Winter Oak

1. The Way It Is

by Mike Driver

50 observations from inside the belly of modernity:

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

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

by Paul Cudenec

The southern French coast near Montpellier Airport is rather congested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Audio version]

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

by W.D. James

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

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

Across the precipice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education

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

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

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

Life together

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

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

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

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

Reference

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

Previous articles in this series

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

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

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

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

4. The Acorn – 102

Number 102

In this issue:

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

1. Zones of corporate tyranny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to top

2. A message to the nature-hating bastards

by The Stirrer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is mental health now an acceptable target for demonisation? 15.01.25

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

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

This wood is my sanctuary

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old oak in the woods

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

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

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

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

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

Back to top

3. London conference for freedom and Palestine

by Real Left

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

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

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

On the Palestine Liberation panel we present:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to top

4. We Were the Shepherds

by Red Pill Poet

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

Back to top

5. Walter Benjamin: an organic radical inspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video link: Who killed Walter Benjamin?

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

Back to top

6. Acorninfo

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

Acorn quote:

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

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

Back to top

If you like this bulletin please tell others about it. Subscribe by clicking the "follow" button.

—–

Back Issues

The Acorn 101

The Acorn 100

The Acorn 99

The Acorn 98

The Acorn 97

The Acorn 96

The Acorn 95

The Acorn 94

The Acorn 93

The Acorn 92

The Acorn 91

The Acorn 90

The Acorn 89

The Acorn 88

The Acorn 87

The Acorn 86

The Acorn 85

The Acorn 84

The Acorn 83

The Acorn 82

The Acorn 81

The Acorn 80

The Acorn 79

The Acorn 78

The Acorn 77

The Acorn 76

The Acorn 75

The Acorn 74

The Acorn 73

The Acorn 72

The Acorn 71

The Acorn 70

The Acorn 69

The Acorn 68

The Acorn 67

The Acorn 66

The Acorn 65

The Acorn 64

The Acorn 63

The Acorn 62

The Acorn 61

The Acorn 60

The Acorn 59

The Acorn 58

The Acorn 57

The Acorn 56

The Acorn 55

The Acorn 54

The Acorn 53

The Acorn 52

The Acorn 51

The Acorn 50

The Acorn 49

The Acorn 48

The Acorn 47

The Acorn 46

The Acorn 45

The Acorn 44

The Acorn 43

The Acorn 42

The Acorn 41

The Acorn 40

The Acorn 39

The Acorn 38

The Acorn 37

The Acorn 36

The Acorn 35

The Acorn 34

The Acorn 33

The Acorn 32

The Acorn 31

The Acorn 30

The Acorn 29

The Acorn 28

The Acorn 27

The Acorn 26

The Acorn 25

The Acorn 24

The Acorn 23

The Acorn 22

The Acorn 21

The Acorn 20

The Acorn 19

The Acorn 18

The Acorn 17

The Acorn 16

The Acorn 15

The Acorn 14

The Acorn 13

The Acorn 12

The Acorn 11

The Acorn 10

The Acorn 9

The Acorn 8

The Acorn 7

The Acorn 6

The Acorn 5

The Acorn 4

The Acorn 3

The Acorn 2

The Acorn 1

Follow Winter Oak on Twitter at @WinterOakPress

5. Ignore the gaslighting – ZIM is real!

by Paul Cudenec

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

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

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

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

Let me explain what I mean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another variation of the smear is that dissidents are insane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Audio version]

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

by W.D. James

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

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

Knowledge is power

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond good and evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tao, again

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

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

Reference

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

7. The Big Plan and the Great Gaslighting

by Paul Cudenec

Earlier this year I published an essay about "modernisation" in post-WW2 France which exposed how it was part of a deliberate strategy of dispossession and control. [1]

This, the detail revealed, was being pushed by the Rothschild-led Zionist industrial-imperialist global mafia, which I have nicknamed Zisglom, or ZIM for short. [2][3]

Its long-term plan is to destroy traditional culture and self-sufficiency in order to make us utterly dependent on its system.

I referred briefly in the article to arch-moderniser Jean Monnet and his telling statement that the French ought to adopt the "American psychology", which meant "in a frame of mind for constant change".

Echoes here of Keir Starmer's "change" agenda and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which are both advancing the same insidious long-term plan.

It's worth adding here that Monnet was an unelected mover and shaker – a "civil servant, entrepreneur, diplomat, financier, and administrator".

And he is considered to have been "one of the founding fathers of the European Union", an important ZIM stepping-stone towards global governance. [4]

Wikipedia adds that "he worked behind the scenes of American and European governments as a well-connected 'pragmatic internationalist'".

In 1919, Monnet (pictured) "was asked to take on the job of Deputy Secretary-General of the League of Nations by French premier Georges Clemenceau and British statesman Arthur Balfour" – the latter being, of course, notorious for the Balfour Declaration that led to the creation of the state of Israel.

The article continues: "In 1925, Monnet moved to America to accept a partnership in Blair & Co., a New York bank which merged with Bank of America in 1929, forming Bancamerica-Blair Corporation which was owned by Transamerica Corporation.

"He returned to international politics and, as an international financier, proved to be instrumental to the economