…" (Lewis 1974, 75).

What is the proper stance of 'Man' to 'Nature' according to the Tao? According to Lewis, "For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge [as wisdom, not Technik], self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science [which Lewis morally equates with one another] the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique…" (Lewis 1974, 77). I have long thought just this is our essential existential decision. Am I in charge or is reality in charge? Should I fundamentally seek to shape the world to my will or try to discipline and educate my will into conformity with the world (which for me, is primarily transcendent reality)? We can see 'modernity' as the attempt to answer and act out the former proposition, the anti-modern as the affirmation of the latter.

Reference

Lewis, C.S., The Abolition of Man, HarperOne, 1974.