In the first part of his retrospective essay on ten years of The Acorn, editor Paul Cudenec looks back on its content in 2015, the year in which it was launched. The online document covering the entire decade can be found here.
Our very first Acorn, which came out on February 6, 2015, was very much concerned with the fight against industrial "growth" and "development", focusing on struggles against road-building plans in West Sussex, East Sussex and Bristol.
The theme continued in the subsequent 18 issues published that year (we've slowed down a bit since!).
In March, for instance, we wrote about the announcement of a big roadbuilding programme by Highways England, whose list of "strategic outcomes" included "supporting economic growth" and "opening up new areas for development".
Our article declared: "All the smooth talk about making roads safer and reducing congestion is a barely disguised cover for its real mission of expanding capitalist infrastructure and thus increasing private profit at the expense of the public and the environment".
We also covered anti-road protests in Turkey and in Australia, where authorities were clearing the way for a motorway to be driven across an Aboriginal heritage site "older than the pyramids".
There was a lot of coverage of the battle against fracking that had been ongoing in England for several years.
Indeed the threat was starting to be seen off – for the time being, anyway! – and we reported that a June decision by Lancashire County Council was a significant victory for frack-free campaigners and had been described as "a Waterloo for the fracking industry".
We placed fracking in a broader context, insisting that our real enemy was "infrastructure" and "the death-cult industrial capitalist system itself".
And we wrote: "There are some 'enemies of progress' out there who strangely don't welcome the prospect of contaminated water, soil and air, of devastated countryside, of lorry-congested roads, of a night sky constantly lit up by flares and of the occasional frack-induced earthquake".
The label "enemies of progress" – a badge I am still proud to wear – came from a leader writer in The Daily Telegraph, who in 2013 also described anti-fracking protesters in Balcombe, West Sussex, as a "shrieking chorus of environmental zealots", a "travelling circus of protest", "eco-loonies" and "new Luddites".
I'm happy with that last one, as well!
On the environmental front we also expressed our support for Plane Stupid and its battle against a threatened expansion of Heathrow Airport, Earth First!, Reclaim the Fields, and Via Campesina, an international movement that was declaring "No to the false solutions of green capitalism! Sustainable family farming now!"
We reported on protests against lignite mining in Germany, against the "phoney COP21 climate summit" in Paris, on the resistance of the Nasa people in Colombia to private ownership of their ancestral homeland, on indigenous resistance to logging in Canada and on massive and bloody demonstrations against a $10 billion copper-mining project in Peru.
We also cited a Mexican anti-industrial group called the Pagan Sect of the Mountain which said it was "continuing the fiercest conflict inherited from our ancestors against progress and artificiality".
There were regular mentions for the Anarchist Action Network, which adopted The Acorn as its unofficial mouthpiece and for a long time reposted each issue on its own website.
We also included plugs for various anarchist bookfairs, for the Anti-Fascist Network in its actions against Tommy Robinson's (Zionist-funded) EDL, notably in Brighton, for Class War in its campaigning against gentrification in London, for Occupy Democracy, the Open Spaces Society and the Love Activists in Liverpool.
We wrote about protests against the DSEI arms fair in London's Docklands, against the G7 in Germany, against the Bilderberg summit in Austria and against NATO war games in several southern European countries as well as the November 5 "Million Mask March" in London.
We also ran a piece about the "full-on resistance movement against capitalism and its infrastructure" that had emerged in France, with notice of a forthcoming talk by Le Comité Invisible, famed authors of The Coming Insurrection, in Brighton.
We subsequently reported on a massive demonstration, of some 20,000 people, against the opening party of the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt and a Mayday protest in Milan "focused on the opening day of Expo 2015, an extravagant six-month 'world fair' celebrating the corporate wealth built on the exploitation of workers and the destruction of the environment".
We also published reports on two rooftop occupations that shut down the Kent factory of Israeli arms company Elbit Systems.
The Acorn expressed a certain ambiguity regarding the "left".
In September we commented on the British Establishment's reaction to Jeremy Corbyn's election as leader of the Labour Party.
We stressed that we didn't see his politics as "particularly radical or interesting" – "he is happy to work within the putrid parliamentary system and to acknowledge its legitimacy, along with that of the 'law' and the monarchy".
And yet, we added, Corbyn had suffered "relentless attacks" and prime minister David Cameron had just described him as "a threat to our national security", using a phrase that observers regarded as evoking "the language of Hitler and Stalin".
At the same time we were exposing "fake 'left-wingers' who hate the alternative media" and expressing a growing frustration at the state of what was supposed to amount to an opposition movement.
We described a big but lifeless anti-austerity demo in London as "depressing" and watched with disbelief as sold-out trade unions got behind both the fracking industry and the proposed Heathrow expansion on the basis that these would provide "jobs".
Declared The Acorn: "We need to break out of the reformist strait jacket that 'left-wing' thinking has put us in. We need to throw off the blinkers of its restrictions and inhibitions and look clearly and boldly into the eyes of the industrial-militarist-capitalist beast before thrusting a stake through its putrid heart".
The so-called "left" was also serving the interests of Capital in France, and we reported on a general strike being staged against a new law drawn up by the ruling Socialist Party, which was all about encouraging "economic growth" – "working hours are to be increased, with Sunday working normalised in the way it already is in the UK, and bosses' powers strengthened".
The legislation in question was known as the Macron Law, with the minister responsible being Emmanuel Macron, the former Rothchild banker and future president who was to feature in many more Acorn bulletins and Winter Oak reports in the years to follow.
A glimpse into the murky activities of the global mafia came in a special Acorn investigation into so-called "sustainable transport" funding in southern England which was being diverted into a project that was blatantly nothing more than a make-over for an urban shopping centre.
Decision-making about the allocation of this state funding was, we discovered, in the hands of a company called WSP Global Inc whose previous projects had included The Shard in London, Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok and Trump Tower in New York, where it was also involved in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center.
Repression was a recurrent theme in the first year's haul of Acorns and we drew our readers' attention to "the increasing fascisisation of the UK and other 'democratic' Western states".
Some of this repression was directed at fellow anarchists, such as those arrested by the Spanish state on suspicion of belonging to a "criminal organisation" in the form of a non-existent "network" invented by the police, or those in the UK who had been targeted by spy cops.
We quoted an anonymous anarchist leaflet in France explaining: "We hate the police. Because they are the armed wing of the thing that is slowly and surely killing us. Because the police will always be an obstacle between the life we have and the life we want".
And we noted that the French high court had upheld the criminal conviction of 12 political activists for "inciting hate or discrimination" because they had handed out leaflets calling for a boycott against Israel as a means of ending the decades-long military occupation of Palestine.
In the UK, we reported, authorities had produced propaganda claiming that young people who questioned official state narratives might be "extremists".
The leaflet, handed to parents in London, claimed danger signs of so-called radicalisation included "showing a mistrust of mainstream media reports and belief in conspiracy theories" and "appearing angry about government policies, especially foreign policy".
We commented: "Numbed slack-jawed conformists gawping apathetically at the TV set are, presumably, the ideal non-extremist citizens of tomorrow".
In another Acorn we wrote: "While the state is trying to win acceptance for its idea of 'extremism' by linking it in the public mind to 'Islamic terrorism', it clearly also applies to anyone who dares cock a snoop at the neoliberal corporate megamachine, as we can see from the remit of the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit, for instance.
"The technique is Orwellian and essentially simple. The system declares itself to be a democracy and therefore anyone who opposes the system is anti-democratic! This is much the same as declaring yourself to be God and that therefore anyone who challenges your absolute authority is working on behalf of Satan!"
We voiced concern about "the future being lined up for us by the industrial prison-system".
And we sounded the alarm about "smart spies in our homes" as part of a so-called internet of things "where privacy, freedom and, indeed, humanity will be consigned to the past and we will all be reduced to the status of permanently monitored and controlled slaves to a techno-industrial global state that will make Orwell's nightmare look like a whimsical daydream".
With police-state repression increasingly being carried out in the name of "anti-terrorism", we pointed out that this phenomenon was not at all what it claimed to be – "it is in fact the deliberately misleading label given to a global psychological war waged against most of humanity by a controlling elite".
Indeed, we said, terrorism itself is often carried out by the state itself, as was the case in the 20th century with the Gladio network which, while exposed most fully in Italy, operated across Europe, including the UK, where the conflict in the north of Ireland was an ideal training ground.
We stated: "The worrying lack of knowledge and understanding, even in radical circles, of the extent to which terrorism was secretly deployed by the capitalist system from the 1940s to the 1980s sadly means that there is little to stop it using the same techniques again today".
And we warned that we were up against "a cult of power for the sake of power, growth for the sake of growth, which will do anything – literally anything – to ensure its own preservation and expansion. Murder, lies and hypocrisy are part of its very essence and we would do well never to forget that".
by W.D. James
Where did the folk music go? Popular resistance continues to manifest itself around the world. Even nascent movements have developed. However, one senses that for the most part these movements are still lacking in whatever would provide the inner cohesion and dynamic energy that would make them powerful and successful agents of change. Advanced thinkers are exploring the task of creating a new culture from which to animate resistance and rebellion, including elements such as myth, spirituality, and other deep elements of culture. Unfortunately, one of the salient effects of modernity has been to cut people and peoples off from their organic and traditional cultures, so this will prove no easy task.
In my mind, this would be something like the creation of a working-class culture in England early in the period of the industrial revolution as uncovered by historians such as E.P. Thompson. The development of that culture was able to draw upon antinomian (literally 'no-law' or 'anti-law') strands of the dissenting religious tradition, memories of popular revolt at least back to the Diggers and Ranters of the English Civil War, and organic traditions of people's music, verse, story, myth, folklore, etc… to form a working-class culture that energized class movements for generations. Certainly, the times have changed, and the circumstances are different today, but something like that but reflecting current realities, while still drawing from deep wells, seems imperative.
In the limited scope of this essay, I would like to focus in on one particular strand of American folk music, the role it played in early twentieth century resistance, and how that role was theorized by W. E. B. Du Bois. I think there are important lessons to be drawn both from Du Bois' ideas and from the role that music played in social movements.
From early adulthood on, I've been a huge fan of all sorts of folk music. When I first tuned into these musical styles there was a local folk radio station and two others with time slots for specific genres like bluegrass. There were several music stores that focused on folk and several good venues for all sorts of performers who were passing through: traditional English and Celtic, bluegrass, the blues, gospel, Americana, American folk-revival, singer-songwriter, etc…. Now, hardly even a shadow of any of those cultural institutions exist locally and the virtual online versions function differently.
In a conversation with the folkie and singer-songwriter David Rovics,i we discussed this. He confirmed my sense of the relative decline of folk music over recent decades and, on his assessment, this has encompassed not just the US, but England, Scotland, and even Ireland. I thought this could be a generational thing in that today's young just weren't into folk and, so, it would become more marginal. He contradicted this though by pointing out that over the past 3-4 decades, the age of his audiences had remained pretty consistently young; it wasn't just a remnant of old fogey folkies who were still listening.
What he pointed to was a lack of cultural institutions to keep the music alive. What he sees being different in places like Scandinavia and France is there is more public funding for the arts in such places, so more art forms can thrive, and the continued existence of something as simple as socialist summer camps for kids (along with other institutions to pass along folk and working-class culture). Apparently, in those countries, the socialist or social democratic parties still have enough power that they also have some material resources to support cultural institutions, like the summer camps, where kids still learn folk songs, including, I believe, some of David's. Hence, a significant 'scene' can still thrive there, and these resources are preserved to help inform social movements.
To me, this reconfirms the need for resistance movements to develop cultural resources and somehow institutionalize those (not in big bureaucracies or anything, but there needs to be people specifically working on that and creating opportunities or it won't happen). Also, it points to the need for music (and I think folk in particular) to be part of that. Plus, it's just fun to go to concerts and festivals, listen to music, and if you have any talent (I don't), to play it. The movements need a major injection of fun.
Sorrow Songs
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, African-American educational and cultural leaders were faced with a choice. What they termed 'sorrow songs' and what later generations would call 'spirituals' were a treasure of African-American culture, but were inexorably tied to the history of slavery. Should they be valued as a cultural resource or left behind as the race strove to move beyond slavery? What was the best path forward?
The sorrow songs developed out of field hollers.ii Originally, these were work songs brought with the slaves from Africa, but as LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) points out in his classic Blues People (1963/1999), diaspora blacks in the United States lived in much closer proximity and more intimate interchange with whites than in other regions, such as the Caribbean, and the African elements were quickly submerged (though never eradicated, and they continued to speak through 'coded' language and the structural attributes of the music; call and response patterns, the rhythms, etc…).
The Library of Congress possesses a lot of field recordings of hollers recorded mostly in the 1930s-1950s. This is a good example to listen to: When You Hear That Peafowl Holler | Library of Congress (loc.gov)
Most of these early recordings were hampered by the technological limitations of the day. You pretty much had to at least pull a guy out of the field, over to your recording device, to have him sing it. A later, more 'in the moment' (though still 'prepared'), example can be listened to here: Work Songs in a Texas Prison – YouTube
The sorrow songs might be sung in the fields, or might be sung around one's cabin or at a religious service, if these were permitted. Musically, they took on themes specifically of spiritual striving (which certainly doesn't mean they didn't speak to social and political striving at the same time). Fortunately, by and large, the decision was made to affirm the sorrow songs. African-American educational institutions like the Tuskegee Institute and Fisk University formed choral groups to perform and honor this musical heritage. Many of these groups, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, have enjoyed a continuous existence from their founding to today.
While I tend to prefer a more raw performance of the spirituals, which is still preserved in some African-American churches today, by listening to early recordings you can hear how the sorrow songs were formed into an African-American high culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGe-OB8wzXk&t and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naFcHO9KBnQ&t
The musical forms of gospel and the blues organically grew out of the sorrow songs, sort of as music for church and music not for church, respectively. Without the affirmation and preservation of the sorrow songs, hardly any later American music would have been what it was. By my reckoning, about the only other distinctly popular music form, contemporary with this developing African-American tradition, native to the US, was the importation of folk ballads from Europe with the Scots-Irish which grew into the mountain music tradition of Appalachia (which itself was in constant interchange with African-American derived music from virtually the beginning).
Charles Upton, in Folk Metaphysics: Mystical Meaning in Traditional Folk Songs and Spirituals, quotes Ananda Coomaraswamy: "[By] 'folklore' we mean that whole and consistent body of culture which has been handed down, not by books but by word of mouth and in practice, from time beyond the reach of historical research, in the form of legends, fairy tales, ballads, games, toys, crafts, medicine, agriculture, and other rites, and forms of organization, especially those we call tribal…. The content of folklore is metaphysical." It can be argued that our organic connection to primordial truths and wisdoms comes mainly through African, European, and Indigenous folk traditions. We have nearly lost contact with those.
The Souls of Black Folks
W.E.B Du Bois donated proceeds from his book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), to help fund the building of Jubilee Hall at Fisk as a home to the Jubilee singers and their music. Lyrics and musical notation from those songs preface each chapter of Souls…, which is, among other things, an exploration and polemical defense of the sorrow songs.
Du Bois (1868-1963) was born in Massachusetts. He earned bachelor's degrees from Fisk and Harvard, where he studied under William James. Eventually, he became the first African-American to earn a PhD from Harvard, but not before first doing graduate work in Berlin where he studied under some of the preeminent German scholars of the day and came into contact with Max Weber.
I would put forth his thinking in Souls…, especially on the issue of the sorrow songs, as excellent dialectical thinking. Du Bois opens the work with a chapter entitled "On Our Spiritual Strivings." He observes that he learned, as he developed intellectually, that the ideals and worlds he longed for were not intended for him or his race; they were separated from him by "a vast veil". He develops this into a general insight:
"…the Negro is a sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American World, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
In this powerful prose, the 'veil' is now shown to not only be a screen in the external life of the African-American, but is also reproduced internally in a self-identity which is constructed as the necessary bringing together of two 'worlds.'
He refers to this struggle, and its outward version of social, political, and economic striving, as comprising a period of "Sturm und Drang" (Storm and Stress). This concept is borrowed from German romanticism. Notice what Du Bois is doing here. German romantic high culture had become the standard of high culture in the Western world; Du Bois is linking it, and the spiritual development associated with it, with African-Americans, not whites! His implicit assertion is that African-Americans have a higher spiritual existence and he will make the case that the cultural expression of that is also a higher culture than the average American culture which he saw as being dominated by greed and base materialism.
Du Bois works towards developing the grand ideal synthesis:
"Freedom too, the long-sought [notice this Germanic hyphenating of concepts: as quite possibly the best educated American of his time, he is just rubbing his opponents' noses in it, as if to say, 'I a black dude am of a way more elite status and intelligence than you'—got to love it], we still seek, — the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty, — all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic… there are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes…."
He foresees the reconciliation of the reality of the unique perspective of African-Americans and the fundamental aspirations of American society more broadly. In fact, he's saying African-Americans are better Americans than are the whites of his day. Jones (Baraka) would also affirm, a half century later, "…'fo' sho',' they [African-Americans] continue to be, despite the wildest of ironies, the most American of Americans."
The Soul of America
Du Bois goes on to address the issue of culture. He asserts: "…there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness[!!!]'. He goes on to deride American contributions to civilized culture thus far:
"Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped upon her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song – the rhythmic cry of the slave – stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people."
Notice, the 'spiritual heritage of the nation', not just of Black Folks. The spirit of the nation is expressing itself, and at its most beautiful, through the contributions of African-Americans.
These songs, Du Bois asserts in high romantic form, are the result of great spiritual suffering—the only true source of greatness. "They are the music of an unhappy people," he goes on, "of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways." In short, the sorrow songs (and by lineage, then, gospel and the blues and all that followed) are the highest expression in American culture of genuine human aspiration and hard-won spiritual elevation.
The Dialectic of Cultures of Resistance
By looking at what Du Bois has been arguing and looking back at how this related to the formation and sustenance of civil rights movements, we can get a model of how the self-conscious creation of a culture of resistance can dialectically affect the larger society.
The sorrow songs, or spiritual music that grew out of them, found their institutional homes in the African-American churches, African-American colleges, and then within many of the social movements that eventually formed. This helped keep those movements in contact with their past, and the cultural forms that had developed out of the struggles of that past, and then to project a forward-looking ideal understood as the aspiration of African-American spiritual striving. Had the decision to explicitly affirm this cultural heritage not been made, at least one powerful instrument of resistance and reform would not have been available as resources to the extent they were (they were genuine music of the folk, so they would not just have just disappeared either).
Further, Du Bois was able to see how the cultural creations which embodied the spiritual, human, and political strivings of the people could, because of their inherent power, truthfulness, and worth, possibly transform the broader American culture. If America was ever to fulfill the aspirations of freedom and equality imbedded within her founding documents, it would be helped, perhaps even tutored, in that development by the wisdom and spirituality of African-American folk culture. At least in the sphere of American popular music, that promise would be fully borne out.
The more general lessons pointed to here include:
Hence, I think those who are currently theorizing this aspect of the various global freedom movements are on exactly the right track. The foregoing is meant to show how, via one example, folk music (and at this point the music of the folk would include not only the elements listed above, but aspects of soul, R and B, country, rock, hip hop, punk, etc…, etc…) is an element to not be neglected. Those traditions will need to be retrieved and reinterpreted. We need to be able to sing together. And that music should reflect the history of our peoples' previous struggles, our current strivings, and future aspirations.
i David's website is David Rovics -Singer/Songwriter – Songs of Social Significance. You can listen to his music there, or on any of the big music services, and also connect to his social media from there. He recently published an essay called 'Why the Resistance Needs Music'.
ii In the description of my Substack blog, Philosopher's Holler, I give this as one connotation of the term. Also, my presentation here of the connections between various aspects of 'black music' is overly simplified for the sake of brevity, but I think true in its essence. For a much better, more detailed, worked out, and entertaining exploration of the rich history of African-American folk music with all the nuance left in, I recommend that you check out Scott Ainslie's blog Scott Ainslie: BluesNotes | Substack. I also want to thank Scott for engaging in recent conversations around these topics.
Number 100
1. A decade of dissent: 10 years and 100 Acorns
This bulletin is the 100th Acorn to drop from the Winter Oak, ten years to the day since it was launched on February 6, 2015. To mark the occasion, editor Paul Cudenec has written a 20,000-word essay looking back at a decade of this newsletter's output on a year-by year basis.
The whole document can be found here, but we will also be serialising it over the coming weeks, in the following sections:
2015: Enemies of progress
2016: Against corporate dictatorship
2017: Parasites in power
2018: Resistance and psyops
2019: The violence of the system
2020: We are the 99%!
2021: Tide turning, fog lifting
2022: Defying the global psychopaths
2023: Smears and revelations
2024: Zionism and the criminocracy
2025: The struggle goes on!
2. Starmer's regime declares war on nature
All that talk by the world's biggest polluters about going "green" and wanting to "save the planet" has always been a transparent fraud.
In reality, "sustainable development" is a scam dreamed up by financial industrialists to allow the diversion of massive amounts of public money into their own pockets, via support for "green" initiatives.
Now the industrial global mafia's "Labour Party" puppet in the UK, which as soon as it came to power launched a full-spectrum attack on the British population, has openly declared war on nature.
In a January 29 speech, chancellor of the exchequer Rachel Reeves, a prominent member of Labour Friends of Israel, declared that industrial developers would "not need to worry about bats and newts" as she prioritised the plutocrats' pursuit of economic "growth", ie private profit.
She was heralding the imposition of a wave of hugely profitable and environmentally-destructive infrastructure projects, including a third runway at Heathrow Airport and a new 100,000-capacity stadium for Manchester United FC.
The UK government led by globalist stooge "Sir" Keir Starmer has clearly been ordered to brutally stamp its jackboot on the face of nature and freedom in the country.
His devotion to the international property development mafia has led him to champion the further destruction of the British countryside with the building of 1.5 million new homes, insisting: "Our plan for change will put builders not blockers first".
Furthermore, the criminocracy pulling the regime's strings is hypocritically using a financial device supposedly aimed at protecting the environment in order to destroy it for financial gain.
In her speech, Reeves said developers would be able to pay into a proposed nature restoration fund rather than considering the environmental impact of their profiteering activities.
Labour Party MP Steve Reed, also coincidentally known for his "longstanding commitment to Labour Friends of Israel", let the cat out of the bag regarding this particular sleight of hand when he said: "Our Nature Restoration Fund will speed up the building of the new infrastructure and homes across the country".
He revealed that the fund would enable the construction of industrial projects such as "datacentres and gigafactories" as well as "supporting a third runway at Heathrow Airport in line with the Government's climate & environmental commitments".
How can money set aside for "nature restoration" be used to accelerate industrialism?
How can expanding an airport possibly be in line with "climate & environmental commitments"?
The future that the money-power wants to impose on us all is dystopian in so many ways.
Environmental campaigner David Powell has long been drawing attention to the dangers of corporate governance in the UK's deregulated Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Freeports first introduced by the global mafia's "Conservative Party" puppets.
He revealed on January 30 that written into the 25-year licenses of all England's 48 SEZs and eight Freeports is a London Court of International Arbitration mechanism.
This, he said, allows corporations to sue the UK government for billions of pounds over contract breaches that they claim infringe on their "rights" to pollute the environment, make faulty products and abuse human rights.
Powell remarks: "The majority of the public are unaware of Sunak and Starmer's free zones rollout, they are even less aware of what the next step is afterwards.
"I'm talking about charter cities – Liverpool will compete with Cardiff, Glasgow will compete with Southampton, each city will have different laws and tax rates, fiscal and societal chaos is the only outcome unless the public rises up and says 'enough'".
by Paul Cudenec
I had a strange experience while going through all the back issues of The Acorn for my ten-year retrospective.
Armed with what I know today, I found I was seeing past events on which we had reported in a different light.
For instance, I always found it difficult to understand how there was any possibility of the fracking industry being allowed to devastate what was left of England's countryside, not just in the face of massive public opposition but also because of the obvious undesirability of the plan for anyone living in the country.
Although I, along with others, was muttering darkly about corruption and collusion between the industry and the UK government, I did not see or express a truth that is now plain to me.
This is that the fracking industry and the UK government are simply different branches of one massive world-spanning public-private criminal enterprise, which has nothing but contempt for the people of England, its land and its culture.
The same is true of all the other destructive industrial "infrastructure" projects being pushed through everywhere, against the wishes of those living there, whether the building of new motorways in France, high-speed rail lines in England or Italy, pipelines in the USA, copper mining in Latin America, cobalt mining in Africa or the massive industrialisation of China.
Behind all of these lies the same entity, whose private wing hopes to profit from the "development" imposed "lawfully" by its public wing – the governments it controls.
I think it is helpful to be able to understand that the thing in question is not some mysterious, shadowy, otherworldly spectre, but a real organisation, a kind of giant holding company whose sheer size and scope makes it very difficult for us little people to see.
It is called by various names – I tend to refer to it as the system, the criminocracy or the single global mafia.
I also like Mees Baaijen's term "Glafia" (global mafia), but for the purposes of this piece I am going to use the label Zisglom, being an abbreviation of "single global mafia" with an added prefix to indicate the ever-more evident Zionist aspect of its identity.
Zisglom has been built up into its current über-dominant form over a couple of centuries, although on the foundations of pre-existing power structures and networks.
It was constructed with money gained by usury, sharp practice and outright criminality and used this money to buy power, thus enabling it to engineer further means of increasing its financial wealth at the expense of society as a whole.
The euphemisms it uses to describe this parasitical self-enrichment, the bleeding-dry of nature and people for its own interests, are "progress", "growth" and "development".
Zisglom's favoured "public" instruments for its global agenda were once European colonial states, such as Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, but the USA later took prime place and a new switch is currently being made to China and the other "BRICS" states.
It has also manufactured a set of global institutions – the World Bank, IMF, Bank for International Settlements, United Nations, World Health Organization, World Economic Forum and so on – which it hopes will form the basis of a new Zisglom-controlled world state.
It aims to rip us all completely from the land and any sort of free and natural existence and lock us down in "smart" concentration camps where we will be permanently plugged into the digital matrix, every aspect of our lives commodified for its sustainable profiteering, using the financial infrastructure of its global "development goals".
As a callous corporate entity, Zisglom has no emotional attachment to the various nation-state proxies it has long been using for its own purposes – it regards them merely as sources of human and natural capital to fuel its own expansion.
But it does like to use the language of national pride to motivate those working (unknowingly, in the main) for its global goals.
From British imperialist-nationalists proud that their country ruled the waves and was bringing "civilisation" to backward natives, to US patriots buoyed up by the notion that theirs was the "land of the free" and was protecting "democracy" across the world, millions have been duped into dedicating their lives to working for Zisglom.
The same, by the way, is true of those internationalists whose vision today is of lifting billions of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans "out of poverty" and into a bright and shiny future of "inclusive prosperity" – this is Zisglom's sugar-coated global slavery project.
Like a practitioner of the martial arts, Zisglom is expert at turning the momentum of attacks on its control to its own advantage.
For example, it managed to convert the original 19th century movements defending working people from predatory industrial capitalism into a 20th and 21st century "socialist" or "communist" phenomenon that enthusiastically cheers on the relentless march of its industrial "progress" and angrily condemns those who question it as "reactionary".
The environmentalist movement, originally in opposition to Zisglom's ongoing industrial devastation, has now been largely transformed into the marketing wing of its "climate" scam.
When Zisglom does not manage to co-opt and control opposition, it will use unlimited violence to destroy it.
I am thinking here of the massacring of the Paris Commune, the crushing of anarchists and other freedom fighters in Bolshevik Russia, the murder by Zisglom sock-puppet Adolf Hitler of not only regime opponents but even non-controlled members of his own party, the attacks on anarchist revolutionaries in Spain by both Zisglom's Franco regime and its "communist" Moscow branch and, needless to say, the regular ruthless repression of popular uprisings and resistance everywhere by Zisglom's public-private uniformed security division, armed with batons, tear gas, guns and grenades.
When the police turn up to evict a protest camp defending nature, they are coming on behalf of Zisglom, which stands to profit from the destruction in question and has also manufactured the "planning" legislation that declares it necessary and legitimate.
Terror is a key feature of the Zisglom corporate playbook. Sometimes it carries out "false flag" massacres that it blames on its enemies in order to justify further acts of terror or repression on its part.
Zisglom has long been involved in every conceivable criminal activity – in bribery and corruption, in racketeering, in the trafficking of drugs, arms, women and children.
The use of blackmail is one of its specialities. In particular it likes to groom and control politicians and other significant individuals by facilitating their involvement in pedocriminality of the worst imaginable kind.
It also deliberately engineers and prolongs vast and bloody wars, in which millions of people lose their lives.
Zisglom benefits from these in countless ways – there are immediate profits for its weaponry, oil and transport divisions, its black market operations make hay from trade embargoes, it rakes it in from pseudo-humanitarian "foreign aid" schemes and, of course, all wars provide field days for money-laundering on a vast scale.
Zisglom-controlled governments borrow huge amounts of money from Zisglom's banking division to spend on war-related products produced by Zisglom and take out further Zisglom loans after the war to pay Zisglom's construction division to build back better in a "modern" style conducive to Zisglom's long-term agenda.
Sometimes, there are additional benefits to a war, such as atrocities which can be used to rally world opinion behind an illegitimate new Zisglom settler-colony and to disallow any criticism of that colony and its own subsequent atrocities, as well as of the Zisglom networks associated with that colony.
Zisglom's corporate mission is one of total control. It wants to know what everyone is saying and doing, all the time, and it wants to be able to censor, police and direct every detail of our lives.
For Zisglom, we are its workforce and its customer base, and in each context it wants to extract maximum profit from us. It likes young people with decades of exploitation ahead of them and would rather send older folk to the knacker's yard when they are no longer a source of profit.
The existence of troublesome "extremists", unruly peasants who refuse to the toe the line of cowed obedience it has drawn for us, is a source of endless frustration for Zisglom.
It has done all it can to ensure that we think the way it wants us to think, behave the way it wants us to behave.
It has gained control of nearly every media outlet, publishing house, school curriculum and academic institution.
Its truths are presented as the only truths, its prejudices are treated as facts, its corporate programme as the only possible future ahead of us.
Zisglom's domination depends on people working for it without knowing that they are working for it, advancing its toxic agenda while thinking they are doing some kind of good in the world.
For this reason, what Zisglom fears most of all is that people will see through the masks, screens and fronts it has so carefully and cleverly arranged to hide its ubiquitous presence.
It knows that the toppling of even a single domino of deceit risks bringing the whole arrangement crashing down.
Finally revealed for what it is – a criminal conspiracy that has grabbed control of our world through usury, cheating, robbery, lies, blackmail and mass murder – Zisglom would no longer be able to maintain its improbable domination of eight billion human beings.
by The Stirrer
Images by Dave Amis.
These images were taken on a short stretch of the River Avon running from Keynsham Lock to about a mile downstream. They show the amount of rubbish, mainly plastic, that was washed down in the floods during the late autumn and this winter, and which was left festooning the riverside trees and bushes as the flood water receded. Rubbish that at the time of writing, shows no sign of being dealt with by a coordinated effort.
A fair number of people when they hear about carbon and climate change tend to choose to ignore or dismiss the issue. One reason is because they see the issue as being of such enormity that it cannot be dealt with so they've resigned themselves to having to deal with whatever consequences they think there will be if levels of atmospheric carbon keep on increasing.
Then there are those of a sceptical bent who question the science being used to justify the assertion that we're in a climate crisis. They also question what they feel is a bandwaggon that has developed around the issue which they feel is being manipulated to impose restrictions on travel and, by definition, on the way people lead their lives.
Carbon and climate change are very polarising issues. That polarisation has gone beyond a robust debate about the facts and theories around the issue to something that's very tribal. So tribal that any rational discussion becomes ever harder to achieve.
Because the issue of carbon and climate change has become so tribal, there's a real danger that the broader environmental crisis that threatens us all will not get the urgent attention it requires. A crisis that's a result of a rapacious corporatist system that relies on never ending growth to fuel it.
Growth that sees the wealth it creates concentrated in fewer and fewer hands while a growing number of us struggle with austerity, inflation, growing impoverishment and last but by no means least, environmental degradation. Growth which on a finite planet is going to hit the buffers, causing massive destabilisation in the process.
Unless people experience an environmental crisis at first hand, they won't see how serious things are getting. As people are obliged to lead stressful, busy lives just to get by in this toxic system, let alone prosper, they're left with very little time for reflection. It feels like it's not a coincidence that there's an ever expanding universe of digital entertainment to distract people, making sure they don't have the time to start asking difficult questions about the system we have to endure.
That's what the elites who presume to rule over us hope is the case. The truth is that people are a lot more sussed than that, and in a variety of ways, can sense that humanity is on the wrong track.
When people see the immediate degradation of the environment after an event, they will react to it. That's why at the top of this piece, there are three pictures of the rubbish swept into the trees and bushes alongside the River Avon after the floods back in the late autumn and this winter. As soon as the flood water receded and the two of us saw the sheer amount of rubbish strewn down both banks of the river, we were both shocked by what we saw.
What had been a pleasant riverside environment had been turned into somewhere we wanted to avoid. As an aside, we do litter pick but, most of what's festooning the banks of the River Avon can only be reached by boat and sad to say, we don't have access to a boat.
We're hoping that people seeing the utter state of the banks of the River Avon will pause to think about why, we as a society generate so much waste. We've got a feeling that quite a few people are asking themselves that question. Hopefully, this will prompt them to ask other questions about how we as a society can free ourselves from the toxic system we currently have to endure and build a saner, more equitable and sustainable word. That may sound like a leap but the visceral reaction of seeing the river banks trashed will be a prompt for some people to think more deeply about where we're going.
There aren't any easy answers or solutions to the situation we're in. We dealt with one aspect of this when discussing the future of transport in this piece: The future of movement on a finite planet 26.2.23.
We certainly can't techno fix our way out of where we are. We definitely cannot rely on those who presume to rule over us to come up with an equitable solution to the environmental, societal and political clusterf**k we're facing. As awareness of and anger at the damage the toxic system we have to endure grows, along with that, we hope there will be a realisation that change will have to come from below.
There are some barriers to overcome. One being political tribalism. As we've written many times before, the opposition to the Covid lockdowns and the subsequent push for people to take what in effect was an experimental mRNA jab consisted of many currents of opinion. A few of those currents are comprised of people who are seriously questioning the trajectory society is on.
An element of that is an acute awareness of the environmental crisis we face, one that's a direct consequence of the rapacious, toxic system we have to live in. That's the broader environmental crisis, not the narrow focus on carbon which has been hi-jacked by those pushing the dystopian agenda of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
If that political tribalism can be broken down and people take a more rounded approach to who they work with to bring about the world we want, then there is hope for the future. The problem is, it feels like a lot of effort is being put in by nefarious actors to make sure we're divided and at each other's throats. The urgent need to get away from that tribalism was dealt with in this piece: Honesty vs tribalism 17.2.23.
There's definitely work to be done…
5. Ferdinand Tönnies: an organic radical inspiration
The latest in our series of profiles from the orgrad website.
"A natural order in which every member does his part harmoniously in order to enjoy his share"
Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) was an influential German sociologist, famous for contrasting Gemeinschaft (traditional community) with Gesellschaft (modern society).
It is clear throughout his best-known work, Community and Society, as well as in Geist der Neuzeit, that Tönnies regarded the Western transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft as a social and cultural decline rather than as a triumph of "progress".
Since the Middle Ages, people had been reduced from participants in a generally harmonious, living entity into atomised victims of a system which imposed its demands and laws from above.
Tönnies spelled out clearly the difference between the two ways of living: "There exists a Gemeinschaft of language, of folkways or mores, or of beliefs; but, by way of contrast, Gesellschaft exists in the realm of business, travel, or sciences… Gemeinschaft is old. Gesellschaft is new as a name as well as phenomenon". (1)
The term "organic" was used frequently, and always in a positive sense, by the sociologist and placed in direct contrast with the word "mechanical".
He wrote, for instance, in Community and Society: "In contrast to Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft is transitory and superficial. Accordingly, Gemeinschaft should be understood as a living organism, Gesellschaft as a mechanical aggregate and artifact". (2)
He added that "the tendencies and inevitableness of organic growth and decay cannot be understood through mechanical means". (3)
Tönnies extended his holistic view to the individual human being, criticising the idea that the soul, or the will, influences the body. He declared: "This is impossible as both are identical". (4)
He put forward instead the idea of "natural will", a kind of individual manifestation of Gemeinschaft – innate, organic and artistic – as opposed to the "rational will" of increasingly artificial modern society.
Tönnies referred to "the masterly analysis of Karl Marx", (5) one of his principal influences, and clearly presented a left-wing and anti-capitalist organic ideology – it was not for nothing that he was ousted from his long-term presidency of the German Sociological Association when the Nazis took power in 1933.
He explicitly equated Gesellschaft, the opposite of his organic Gemeinschaft, with capitalism. "The merchants or capitalists", he wrote, "are the natural masters and rulers of the Gesellschaft. The Gesellschaft exists for their sake. It is their tool". (6)
The move to Gesellschaft "meant the victory of egoism, impudence, falsehood, and cunning, the ascendancy of greed for money, ambition and lust for pleasure". (7)
The city, for Tönnies, was the epitome of the soulless, artificial, capitalist modern world: "The city is typical of Gesellschaft in general… Its wealth is capital wealth which, in the form of trade, usury, or industrial capital, is used and multiplies. Capital is the means for the appropriation of products of labor or for the exploitation of workers". (8)
Alongside his critique of how mercantile relationships – capitalist society – destroyed authentic communities, came a scathing condemnation of the modern state.
The state, said Tönnies, "is nothing but force" (9) and totally opposed to the "folk life and folk culture" (10) which underpinned the cohesion of Gemeinschaft, suppressing all possibility of "a natural order in which every member does his part harmoniously in order to enjoy his share". (11)
The common people were all too aware that the state acted against their interests, he said, and that it effectively stopped them from existing as an organic entity.
"The state is their enemy. The state, to them, is an alien and unfriendly power; although seemingly authorized by them and embodying their own will, it is nevertheless opposed to all their needs and desires, protecting property which they do not possess, forcing them into military service for a country which offers them hearth and altar only in the form of a heated room on the upper floor or gives them, for native soil, city streets where they may stare at the glitter and luxury in lighted windows forever beyond their reach!
"Their own life is nothing but a constant alternative between work and leisure, which are both distorted into factory routine and the low pleasure of the saloons. City life and Gesellschaft down the common people to decay and death…" (12)
This understanding of the state as an artificial entity which claims to embody community, but in reality kills it, is very much part of the classical anarchist tradition, particularly when combined with Tönnies' class awareness and anti-elitism.
As a young man, in 1873, he read Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy and was impressed with the work and its author to the point of "hero worship", writes Richard Noll. (13)
But the more Nietzsche wrote, and won acclaim, the less Tönnies liked what he saw and in 1897 he penned Der Nietzsche-Kultus: Eine Kritik in which he attacked the cult that had developed around the philosopher.
Says Noll: "Part of this Nietzschean faith was the exaltation of the mastery of the many by the few, a new nobility of the perpetually self-creating who would lead the way for the rest of the herd.
"Tönnies argued that rather than provoke widespread liberation, Nietzschean ideas were being used instead to maintain conservative and especially elitist classes in society – precisely those persons and values that Nietzschean cults claimed they were repudiating". (14)
Video link: Ferdinand Tönnies – Community and Society
1. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society: Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, trad. Charles P. Loomis, (New York: Dover Publications, 2002), p. 34.
2. Tönnies, p. 35.
3. Tönnies, p. 36.
4. Tönnies, p. 121.
5. Tönnies, p. 89.
6. Tönnies, p. 83.
7. Tönnies, p. 202.
8. Tönnies, pp. 227-28.
9. Tönnies, p. 216.
10. Tönnies, p. 225.
11. Tönnies, p. 208.
12. Tönnies, pp. 230-31.
13. Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: The Origins of a Charismatic Movement (London: Fontana, 1996), p. 3.
14. Noll, p. 5.
Where the British deep state intersects with "counter extremism", the far right and Zionism, the name that always crops up is "Rothschild"! An illuminating post by David Miller.
* * *
"I'm working with an amazing voluntary team, building a map of left-wing networks. Here's what they made re Professor Mariana Mazzucato's department, the economist advising Keir Starmer. It shows her department's million-dollar grants from Soros and the Rockerfeller Foundation". Some important collective research into aspects of the single global mafia (aka Zisglom), relayed by Charlotte Gill.
* * *
"Club of Rome, Le Cercle, Bilderberg… I was just pointing at pictures of perpetrators and then found out that all of them were connected to these organisations". Anneke Lucas gives a compelling account of the psychopathic global mafia's long-term use of young girls – like herself in her childhood – as sex slaves.
* * *
"The BBC suspended six of its reporters for simply liking pro-Palestine tweets. And yet, in Berg's case, his overt pro-Israel advocacy has been treated as entirely unproblematic". Alan Macleod of Mint Press News sheds further light on Raffi Berg (pictured), the BBC news chief linked to the CIA and Mossad.
* * *
"The Plutocracy / oligarchy / super rich / .001%, whatever term you like, the power elite, is a real problem when it comes to war. Given this, the peace movement needs to stop playing whack a mole with war protests and oppose the power structure that makes war, if we are sincerely interested in ending war". A refreshing article from the Green Liberty Caucus in the USA, republished by the Real Left in the UK.
* * *
"The marketing of illusions opens the doors to new consumers made patients for life, the techno-medical trans-industry mutilates bodies and sterilizes adolescents, artificial reproduction laboratories work to make test-tube babies the normal way of coming into the world". Newly-published translation of an article by Italian resistance fighter Silvia Guerini.
* * *
An important commentary has been produced by Iurie Rosca and Mees Baaijen on Alexandr Dugin and the reality behind the BRICS-orientated "multi-polar" world order he promotes. It nicely complements Paul Cudenec's analysis of the Russian globalist pawn.
* * *
"Most of the alternative community are convinced the nation-state system is sacred, and that a return to nationalism and national sovereignty is the solution to globalism. But the truth is that universalism combined with localism are the antidotes to the global Great Reset project. It is only on the local level, that we as private citizens are able to effectively engage the agenda of the cabal". Hear hear to this statement from The World Is Not Enough, in a written conversation with Rosca.
* * *
"The same marketing operations that were incubating and disseminating key messaging for the climate movement were framing the campaign messaging for humanitarian war and NATO/Zionist aligned imperialism". Michael Swifte writes about "networked hegemony".
* * *
Video recommendation. The Collapse of The American Dream Explained in Animation.
* * *
"Are we going to resign ourselves to living in an authoritarian state, one where the police serve their political masters in deciding which rights we are permitted, and whether we are allowed to engage in any kind of meaningful protest against our government?" So asks journalist Jonathan Cook on his blog. The answer is obviously "no"!
* * *
Our fellow dissidents at UK Column have been putting out some excellent news programmes recently – the editions of January 20 and January 27 were particularly powerful.
* * *
Young English freedom activist Montgomery Toms issued an encouraging video on January 10, 2025, of him and his fellow campaigners' efforts to talk to the London public about the dangers of a cashless society and digital ID. He insists: "We are the people and we hold the power!"
* * *
Activists in Galway, Ireland, have also been spreading the message of resistance to global tyranny. Are we witnessing the start of the Great Uprising?
* * *
"Cooperation is part of human nature. We have never needed to obey state authority in order to cooperate with one another in our collective self-interest". A very good essay by Iain Davis proposing what he calls "voluntary democracy".
* * *
Common Knowledge Edinburgh are organising an all-day event in the city on Saturday February 22, from 9am to 4.30pm, entitled "The Scottish People's Covid-19 Inquiry – Raising Awareness". Speakers include Dr Claire Craig, Professor Richard Ennos, Professor Diane Rasmussen, Dr Alan Mordue, Dr Liz Evans and Professor Martin Neil. The venue is the Jesuit Church of the Sacred Heart, 28 Lauriston Street, Edinburgh, EH3 9DJ.
* * *
There have been plenty of opportunities to watch Winter Oak's Paul Cudenec on video at the start of 2025, with his appearance on fellow journalist James Delingpole's podcast followed by his personal "call to resistance" issued on his Substack.
* * *
"One of the bed-rocks of the ideology of liberal democracies like ours remains that conspiracy theories are always wrong, and those who espouse them are mental incompetents". Robin Ramsay.
(For many more like this, see the Winter Oak quotes for the day blog)
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by Paul Cudenec
Somebody commented on my article "The British population is under attack" that I had not made any mention of immigration.
The first point to make in response, I suppose, is that my definition of "the British population" includes immigrants and descendants of immigrants, who are as much affected by the threats I listed as anyone else and who often play an important role in resisting them, as The Stirrer recently pointed out.
Secondly, as a kind of declaration of personal interest, I should add that I have several friends, both in the UK and France, who are partly or wholly of non-European immigrant descent.
Thirdly, I would add that as an Englishman living in France I do not feel that my presence here constitutes any kind of attack on my host nation, but is rather a reflection of my deep love and respect for the French people, its country and its culture.
Having said all that, it is certainly true to say that moving large numbers of people from one part of the world to another does form part of the global mafia's modus operandi.
One of the worst examples of this, alongside the horrors of the African slave trade, was the shipping of hordes of Europeans to America and Australasia, where they were used as human battering rams for the empire of Global Capital.
With the indigenous peoples cleared off the land, there was nothing in the way of it becoming a giant greenfield site ripe for profitable development opportunities and, in the case of North America, the construction of a brave new world where commerce was king and old customs and values could be swept away by the glorious advance of Progress.
Well, theoretically anyway, since it has become clear to me in recent years that many contemporary Americans are very attached to old-fashioned values, not least that of freedom from tyranny.
Perhaps that is why China is now considered a better bet as the foundation for a totalitarian New World Order?
Anything traditional or grassroots that speaks of social cohesion and cultural autonomy is despised by our overlords, who prefer rootless, disorientated and divided populations with no sense of history – the perfect prey for their propaganda and control.
So we could certainly see the successive waves of immigration into Europe after the Second World War, along with the "Americanisation" or "modernisation" of our society, as part of that cultural bulldozing.
But there is a big difference between these new arrivals and the "settlers" that took over Turtle Island and Down Under – and indeed those that have occupied Palestine.
They do not generally arrive convinced of the inferiority of the indigenous people and of their God-given right to massacre them and steal everything they have!
While there have obviously been problems over the decades, these immigrants have generally submitted quietly to their status in European society, often as cheap labour, undercutting what had become an expensive unionised workforce thanks to decades of hard social struggle.
Recent tensions regarding Muslims have largely been stoked by Zionist-funded pseudo-nationalists whose role is to facilitate divide-and-rule for the system and also to diminish solidarity with indigenous Muslims in the Middle East being wiped out by Jewish immigrant settlers.
I don't suppose many folk of indigenous extraction in the USA, Canada, Australia or New Zealand want to send all white people back to Europe.
Likewise, we Europeans, while protecting and preserving our own distinctive cultures and traditions, have little choice but to recognise both the reality of the immigration that has already taken place and, importantly, the humanity of those who have come to live in our lands.
I do hope, though, that all this displacement comes to an end and we can settle once more into stable and culturally-cohesive societies.
This will be one of the big benefits from the collapse of the globalist system, which I continue to insist is not too far away now, if we keep up our resistance!
As centralised world power disintegrates, and returns increasingly to the local level, so will the wounds caused by all the dislocation begin to heal.
Communities, with their own specific land, climate and food sources, will begin to differentiate once again, developing their own habits and stories, which will in time become customs and myths.
Within two or three generations they will start to speak slightly differently, dress differently, see the world in slightly different ways.
Eventually they will be identifiable tribes or nations, distinct cultural entities, and the grim grey years of global cultural levelling will be nothing but a half-forgotten nightmare.
by Paul Cudenec
As I have pointed out before, a big disruptive event like a war serves multiple purposes for the criminocrats. [1]
One of these is to initiate a Reset, a "building back better" of society that is not just highly profitable for them, but also advances their long-term industrial-authoritarian agenda.
Delphine Dulong sheds interesting light on this process in a book showing how the Second World War and then the Algerian war of independence were used to "modernise" French life and politics. [2]
This programme was advanced on a practical level through a series of state Plans, which I immediately equated with Soviet industrialism, but which have also been described as "more corporatist than truly democratic". [3]
If the hint of fascism seems inappropriate in a post-war context, it is worth noting that Dulong detects the beginning of the "modernisation" movement, particularly in agriculture, in the corporatism of the Nazi-friendly Vichy regime in wartime France, which also launched a Ten-Year Plan. [4][5]
The aim of this modernisation was to complete the job that had been carried out with the First World War and do away with the traditional French outlooks and ways of living that were obstacles for global corporate control and exploitation.
Anything traditional, rooted in the past, was thus depicted as bad, old-fashioned, out-of-date and in need of being swept aside by the steel broom of industrial "progress".
As one of the modernisers openly declared: "The essential conflict in contemporary France is between those who want to accelerate economic modernisation and those who want to slow it down, between those who want to bring France into the 20th century and those who want to keep it in the old days". [6]
Their hostility even extended to the elevated and non-commercial emphasis of French (and European) culture as a whole, especially compared to the laudably money-orientated USA.
A telling 1953 article in the Jeune Patron (Young Boss) journal declared: "To be a guide in the domain of ideas in France, you have to be a scribe, you have to be an intellectual, you have to be a novelist, you have to be a philosopher.
"Sartre or Malraux are more important in French life than any industrialist.
"In America, the CEO of General Motors is much more important than Hemingway. There's a big difference.
"It is America's business chiefs who have political leadership, it is they who are responsible for the nation, it is they who really steer the life of the nation in one direction or another.
"In America, the economic leadership has become a political leadership; there is no leadership other than by the economic phenomenon". [7]
The problem for those behind this endeavour was, however, that the French public remained fond of their old ways and customs and would not readily vote for politicians promoting such an approach.
So in order to modernise French life, the first task was to "modernise" French politics by bypassing the existing democratic process.
This was achieved by switching power away from elected politicians who were still, to some extent, answerable to the people and into the hands of faceless technocrats working behind the scenes.
Justifying this was the claim that in the bright new shiny post-war world, the country needed to be led by "experts" guided not by personal opinion or party loyalty but purely by cold rationality – by "the science" as they would say today.
The truth lay elsewhere, of course. Those pushing this agenda were no more "apolitical" than the organisation of that name whose insidious role in contemporary British politics was recently exposed by Ben Rubin. [8]
It was just that their agenda was a long-term one and not visible to most of the public because it was not presented to them as a "political" issue over which they had any right to exercise the control supposedly invested in them by "democracy".
"Modernisation" was, as it always is, depicted as something that must and will inevitably come about, a necessary evolution of human society that advances hand-in-hand with the passing of time itself.
Its proponents complained in 1953 of French people's "attachment to a certain archaic style of civilisation and almost total lack of knowledge of technological evolution".
They added: "Dynamism too often gives way to a certain tendency for stagnation, which stifles it; and we cannot be sure that the 'modus vivendi' which has been established between rural and urban France in certain periods will end with a positive outcome in which dynamic action and the spirit of progress will win the day over the stagnation of practices and the respect of traditions". [9]
Any fusty old nonsense that got in the way of this glorious techno-future was not fit for purpose and had to be swept away.
Such as the law, for instance. As moderniser Jean Rivero put it in 1965: "Understand that there is a Plan, we have drawn it up, we are executing it and the law has got nothing to do with it". [10]
They favoured a law which was "supple and adaptable" – a preference close to the 21st century calls by Klaus Schwab of the WEF for "agile" governance. [11][12]
Parliamentary democracy was regarded as an obstacle to the fast-tracked advance to industrial modernity – all those "interminable debates" would just slow the whole thing down too much. [13]
There was, on the part of the modernisers, a "refusal to take part in political activity as defined by the forms of representative democracy". [14]
Manoeuvres were carried out to instead exercise ultimate control through the instrument of one single person, the president.
This was made possible by the crisis in Algeria that broke out in 1954 and the great public esteem for WW2 resistance figurehead Charles de Gaulle.
When he was given special presidential powers in what some called a "semi-dictatorship", it was widely assumed that these would apply purely to him, for the duration of the emergency, and that afterwards the power of parliament would be restored. [15]
But this was not the case and, furthermore, in 1962 the constitution was changed so that, instead of being chosen by parliament, the president was elected directly by the public.
As journalist/propagandist Roger Priouret had declared in 1959: "No doubt about the goal whose achievement would be welcomed by company heads, managers and integrated workers: they want a strong and stable executive capable of firmly steering the economy in the direction of industrial progress". [16]
This switch to a more authoritarian form of government was a key feature of the post-war Fifth Republic and its effects are still in evidence today, with president Emmanuel Macron's government pushing through law after law without a vote in parliament thanks to the handy "49.3" get-out clause inserted into French constitutional law.
Another important change described by Dulong was in the general understanding of what politics was all about.
No longer was it depicted as being concerned with values, principles, ideas, ethics or the interests of the French people.
Instead, it was all about money-making – or "the needs of the economy" as it was euphemistically termed by one moderniser in 1959. [17]
A key moment in the reorientation of French politics to serve the interests of Mammon came in 1960 with the controversial appointment, as finance minister, of Wilfrid Baumgartner, director of the Bank of France, the country's central bank. [18]
President de Gaulle, as well as being a French nationalist rather than a Europeanist, was not particularly interested in economics and so, although his personal popularity was a useful battering ram in switching power from parliament to the president, he was not the ideal leader for the modernisation camp.
Georges Pompidou, president from 1969 to 1974, was a much better fit with the new notion of a president as a "competent" steward for the "economic" priority, after his many years working for the Rothschild bank. Macron also worked for the Rothschilds, as I may have previously mentioned!
"Change" was the keynote theme of the "modernisation" bandwagon, just as it is today for the likes of Keir Starmer and Tony Blair, with his revealingly-entitled Institute for Global Change.
The way people thought in France had to change in order to pave the way for the planned changes in their lives.
To achieve this, a new team had to be brought in to reshape public thinking.
Dulong describes in detail how a network of people was created to influence all sectors of French life, in the civil service, academia and the media.
This very much reminds me of the Common Purpose network in the UK (as exposed in depth by UK Column) and, indeed, I suspect the very same interests lay behind it. [19]
Dulong says this brought together organisations usually very remote from each other.
"It constituted, in fact, a real lacework of institutional relationships, often reinforced by links of personal friendship. In the words of Pierre Uri, it could thus be compared to 'a spider's web'". [20]
Dulong explains that the network included senior civil servants, trade unionists and various specialists in the social sciences – economists, sociologists, political scientists and statisticians. [21]
They were selected for their technical "competence" rather than to represent the views of the French people.
She adds: "They had as a common characteristic the exercise of several activities at the same time: they taught in public establishments, took part in think tanks, collaborated with media companies, devoted part of their weekly schedule to trade union activities, research, advice and so on. They were therefore at the intersection of multiple socio-professional 'sectors' (administration, academia, journalism, etc) and thus benefited from additional resources which compensated to some extent for their relative marginality". [22]
Dulong says they were of a quite different breed to previous generations of senior French civil servants – she cites research showing they were often "communists, protestants or Jews", or from working-class families, some with backgrounds in the liberal professions and others in business. [23]
Their "political" background was somewhat elusive, with many having apparently been part of the French Resistance, though as this was an underground movement, this was not an official part of their CV.
Others had been involved with de Gaulle's Free France parallel government in both Algiers and London. [24]
These new administrators were placed in the fast lane for promotion and quickly overtook older and more experienced individuals to occupy key posts. [25]
An important group in this phenomenon was the Club Jean-Moulin, which explicitly said it was involved in "the struggle for power" and described its aim as being "to facilitate the emergence of the new elites". [26][27]
In a 1961 document called The State and the Citizen, effectively its manifesto, it called for "the end of ideology", "egalitarian society", "mathematical culture", "the scientific spirit" – "rigour" rather than "intuition" – "the search for political rationality" and "efficient" political power. [28]
A controlled "left" was an important weapon in pushing through the "change" agenda, just as it is today with all the "woke" and "climate" posturing which reinforces the totalitarian Great Reset narrative.
Dulong writes that converting leftists to the modernisation cause was an openly-stated aim of these networks, with politician Gaston Defferre writing: "The left of opposition must become a left of management". [29]
Whenever a regime – fascist, communist or "democratic" – wants to bulldoze the existing structures and morals of a society so as to impose its new model, it does so under the flag of "youth" and post-war France was no exception.
The technique is to brainwash young people into rejecting the ways of their elders and indoctrinate them to work for a "better" world that suits your own programme.
Jean Ripert, later high up in the UN, told Dulong in an interview that he became passionate about the Plan as a young man through reading a newspaper article by Jean Monnet, one of the leading French modernisers. [30]
"I was convinced, like a lot of people of my age, that it was an essential idea. Effectively I associated the liberal economy with disorder… But what most attracted me in this article was the expression 'modernisation or decadence'.
"I said to myself: 'There is something that is not working in this place. We are a country of old people, run by old people'". [31]
This "generational" game was also used to push the industrialisation of French farming.
One of the modernisers wrote of "a generation faithful to economic norms very close to those of the Middle Ages confronted, without warning, by a generation extremely sensitised to the influence of the modern world… proclaiming its affiliation to the modern world". [32]
But what, you might be wondering, was the aim behind all this "modernisation"? What was the driving purpose?
It was money, of course. Documents referenced by Dulong show clearly that what was at stake was the immediate and long-term "productivity" of France.
She reveals, for instance, that the Fonds de modernisation et d'équipement was set up with the express purpose of "transforming" public funds of all kinds into productive capital. [33]
In other words, certain interests wanted to remodel society so they could extract as much wealth as possible from the French people and their land.
The French state, in their hands, was merely a public-funded tool used to accelerate their private accumulation of wealth.
Alongside the internal subversion of French institutions, a great deal of propaganda was unleashed to brainwash the public into going along with the demolition of their traditional culture.
Dulong describes the technique of depicting two radically different kinds of French society, a binary opposition which invites only one preference.
"One was 'static', 'immobile', stuck in its own rut and corresponding to social conditions overtaken by history – those of '19th century' France – in summary, an 'anachronistic' society; the other was 'transformational and evolutionary', turned towards the future, in short a 'modern' society". [34]
There was also a big propaganda effort to make The Economy the first and foremost political issue, with the publication of a series of books on the subject, aimed at the general public.
Dulong remarks: "All these works can be interpreted as attempts at a mobilisation aiming to interest 'laymen' in economic science". [35]
She says that the same was true of a swathe of new magazines promoting the idea of "economic democracy", which amounted to "the devaluing of parliamentary representation and the definition of a new type of political leadership". [36]
Business "executives" were presented as a new class to be looked up to, there were a lot of fact-finding trips across the Atlantic as part of a "symbolic remodelling of society" and American-style opinion polls started playing an important role in France. [37][38][39]
The lines between public and private were increasingly blurred, with much interaction between business chiefs and senior civil servants. [40]
The state was run like a company, for the benefit of its private stakeholders, while private businesses were painted as benevolent bodies deserving of state support and providing prosperity for all. [41]
Claimed the propaganda: "Playing an essential role at the heart of the industrialisation phenomenon, our businesses increasingly constitute, for those who work in them, a human environment on which they depend for their blossoming". [42]
The question of modernisation and its propaganda in France is also addressed by Pierre Rimbert in a 2005 book.
He remarks that although the process was set in motion after the war in the name of the general public interest, it ended up "only serving the dominant fractions of the dominant class".
And he stresses: "The planners wanted above all to identify and eradicate social obstacles to economic growth". [43]
Rimbert quotes arch-moderniser Monnet's statement that the French "ought to adopt the 'American psychology', meaning 'in a frame of mind for constant change'". [44]
He also cites a 1964 report that called for "an effort of reflection: to compile the inventory of what will necessarily change, to measure the degree of resistance from various sectors becoming obsolete and to draw up a strategy of elimination". [45]
He adds: "Those initially targeted were small businessmen, shopkeepers, craftsmen and, above all, the small farmers who represented a third of the active population at the end of the war". [46]
The similarity to the current Great Reset programme really is striking!
Rimbert explains that because the first victims of this modernisation were generally associated with old-fashioned "right-wing" outlooks, the assault on traditional life was packaged as "progressive" and "left-wing", even though it went on to threaten the livelihoods of a range of workers. [47]
His own focus is on the role of the French daily newspaper Libération in this "modernisation" psyop.
Originally founded in 1973 by Jean-Paul Sartre and others in the name of "giving a voice to the people" by reporting news and views independently of commercial interests, it was gradually turned round to face in completely the other direction. [48]
As it accepted advertising and outside "investors", it increasingly adopted an editorial line that suited the global money-men. [49][50]
Comments Rimbert: "The fusion of the press with money determines its contents more efficiently than any kind of direct censorship, even if exercised by the owner". [51]
Journalist Serge July, a co-founder of Libération who was at its helm from 1974 to 2006, said in 1991 that the newspaper "placed itself as the organ of economic modernisation at the start of the 1980s". [52]
Colleague Laurent Joffrin, who later became editor, boasted in 1993: "We were the instruments of the victory of capitalism in the left". [53]
Libération promoted a "second left", pursuing the kind of "modern" Third Way politics embraced by the likes of Tony Blair and, as I showed recently, Rockefeller Foundation trustee Juan Carlos Santos. [54][55]
It became obsessed with "the economy", praised Margaret Thatcher and took a pro-NATO stance during the first Gulf War and in Kosovo. [56][57][58]
In 2003, the invasion of Iraq by the US and its accomplices was met in France by what July condemned as "anti-American hysteria".
He insisted: "The democratic world needs America. In a context of globalisation, political defeats for America are defeats for democracy".
And he complained that the negative reaction to the neo-colonial occupation of the Middle Eastern country was prompting "bare-faced anti-semitism". [59]
In the light of all this, the formal purchase in 2005 of the largest shareholding in the newspaper by a well-known zio-imperialist financier felt less like a take-over than the triumphant public declaration that the defeat of its original spirit was complete. [60]
The symbolism was certainly strong enough to provide the title of Rimbert's book – Libération de Sartre à Rothschild (Libération from Sartre to Rothschild).
It seems clear to me that Edouard de Rothschild's showboating and all the propaganda pushed out by Libération was the continuation of the process described by Dulong, whose book is in fact cited by Rimbert.
This is confirmed by the fact that she names as "the essential link in the chain, from beginning to end", the politician Jacques Delors, who later became French finance minister and then, in 1985, president of the European Commission. [61]
Wikipedia notes: "During his presidency, he oversaw important budgetary reforms and laid the groundwork for the introduction of a single market within the European Community. It came into effect on 1 January 1993 and allowed the free movement of persons, capital, goods, and services within the Community.
"Delors also headed the Committee for the Study of Economic and Monetary Union, widely known as the Delors Committee, that in early 1989 proposed the creation of a new currency — the euro — to replace individual national currencies. This was achieved in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty". [62]
The EU was always just a stepping stone towards an intended world industrial-authoritarian state.
During the period analysed by Dulong, Delors was employed in "a series of posts in French banking and state planning" with Baumgartner's Bank of France.
These signs of a globo-criminocratic agenda at work are further reinforced by the fact that Dulong mentions the involvement in the post-war bid to "change" France of the Behavioural Sciences Center at Stanford, California, and funding from UNESCO, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. [63][64]
As I have previously demonstrated, the latter is nothing but a front for the Rothschilds' industrial-financial empire and its sinister bid to destroy traditional life and organic communities everywhere. [65]
The single global mafia's move for world domination has been advanced under the false flag of "progress" so as to lull us into numbed acceptance of its supposed inevitability.
But we don't have to accept the grim techno-totalitarian future the mafia has in mind for us.
If we can wake enough people up to the chilling reality behind its ongoing push for still more "modernisation", "development" and "growth", then we can turn our backs on that industrial prison-camp and stride out towards a free and natural tomorrow.
[1] Paul Cudenec, 'Wars, resets and the global criminocracy', https://winteroak.org.uk/2024/06/10/wars-resets-and-the-global-criminocracy/
[2] Delphine Dulong, Moderniser la Politique: Aux origines de la Ve République (Paris: L'Harmattan; 1997). All translations in this essay are my own – the original French versions can be found here.
[3] J-F Le Calonnec, 'La planification et le droit', Economie et humanisme, 140, 1962, p. 40, cit. Dulong, p. 50.
[4] Dulong, p. 19 FN.
[5] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planification_en_France
[6]
M. Duverger, De la dictature (Paris: Julliard, 1961), pp. 41-42, cit. Dulong, p. 226.
[7] L. Salleron, 'Le chef d'entreprise dans la cité, Jeune Patron, september-october 1953, pp. 31-33, cit. Dulong, p. 113.
[8] https://riseuk.substack.com/p/dereliction-of-duty
[9] Promotions, 26, 1953, pp. 123-24, cit. Dulong, p. 34.
[10] Jean Rivero; 'Le Plan et le droit', in La Planification comme processus de décision (Paris: A. Colin, 1965), p. 122, cit. Dulong, p. 44.
[11] Dulong, p. 48.
[12] See Paul Cudenec, 'Klaus Schwab and his Great Fascist Reset'. https://winteroakextra.wordpress.com/2020/10/08/klaus-schwab-and-his-great-fascist-reset/
[13] P. Lamour, 'Mutation de l'esprit critique', La Nef, 15, 1963, p. 44, cit. Dulong, p. 174.
[14] G. Burdeau, Note préparatoire à la table ronde de l'AFSP de novembre 1960, citée in G. Vedel, dir, La dépolitisation. Mythe ou réalité (Paris, A. Colin, 1962), p. 12, cit. Dulong, p. 186.
[15] B. Lavergne, 'Perspectives de politique intérieure française', L'Année politique et économique, 163, 1961, pp. 343-345, cit. Dulong, p. 224.
[16] Roger Priouret, La République des députés (Paris: Grasset, 1959), p. 251, cit. Dulong, p. 227.
[17] M. Vasseur, Le droit de la réforme des structures industrielles et des économies régionales (Paris: LGDJ, 1959), p. 516, cit. Dulong, p. 48.
[18] Dulong, p. 163.
[19] https://www.ukcolumn.org/series/common-purpose-effect
[20] Dulong, pp. 14-15.
[21] Dulong, p. 11.
[22] Dulong, pp. 17-18.
[23] B. Gaïti, De la IVe à la Ve République. Les conditions de la réalisation d'une prophétie, PhD thesis, Université Paris I, 1992, cit. Dulong, p. 18.
[24] Dulong, p. 19.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Club Jean-Moulin, L'Etat et le citoyen (Paris: Seuil, 1961), p. 379, cit. Dulong, p. 199.
[27] Brochure du centre d'information et de documentation, Archives du club J. Moulin, 1CJM7/dossier 7, cit. Dulong, p. 149.
[28] Club Jean-Moulin, L'Etat et le citoyen, p. 409, cit. Dulong, p. 151.
[29] Gaston Defferre, Un nouvel horizon (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 21-22, cit. Dulong, p. 266.
[30] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Ripert
[31] Dulong, p. 20.
[32] M. Debatisse, La révolution silencieuse. Le combat des paysans (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1963), p. 47, cit. Dulong, pp. 119-20.
[33] Dulong, p. 15.
[34] Dulong, p. 9.
[35] Dulong, p. 63.
[36] Dulong, p. 69.
[37] Dulong, p. 81.
[38] Dulong, p. 78.
[39] Dulong, p. 132.
[40] Dulong, p. 112.
[41] Dulong, p. 106.
[42] 'L'enjeu de la civilisation industrielle', Cahiers du CRC, 6, 1961, p. 91, cit. Dulong, p. 108.
[43] Pierre Rimbert, Libération de Sartre à Rothschild (Paris: Editions Raisons d'Agir, 2005), pp. 84-85.
[44] Rimbert, p. 85.
[45] Groupe 1985, Réflexions pour 1985, La Documentation française, 1964, p. 104, cit. Rimbert, p. 86.
[46] Rimbert, p. 86.
[47] Rimbert, pp. 86-87.
[48] Rimbert, p. 9.
[49] Rimbert, p. 50.
[50] Rimbert, p. 60.
[51] Rimbert, p. 133.
[52] Serge July, 'Introduction à Libération 111', 1991, cit. Rimbert, p. 128.
[53] Quoted in 'Les années Libé', a film by Michel Kaptur, France 2, 2 June 1993, cit. Rimbert, p. 114.
[54] Rimbert, p. 102.
[55] See Paul Cudenec, 'The Single Global Mafia'. https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/cudenec-the-single-global-mafia.pdf
[56] Rimbert, p. 112.
[57] Rimbert, p. 55.
[58] Rimbert, p. 116.
[59] Rimbert, p. 116.
[60] Rimbert, p. 63.
[61] Dulong, p. 157.
[62]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Delors
[63] Dulong, p. 87.
[64] Dulong, pp. 40-41.
[65] Cudenec, 'The Single Global Mafia'.
by Paul Cudenec
I have been writing a lot recently about Zionism, as is sadly unavoidable for anyone genuinely intent on exploring and exposing the nature of the single global mafia.
We all know that any criticism of Israel, and of the Rothschilds, prompts an automatic accusation of being "anti-semitic" and I have not escaped this inquisitional smear-label.
Needless to say, it is not at all accurate and I have been reminded of the extent to which this is so by reading Love & Revolution, the latest and most extensive collection of writing from Mark Josephs, aka Mark the Mystic Activist. [1]
Mark's writing has been deeply resonating with me for several years now – I have written about it here and here.
We often seem to take a similar approach to things, whether on the political or philosophical level, and I notice that in this latest work he deploys at one point the satirical term "unauthorised hope", which coincidentally forms part of the title of a fictional work of mine. [2][3]
Given Mark's Jewish family background, I do not think it fanciful to regard him as an idiosyncratic contemporary representative of a current of early 20th century central-European Jewish thinking that has been a source of personal inspiration for me.
Labelled "anti-capitalist Romanticism" by academic Michael Löwy, the current included thinkers like Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Bloch, Gershom Scholem, Erich Fromm, Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka. [4]
This broad "cultural critique of modern capitalist civilization in the name of pre-modern or pre-capitalist values" does not fit easily into standard political categories, but is part of what I call the organic radical approach.
It is, I believe, nothing short of a cultural disaster that this thread of freedom-cherishing humanistic anti-industrial Jewish wisdom has currently been largely eclipsed in the public mind by the hateful greed-driven brutality of Zionist imperialism.
But Mark keeps alive the fine old tradition of high-minded Jewish universalism when he writes: "Our Essence doesn't feel confined to a race, or nationality, or existential doctrine (Religion, Atheism, etc). It experiences itself as somehow deeper and more universal than any of these identifications.
"And it sees others as also deeper than their colour or creed. Our Essence looks from its own depths into the depths of others – and sees their Essence – and experiences a Universal Love". [5]
Introducing his new 250-page work, he says that although his style is light-hearted, this is "a very serious book" proposing a deep approach. [6]
He states: "Today, in my opinion, we are faced with a global situation that calls for a global revolution.
"Our leaders are utterly hypocritical – preaching greenness while genetically modifying our food and spraying our skies; and preaching freedom and equality while continuously tightening the grip of centralised, absolute, impersonal, digital control.
"We are being conveyed without consultation into a technocratic, transhuman, smart-city dystopia". [7]
In broader terms, Mark says we are all trapped within "a unified, dominant, global culture cut loose from the natural world, floating dreaming of being digital, mind, abstract information, bodiless, cosmic, computer-people-beyond-people… As if we could dream without bodies! As if we could be bodies without hearts!" [8]
"They're pacing up and down inside us, even now. They've industrialised the countryside, turned fields into factories, and trained us to think in straight lines", says Mark. [9]
"The collective consciousness, the human mind is being persuaded away". [10]
"The dominant, modern, global culture has detached itself from reality – from the indefinable Mystery of which we are all part – and is therefore definably insane". [11]
Not only has the system domesticated us – separated us from our true belonging – but it has also blinded us to the horrendous reality of what it has done to us.
Mark writes: "We visualise disenfranchised, indigenous peoples, addicted to alcohol, meths and glue – uprooted from the deep soulfulness of their ancestral traditions – rotting on reservations.
"We don't understand that we are those indigenous peoples, that we ourselves have been separated from the land, and each other – from our own ancestral stories and songs and seasonal celebrations, separated from our own Sacred Flight.
"It is somehow unclear to us that we have been domesticated, and set to work on tasks without meaning, that we have been individualised – that we have been addicted to superficial escapism – and that the cities are our reservations.
"We don't miss the birdsong at dawn, because we haven´t heard it for generations. We don't miss the unbreakable bonds of siblinghood, because they've been shattered for generations.
"We don't feel the need to make a passionate stand for all that says 'yes!' to life, because we've been comfortably numb for generations". [12]
In the best tradition of anti-capitalist Romanticism and organic radicalism, Mark questions the reality of the "Progress" that we are told lies behind the constant acceleration of industrial modernity, including the disdain we are taught to feel for our non-domesticated pre-industrial predecessors.
He asks: "Is it possible that these ancient, ancient ancestors of ours had more finely attuned senses than ours? Yes!
"A better sense of smell? Yes! A closer connection to 'the animals' (a word we, 'the progressed', use to distinguish 'us' from 'them')?
"Were the minds of these people not bound, as ours tend to be, by this arbitrary discrimination – and were they, therefore, more aware of themselves as one–type–of–creature surrounded by other–types–of–creatures (other animals, fish, birds, insects, trees…) – and therefore more capable of sensing the existential equality of all creatures? I would imagine so – yes!" [13]
"Why, just because their technology was so much simpler than our own, do we go on to assume they were stupid?" [14]
"Is the global, civilisational trend towards increasingly complex technological dependency, and increasing distance from the natural world – from our flesh and blood belonging within the natural world – progressive? Or have we 'progressed' too far?" [15]
Mark suggests, in verse form, an appropriate collective response to this innovative, inclusive and impactful global enslavement.
So here's my proposal:
that we say 'fuck that' –
and take a stand.
A stand for simplicity.
A stand for the truth beyond our truths:
that you and I, both of us, admit
neither of us knows.
I propose a revolutionary pilgrimage
back to each other
back to ourselves in each other. [16]
More specifically, his proposal is for us to come together in what he calls Conscious Tribes.
"We need Tribes – groups of ten, twenty or thirty people who know each other well, who are close, who meet regularly, who help each other and rely on each other, and who support each other in learning to live together in Universal Love, in becoming the revolutionaries capable of the First Successful Revolution!" [17]
The aim, beyond mere mutual aid, is to cultivate together a new quality of consciousness that can be the foundation of our future world.
Mark explains: "By 'Conscious Tribe' I mean a non-biological, extended family. Or, more accurately – because it might include biological brothers and sisters, for example, or parents and their children – by 'Conscious Tribe' I mean an extended family not limited by biological bonds". [18]
"I believe that our unified commitment to the non-biological, consciousness-committed extended family – the Conscious Tribe – can be the 'social glue' we need in order to shape the alternative cultures we seek to co-create". [19]
"On a very practical level, this means aligning our daily activities with our awakening consciousness – it means learning to plant and harvest and cook, and build and make, and transport and travel, and heal and share knowledge in ways that make us less and less dependent on the alienated dominant culture, and more and more embedded in nature, and locally self-reliant". [20]
An important part of the global mafia's incessant propaganda is to tell us that the way we live today, in its prison world, is the only way we could ever live, that another world is impossible.
But this is obviously not true, as Mark is at pains to point out.
He writes: "Local community. Deep relationships. Responsibility for our locality. Contact with nature – with the trees, the animals, the insects and birds… with the weather, with the waxing and waning moons, with the equinoxes and solstices.
"Time out, down time, holy-days. Celebration, appreciation, gratitude. Local, poison-free food. Poison-free water. Creativity and contribution (as against wage slavery).
"I believe all of these things favour the evolution and transformation of consciousness – and that asphalt, street lights, traffic noise, plastic food, work-work-work, and junk, escapist entertainment don't". [21]
The richness of Mark's writing is hard to convey in a short review of this kind.
The essays that form the book are interspersed with poems and allegorical tales which he says "are intended to remind us that it is joy that will give us the energy we need for our multi-generational revolutionary journey". [22]
But all is interwoven. Thus, for instance, we find buried within a jokey fictional account of a heretical movement that emerged within a bizarre Squirrel God cult, the following nut of essential truth: "Our existential insecurity and sense of separation create an inner state of disempowerment, making us easy to control, manipulate and exploit". [23]
Mark insists that it is by rediscovering authenticity in our lives – mentally and physically – that we can shake ourselves free of the mafia's control and exploitation.
He writes: "We share a process, a journey, not just of letting go of the centralised, alienated, artificial lifestyle of the dominant culture – but of letting go of the cultural conditioning we have internalised.
"In fact, the two are inseparable. As we grow our own medicines, in our own gardens (for example) we both let go of the cultural conditioning that tells us to distrust all healing outside of the doctor's surgery and the hospital – and, simultaneously, we gradually ease our real, everyday lives back into harmony with the natural world". [24]
Although the Conscious Tribes concept lies outside the usual political classifications, Mark argues that its political aspect could best be labelled "Conscious Localism".
"I see Localism as the way back to diversity, to reconstructing local traditions, to knowing the land and climate we live on and in, and to finding each other again". [25]
Mark's writing is aimed at playing an active role in the forging of a new consciousness and the book contains detailed recommendations for how to set up and guide local groups.
He tells readers: "If you feel, as I do, the amoral, artificial, mechanical, global grip tightening – I invite you to study this text closely, and discuss it with your friends – and act on it while there remains room for manoeuvre!" [26]
To help advance the love revolution, Mark provides some inspiring happy endings for his fictional accounts.
There is this one, for instance: "From Buenos Aires to Hong Kong, from Johannesburg to Reykjavik: the Great City Dig-Up freed the suffocated earth – replacing the asphalt and concrete with vegetable gardens and orchards, forests, meadows and wild lands – and gardens of flowers, medicines and herbs.
"Where once traffic had flowed, rivers soon gurgled along. Where once great city plazas had proclaimed the importance of shopping – great lakes came to proclaim the importance of beauty.
"Where once people had almost believed they were not of the Earth, they were now happy to realise they were". [27]
And this: "The many creatures cheered. The seven aunties sobbed with happiness. Surveillance cameras crackled, the air was filled with sparkling, flying microchips and 25G towers shattering – like fireworks of celebration.
"And slowly, slowly – for everything takes time – the good people of Smart City Central re-accustomed themselves to feeling the Love in their Blood – and other tender, forgotten emotions". [28]
Love & Revolution can be obtained via https://www.tribusconscientes.com/
[1] Mark Josephs, aka Mark the Mystic Activist, Love & Revolution: Radical Honesty, Conscious Tribes, Local Community. All subsequent page references are to this work.
[2] p. 108.
[3] https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/47-random-fragments2.pdf
[4] https://orgrad.wordpress.com/a-z-of-thinkers/michael-lowy/
[5] p. 133.
[6] p. 13.
[7] p. 52.
[8] p. 11.
[9] p. 140.
[10] p. 11.
[11] p. 39.
[12] p. 221.
[13] p. 158.
[14] p. 159.
[15] Ibid.
[16] p. 12.
[17] p. 53.
[18] p. 17.
[19] p. 19.
[20] p. 17.
[21] p. 51.
[22] p. 15.
[23] p. 32.
[24] p. 134.
[25] p. 211.
[26] p. 14.
[27] p. 149.
[28] p. 207.
by Mike Driver
Stop for a moment, listen, can you hear it? Like a strain of music in the distance, lost, then heard again. Spring is coming. Hope gathers itself in the soil, the songs of the forest are changing, optimism lights the air. Spring is nature's trampoline propelling colours like prayers on butterfly wings. The returning Sun hovers over the horizon, its first warm glance stirs the animals, the rivers become light, flowing away from the past. The morning mist harbours happier spirits, the short cold days make the turn for home and the space harrowed within us starts to fill with thoughts of summer. Every year we are handed the keys to a room hiding a lost love, open the door, start again. And there is nothing this wayward technology, this vaudevillian pretence, this false life, can do to stop it.
My original plan was to write a very different piece. I've typed The Social and Economic Collapse of the United Kingdom at the top of the page half a dozen times. Then I stare at the cursor blinking in the white page. That page could contain an analysis of the debt the pointless lockdown bequeathed to us. A dissection of the traitorous political class serving not us but their own dark master lurking in the shadows somewhere. It could contain the betrayal of the people, our children. Therein I would have dragged their propaganda into the light. Skewering it with my trusty wit. In conclusion I would surely have forecast a dark end, economically and socially. And yet the cursor blinks, the Sun also rises as the old man said. The blank page waits for us to write our own destiny. We are much more than this. They can't hold us back. This life is still beautiful and it's just a few small steps away. All we need to do is change the way we attend to the world.
Three years ago we bought 40 acres on the top of a mountain somewhere in the Balkans. The cursor blinks, it's early evening here, the prince of the mountain sweeps from his treetop throne. At this moment the sky seems to hold the whole purpose and process of life. A perfect silence ensues, then, gliding from the opposite direction his mate appears. Joined in fearless harmony the two Eagles dance across the fading sunlight. Nothing else moves, time has stopped for the rest of us, an invisible line joins the Eagles, the orchards and the vines we planted. I have to remind myself to breathe. The forest holds the farm we built on all sides. It allows our vanity, our indulgence with quiet forbearance. The trees have loaned us the land, sooner or later they will foreclose and this place, like all of us, will return to the wild. Before then we will try to build a farm in one of the last free places on earth.
It would an exaggeration to say there was any plan or philosophy in the beginning. More a disaffection, a vague feeling we had that something has gone very, very wrong. A hollowness that echoes in the canyons of modernity, our lives colonised by technology. A sense that the implications of fusing human beings with this technology hasn't been thought through. What are the consequences of handing our lives over to machines?
Technology fosters forgetfulness, people have no idea how to grow things, how food reaches the supermarket, where energy comes from, it's all forgotten knowledge. The quest for convenience has given us a licence to forget.
Later it became apparent to me that what we are doing is a form of memory. That just maybe our land is starting to remember. The recovery of the soil freed from industrial fertilisers is a form of natural memory. The soil remembers how to grow food without interference. Seeds remember how to grow without pesticides. Humans remember the old ways pre the erasing effects of the Industrial Revolution. Can we remember how to thrive without constant interruption?
I can't help but think these memories are not wanted by our technology-obsessed overlords. The wiping of memory seems to be a priority. The blank slate a programmable screen.
What guides us here emerged from our interactions, with the land, our neighbours and the forest, ideas shuffling into the light like forgotten memories.
There's revolution in this. Small like the ember of a fire. A dead fire won't ignite. But this ember who knows where it will take us. At the base of the mountain the bringer of technological fire – Prometheus – abounds, but up here we have escaped the chains of technology. The WIFI signal drops out most of the day. Down there in the modern world we have forgotten how knowledge and understanding are reached. All thoughts are presented to you daily on your devices, hermetically-sealed packets of decontextualised instructions. No need to delve into understanding. No need to seek wisdom. They provide the contents of your mind wholesale. Here it's more about what we don't know, a constant game with the wild. Trial and error. Joy and humility. This great unknowing.
We're not supposed to acquire the world all at once, as Denise Levertov says in her beautiful poem Contraband:
The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That's why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
Denise anticipated our technological hellscape with eerie precision before the internet was a gleam in DARPA's eye. The internet is of course the tree of knowledge, the smart phone is (unironically?) the apple and Artificial Intelligence the snake. At this dosage the effects are fatal. The soul withdraws to hide and something else grows in its place. A single eye that never blinks. All-knowing but blind, reflecting itself iris to iris.
Up here on the mountain we cannot afford to be severed from our human instincts. The first and best decision we made here was to listen to our guiding light. A man whose knowledge has grown out of the land. To call him the local farmer would be a disservice as he does so much more. But farm here he does. The immensity of his knowledge and capabilities humbles us every day. Let me be very clear. We urbanites in the west know less than nothing. We are not even aware of what we don't know. All the connectivity in the world won't grow shit on this mountain. It's a different type of knowledge we seek, a knowledge born of time and experience, a reverberative understanding that comes from a lifetime of conversations with the earth, the weather, the trees, plants and animals. An adaptive and intuitive knowledge passed down through generations, words worn at the edges travelling the long way.
Our predecessors on this land ignored the advice of our man. They thought the land was made of money, that raspberries could be farmed in every field. But the soil in the mid field was tired, it couldn't support the raspberry bushes and slowly their spreadsheet-driven plans unravelled in the face of implacable nature.
In November 2023 we planted 1400 fruit trees and two vineyards focusing on old, regional varieties. We added a complex watering system in the following year.
Besides orchards and vineyards, we gave special attention to microbiological soil improvement as well as a unique experimental no dig garden project.
As a part of our research work, we have amassed a large reference library which is now an additional source of analogue knowledge.
We fail frequently. But our failures are relatively small, and they always preserve the land for our next project. Regenerative agriculture is the opposite of industrial farming. What we grow here tastes of life. It is completely different.
In the last three years I have regained my sense of wonder. Thoreau famously said, 'in wildness is the preservation of the world', I believe in wonder lies the hope of humanity. The connected life destroys your sense of wonder and in that sense, it destroys the hope that lies in every human heart. There is a different way to attend to the world. Dostoyevsky put it slightly differently when he said, 'beauty will save the world'. We have to open our eyes and our hearts to it. We have to build our lives to reflect the patterns that exist in nature and not those configured by machines. The order we seek is reflected in creation. It is not machine-like. Meaning, as I have said before, precedes reason. Life unfolds not via staccato inputs from disembodied pieces of matter but out of a living unpredictable whole. An ant contains more wonder than all our technology.
The mere fact that we are here is astonishing. Wait till everyone rediscovers what nature provides for us. Wait till everyone rediscovers art, music, poetry, literature, friendship and love. Wait till everyone discovers this heaven. The quantified world doesn't stand a chance.
(I must take a moment to express my deep gratitude to my partners in this great dance. You know who you are. Thank you for sharing this life with me).
by Paul Cudenec
In the last of these 14 profiles from The Single Global Mafia, we turn to the president of The Rockefeller Foundation itself, who acts as an ex-officio member of its board of trustees.
Rajiv Shah is best known for having been administrator of the United States Agency for International Development from 2010 to 2015, where he is said to have "elevated the role of development as part of our nation's foreign policy". [395]
In particular he is given credit for ensuring the passage of two significant laws – the Global Food Security Act and the Electrify Africa Act, of which we have already heard tell.
USAID pushes a worldwide programme of "long-term socioeconomic development", primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. [396]
Wikipedia places it in the long tradition of US so-called "foreign aid" schemes, such as the post-WW2 "Build Back Better" Marshall Plan and the WWI Commission for Relief in Belgium headed by Herbert Hoover. [397]
However, while the online encyclopedia claims the latter "prevented starvation in Belgium after the German invasion", the truth is very different.
As historians Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty explain, it in fact amounted to "one of the world's greatest con jobs" with Hoover being "a confidence trickster and a crook". [398][399]
"The American-born mining engineer lived in London for years and was a business colleague of the Rothschilds," they add.
"Financial muscle was never far from his center of power. The Morgan/Rothschild axis was wrapped around the entire project". [400]
Today USAID continues that fine tradition of working with "financial muscle", as it spells out on its website.
"USAID partners with the private sector where there is a strong alignment between business interests and our development objectives. Today, we find these two aims increasingly intersecting". [401]
Or maybe it is just becoming increasingly obvious that they amount to the same thing?
In any case, Shah has played a key role in this corporatist "intersection". His Rockefeller Foundation profile says that while at USAID he "reshaped the $20 billion agency's operations in more than 70 countries around the world by elevating the role of innovation, creating high-impact public-private partnerships". [402]
USAID says it is involved in "engaging with the private sector as strategic partners" in the areas of "food security", "global health", "climate change" and "energy". [403]
It could have added "war" to that list.
As journalist Saheli Khastagir writes: "In the 2000s, while the US military was bombing Iraq and Afghanistan, USAID was tasked with 'rebuilding' the two countries.
"More than a month before Iraq was actually invaded by American troops, USAID began soliciting bids for rebuilding the country from a few 'pre-qualified' corporations". [404]
An August 2024 article on the Bloomberg website notes that USAID is often accused of being a front for the CIA and "has faced its fair share of scandals over the years".
It reveals that in Iraq, child labour was used by the recipient of a $9 million 2021 USAID grant to provide critical water, sanitation and hygiene services to 200,000 internally displaced persons.
And there were "multiple cases involving the sexual exploitation and abuse of children" at African charities that were awarded tens of millions of dollars in USAID contracts. [405]
Continuing the financial neo-colonialism theme, Shah is the founder of Latitude Capital, "a private equity firm focused on power and infrastructure projects in Africa and Asia". [406]
In 2020 he was part of The Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican, "a historic new partnership between some of the world's largest investment and business leaders and the Vatican", headed by Lynn Forester de Rothschild. [407]
Shah sits on numerous boards including the International Rescue Committee, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Trilateral Commission and the Atlantic Council – he is also a member of the much-aforementioned Council on Foreign Relations. [408]
And in January 2024 he was appointed a Class C director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for a three-year term ending on December 31, 2026. [409]
In order to fully understand the context of all these roles – and indeed of his presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation – we need to look back to the early years of his career.
As a young man, in 2001, Shah went to work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he was responsible for developing the International Finance Facility for Immunization, which has raised more than $5 billion for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). [410]
This basically uses government pledges to support the issuing of "Vaccine Bonds" sold to institutional and individual investors so as to ensure and accelerate funding for Big Pharma jabs. [411]
The origins of this device are fascinating. In the text of a 2018 speech, Arunma Oteh, then vice-president and treasurer of the World Bank, describes herself as "a pioneer board member of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm), which was founded in 2006". [412]
She sheds some interesting general light on the financial-imperialist development agenda that has been so visible throughout this essay.
Oteh says: "Global growth is going to come from emerging markets, which of course relies in part on development finance. From an investor's perspective, emerging markets often offer high returns on a risk‑adjusted basis as well as opportunities for diversification.
"To foster growth, we need to connect investors to products that build human and physical capital. We need to fill infrastructure gaps and improve health and education outcomes. Like the previous speaker said, we need to increase female labour‑force participation.
"The UN estimates that of the $3.9 trillion needed annually for developing countries to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, only $2.5 trillion is being invested per year.
"This means we need to bridge this $1.4 trillion annual gap, and I believe we can do so by leveraging the capital markets to complement what public‑sector resources already do.
"Specifically, I believe we can mobilize more private‑sector resources. We can focus more on sustainability, as earlier speakers have alluded to. I think we need to continue to think about innovative financing solutions". [413]
Oteh's speech was addressed to the 50th general meeting and conference in Madrid of the International Capital Market Association, known as the ICMA, which played a key role in creating the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, IFFIm.
Explains a 2017 "Innovative Finance" update from IFFIm, GAVI the Vaccine Alliance and the World Bank: "The International Capital Market Association in 2017 issued guidelines for socially responsible investments.
"The result: ICMA's Social Bond Principles (SBPs), which were recognized by GlobalCapital's Sustainable and Responsible Capital Markets Awards this year as the Most Valuable Innovation for the Green/SRI Bond Market".
It quotes René Karsenti, who is both IFFIm's board chair and ICMA's president, as describing ICMA's latest work in this area as "a big and valuable step ahead for the field that IFFIm has been part of since 2006". [414]
ICMA is set up as a "not-for-profit association" (Verein) under the Swiss Civil Code and headquartered in Zurich, with offices in London, Paris, Brussels and Hong Kong.
It explains on its website: "For over 50 years ICMA and its members have worked together to promote the development of the international capital and securities markets, pioneering the rules, principles and recommendations which have laid the foundations for their successful operation.
"ICMA currently has over 620 members active in all segments of international debt capital markets in 70 jurisdictions globally.
"Among our members are private and public sector issuers, banks and securities dealers, asset and fund managers, insurance companies, law firms, capital market infrastructure providers and central banks". [415]
And who could possibly be behind such a massive and powerful global financial institution?
Oteh reveals in her speech: "ICMA started as an organisation of 19 bond dealers in NM Rothschild & Sons London office in 1968". [416]
So there you have it.
That was hard work to put together (and possibly to read!) but I think it had to be done.
It is plain that the Rockefeller entity, as reflected by the profiles of its president and the trustees of its Foundation, is not in the least distinct from the Rothschilds' empire.
It is part of it.
They are the same thing.
What is revealed by following the threads of the activities and affiliations of these 14 individuals is a single interlocked web of exploitation and control, implicated in the Zionist genocide in Palestine and intent on profiting from a vast wave of industrial neo-imperialism in Asia, Latin America and, in particular, Africa.
There is only one global mafia and here we have seen its ugly face all too clearly.
The only question that remains in my mind is what on earth the rest of us – the overwhelmingly vast majority of humankind, after all! – are going to do about this horrible reality.
The above article is an extract from Paul Cudenec's new 100-page booklet, The Single Global Mafia: The Rockefeller Foundation's multiple links to Zionism and military-industrial-financial neo-imperialism, which can be downloaded free here for reading, safekeeping and the widest possible sharing.
[395] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/profile/rajiv-shah/
[396] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development
[397] Ibid.
[398] Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty, Prolonging the Agony: How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WWI by Three-and-a-Half Years (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2018), p. 233.
[399] Macgregor and Docherty, Prolonging the Agony, p. 204.
[400] Macgregor and Docherty, Prolonging the Agony, p. 204, p. 231.
[401] https://www.usaid.gov/partner-with-us/corporations
[402] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/profile/rajiv-shah/
[403] https://www.usaid.gov/partner-with-us/corporations
[404] https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/03/aid-for-profit-the-dark-history-of-usaid
[405] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-08-23/usaid-records-detail-child-labor-abuse-and-social-media-threats
[406] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/profile/rajiv-shah/
[407]
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-council-for-inclusive-capitalism-with-the-vatican-a-new-alliance-of-global-business-leaders-launches-today-301187931.html
[408] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajiv_Shah
[409] https://www.newyorkfed.org/newsevents/news/aboutthefed/2024/20240105a
[410] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/profile/rajiv-shah/
[411] https://iffim.org/sites/default/files/library/publications/iffim-updates/iffim-update-12/IFFIm%20Update%2012.pdf
[412] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2018/06/01/leveraging-capital-markets-for-sustainable-development
[413] Ibid.
[414] https://iffim.org/sites/default/files/library/publications/iffim-updates/iffim-update-12/IFFIm%20Update%2012.pdf
[415] https://www.icmagroup.org/About-ICMA/
[416] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2018/06/01/leveraging-capital-markets-for-sustainable-development
by Paul Cudenec
James Stavridis, chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation's board of trustees, projects a wholesome and all-American image for the organisation, with his impressive list of military decorations.
After a long and seemingly illustrious career, during which he became NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, he at one point appeared to be heading for the very top of US society.
His personal website boasts: "In 2016, he was vetted for Vice President by Secretary Hillary Clinton, and subsequently invited to Trump Tower to discuss a cabinet position with President Donald Trump". [375]
However, his reputation remains somewhat stained by a misconduct investigation in 2012 that "derailed his chances of becoming the Navy's top officer". [376]
Media reported at the time that he had been cleared of wrongdoing, but that is not exactly what is shown in a redacted official report released in 2018.
On the basis of "an anonymous complaint to this Office and information gathered in the course of the investigation", it concludes that Stavridis:
A. used MilAir for unofficial travel without obtaining approval on one occasion in connection with his travel to Dijon, France;
B. claimed and collected per diem expenses to which he was not entitled in connection with seven instances of overlapping TDY travel;
C. authorized his wife on two occasions to claim and collect per diem associated with official travel for TDY to which she was not entitled;
D. failed to use his GTCC for travel-related expenses incurred during TDY travel;
E. accepted gifts on three occasions from foreign governments and on two occasions from NFEs without timely reporting or disposing of them;
F. permitted family members to accompany him on MilAir without properly documenting their unofficial travel or reimbursing the Government for such travel at the full coach fare;
G. permitted a employee and family member to accompany him on MilAir in connection with travel to Dijon, France, without requiring the employee to reimburse the Government for the family member's unofficial travel at the full coach fare;
H. used a Government-provided cellular telephone for unofficial purposes, permitted staff members to use Government-provided cellular telephones for unofficial purposes, and permitted his wife to use a Government-provided cellular telephone for unofficial purposes; and
I. failed to obtain proper authorization to transport his spouse in Government-provided vehicles for official and unofficial travel in Belgium. [377]
But the scandal of Stavridis's abuse of his position, and the initial cover-up of the report's findings, pale into insignificance next to the fact that he is a managing director-partner of The Carlyle Group. [378][379]
I have been aware of this insidious organisation for many years now.
In 2002 I protested outside its London offices as one of a dozen anarchists from Worthing, up in the big city for the day to take part in the broader Mayday protests against what we called "the way ordinary people's lives are ruined by the ruthless greed and power hunger of global big businesses and the puppet governments that serve their agenda". [380]
We put up a banner reading "The Carlyle Group – Axis of Evil" and handed out hundreds of leaflets to the public.
We summed up The Carlyle Group as "an extremely dodgy US finance firm that links the US government, the American defence industry, the UK Conservative Party and the Bin Laden family".
Our spokesman (that was me, I can now safely reveal!) said: "The Carlyle Group is at the heart of a global scam to enable a powerful elite to get rich from the horrors of war, while pretending to serve some kind of public interest". [381]
The full text of the leaflet can still be found on the internet, but 22 years later I again tried to sum up the enormity of what The Carlyle Group represents in my May 2024 article looking at Chatham House and at one of its presidents, former UK Prime Minister John Major.
I wrote: "Not mentioned in Major's Chatham House profile is that in May 2001 he was appointed European chairman of The Carlyle Group, the US-based multinational private equity, asset management and financial services corporation, founded by William E. Conway Jr., Stephen L. Norris, David Rubenstein, Daniel A. D'Aniello and Greg Rosenbaum.
"In one of history's great coincidences, Carlyle's investor conference later that year took place in Washington on September 11, with Major in attendance.
"In the weeks following the meeting, it was reported that Shafiq bin Laden had been the 'guest of honor', and that the Bin Laden family were investors in Carlyle-managed funds". [382]
As I noted, an article in The Economist (of all places!) commented that you did need not be a 'conspiracy theorist' to be concerned about what lay behind Carlyle's success.
It added: "Can a firm that is so deeply embedded in the iron triangle where industry, government and the military converge be good for democracy?
"Carlyle arguably takes to a new level the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower feared might 'endanger our liberties or democratic process'". [383]
Stavridis is also, like so many of the Rockefeller crowd, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and, needless to add, a regular at the WEF. [384][385]
In 2021, Stavridis joined the national security advisory board of venture capital firm Shield Capital, as a senior advisor. [386]
In 2022 this business formed a strategic partnership with L3Harris Technologies which "will enable Shield Capital portfolio companies to more quickly develop and deploy new technologies in its core cyber security, artificial intelligence, space sensing and autonomy markets".
It will also "foster emerging defense and commercial technologies that address customers' growing requirements for innovative, agile solutions that can be rapidly fielded". [387]
The use of the word "agile" here made me immediately think of Klaus Schwab of the WEF and his calls for Fourth Industrial Revolution "agile governance" which "seeks to match the nimbleness, fluidity, flexibility and adaptiveness of the technologies themselves and the private-sector actors adopting them". [388][389]
Stavridis is also on the board of Ankura, a consulting group dealing with the likes of cybersecurity, digital forensics, compliance, mergers and acquisition services and which describes itself as "nimble, agile, and fluid". [390][391][392]
It's that word again! Uncanny!
Stavridis is a regular TV pundit in the USA, but one of his less publicised appearances was in April 2021 at the wedding of CNN news anchor Natalie Allen and Emory professor Jeff Rosensweig, an associate professor of international business and finance at Emory-Goizueta Business School, Atlanta, and director of the Global Perspectives Program. [393]
The wedding was held at the Jekyll Island Club Resort and the Atlanta Jewish Times explains: "The venue was chosen because the Federal Reserve System was formed there by J.P. Morgan, among others. Rosensweig began his career at the Federal Reserve.
"Adm. James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and currently chairman of The Rockefeller Foundation, shared wonderful reflections on 'service and commitment' during the ceremony". [394]
How lovely!
The above article is an extract from Paul Cudenec's new 100-page booklet, The Single Global Mafia: The Rockefeller Foundation's multiple links to Zionism and military-industrial-financial neo-imperialism, which can be downloaded free here for reading, safekeeping and the widest possible sharing.
[375] https://admiralstav.com/about/
[376] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/us-admiral-cleared-of-misconduct-in-pentagon-probe/
[377] https://media.defense.gov/2018/Jul/25/2001946777/-1/-1/1/ADMSTAVRIDISROI(FINAL)_REDACTED.PDF
[378] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Stavridis
[379] https://www.carlyle.com/about-carlyle/team/james-stavridis
[380] https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2002/05/29864.html
[381] Ibid.
[382] https://winteroak.org.uk/2024/05/15/power-and-corruption-the-public-private-imperial-mafia/
[383]
https://web.archive.org/web/20051212013149/https://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1875084
[384] https://www.cfr.org/bio/james-stavridis
[385] https://www.weforum.org/people/admiral-james-g-stavridis/
[386] https://shieldcap.com/advisors/senior
[387] https://www.l3harris.com/newsroom/press-release/2022/03/l3harris-and-shield-capital-form-strategic-partnership-accelerate
[388] https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/10/05/klaus-schwab-and-his-great-fascist-reset/
[389] Klaus Schwab with Nicholas Davis, Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Guide to Building a Better World (Geneva: WEF, 2018), e-book. 82%
[390] https://ankura.com/news/admiral-james-stavridis-joins-ankura-board-of-directors
[391] https://craft.co/ankura
[392] https://ankura.com/about
[393] https://goizueta.emory.edu/faculty/profiles/jeffrey-rosensweig
[394] https://www.atlantajewishtimes.com/the-professor-and-tv-anchors-earth-day-wedding/
by Paul Cudenec
As I have said before, Israel's current long-planned genocidal landgrab – and the complicity of world puppet "leaders" – has fatally exposed the nature of the single global mafia.
The sheer horror of what has been unfolding in Gaza and Syria has, for many of us, swept away any remaining hesitation about condemning the Zionist entity, which for decades has been using the suffering of Jews under Nazism as a shield against criticism of its own murderous activities.
The more that Israel and its supporters scream "anti-semite!" at those expressing their outrage at the brutal slaughter, the more this dishonest instrument of intimidation and censorship loses its power.
And top Zionists are now admitting to their own circles that they have lost control of the narrative, that their propaganda is not working and that Israel is regarded by billions across the world as a criminal state, guilty of serious war crimes.
They don't put it quite that way, of course!
When Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the notorious Anti-Defamation League, addressed a committee of Israel's Knesset on January 7, 2025, he referred instead to "an inferno of antisemitism" that just happened to have coincided with 15 months of Zionist terror!
Indeed, his contribution formed part of a session of the Israeli parliament's Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs dedicated to the so-called "rise of global antisemitism".
Greenblatt was the most prominent of a number of American Zionists who addressed the meeting, as a report by Judah Ari Gross on the eJewishPhilanthropy website reveals.
Greenblatt "admitted failure" in his organization's efforts to combat the criticism of Israel's actions since October 2023.
He said: "Nobody likes to admit when they've fallen short. I don't like to lose. I personally hate to lose. However, sometimes we need to acknowledge the reality, and I believe it takes confidence to express humility".
In a subsequent interview with Jewish Insider, Greenblatt expressed his disappointment that the "woke" phenomenon supported by Zionist networks had worked against them over Gaza.
He told Melissa Weiss: "I think if you're not stepping back and rethinking, considering the facts, just the facts — how so many allies fled, or at least didn't stand by us in the way you would have thought — just the fact that in the younger demographic there's a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes than in the older segments of the population.
"If you start to think about the fact that the Jewish community has been very supportive of diversity initiatives, and yet these initiatives, which are supposed to promote inclusion, actually result in the exclusion of Jews".
Gross explains, in his report, that Greenblatt did not offer the Knesset concrete recommendations to innovate the field of "combating antisemitism".
Instead, he told the meeting: "What I learned from working in Silicon Valley, it's OK to fail as long as you fail forward and learn from it. So that's what needs to happen now".
Fresh thinking was sorely needed, he said: "Otherwise, as Einstein said, we'll be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. It's the definition of insanity.
"So starting with ADL and the rest of the NGO sector in the US and around the world, we've got to start doing things differently. And the same goes here in Israel.
"This means that the problem won't be solved by yet another new Knesset task force. It won't be solved by the government just throwing money at the problem. It won't be solved by the IDF spokesperson's unit issuing updated talking points or suddenly using TikTok.
"Like us in America, you need to adopt new strategies to experiment with creative tactics to study the results and scale what works".
Part of this effort will, of course, involve full-spectrum propaganda, as Greeblatt made clear in his interview with Weiss.
The ADL chief stressed: "I think the info sphere is a front in this war. And so there may be seven fronts to the terrestrial war, you know, as the Israeli government has talked about. But there are multiple fronts to this information war.
"In the information sphere, Wikipedia is a front. Video games are a front. Social media is a front. These messaging services are a front, and we need to understand that as well. So that's why we monitor video games. That's why we are being very robust and taking on Wikipedia. That's why we are so actively engaging with the social media platforms, and we'll continue to do that".
There is plenty of financing available to Israel for such propagandising and interference. Jewish Insider reports: "The Foreign Ministry's budget for public diplomacy in 2025 is expected to be $150 million — over 20 times what it was before the war began in 2023".
Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar said: "We are in the middle of an effort to change the approach towards the whole topic that was once called hasbara, and that I call 'consciousness warfare'.
"The democratic world is influenced by public opinion… and when it is not good for us, then it influences the elected political level's space to maneuver in the international arena".
But it also sounds as if the desperate Zionist mafia are preparing to stoop to new levels of dirty tricks and violence in their war on the rest of the world.
In his speech, Greenblatt referred approvingly to the infamous recent Mossad/Israeli operations involving the remote-control murder of opponents by the use of exploding pagers and the completely illegal raid on a missile factory inside Syria, before Assad's government was toppled.
He said: "We need the kind of genius that manufactured Apollo Gold Pagers and infiltrated Hezbollah for over a decade to prepare for this battle.
A decade of preparation? Yet more proof, as if it were needed, that Israel's "war" on the region was not a "response" to events of October 7, 2023!
Greenblatt continued: "We need the kind of courage that executed Operation Deep Layer inside Syria and destroyed Iranian missile manufacturing capabilities to undertake this mission".
"This is the kind of ingenuity and inventiveness that have always been a hallmark of the State of Israel, that have always been a characteristic of the Jewish people. I know we can do it".
What has been confirmed is that the Zionist gangsters regard their online critics across the world as military and not merely political foes.
Gross comments: "Greenblatt pushed for the State of Israel to consider the fight against antisemitism online and around the world to be another front (alongside Gaza, Lebanon, West Bank, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran) that the country must contend with".
Greenblatt himself explained: "Capturing TikTok might seem less meaningful than holding on to Mount Hermon. Libelous tweets certainly might seem less deadly than missiles from Yemen.
"But this is urgent because the next war will be decided based on how Israel and its allies perform online as much as offline. Make no mistake, it's real".
The Knesset committee also heard from Jamie Geller, the chief marketing officer of Aish, a Jewish "educational" organisation.
She stressed the need to keep the diaspora on the side of Israel, despite the horrors it was inflicting – the manufactured spectre of ever-rising "anti-semitism" of course plays a key role in these efforts.
She said: "Education has to be part and parcel to the fight against antisemitism because otherwise the majority of Jewish people are left… unable to stand up and be proud and will reject their Judaism and reject Israel in turn. [But] if we educate them, they can be soldiers in the fight with us".
Rarely in the course of human history has "education" been such an obvious euphemism for propaganda and fearmongering!
Meanwhile, Shira Hutt, executive vice president of the Jewish Federations of North America, boasted about the successful targeting and intimidation of anyone who dares speak out against the Zionist murder machine.
She said: "Over the past few years, 146 local federations that make up the Jewish Federations of North America have committed to building and supporting professionally run and led security initiatives that include under its umbrella every Jewish institution and interacts with every law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over the community.
"This has come at an enormous cost in dollars and in focus, but it has been essential".
She bragged that her federation had, for instance, forced the withdrawal of a city council resolution condemning Israel in Fort Collins, Colorado, and got a Philadelphia schoolteacher sacked because she challenged Zionists online.
Hutt declared: "There are many organizations that play an important role and we are grateful for their national partnership, but the local civil engagement of every community is an indispensable component of the solution".
In other words, Israel's little footsoldiers have played a crucial role in facilitating its genocidal activities.
But as the tide of world public opinion turns still further against Zionists and their crimes, their disproportionate and anti-democratic influence over our societies will finally come to an end, regardless of whatever desperate measures Greenblatt and his co-conspirators come up with next.
See also: The truth about Davos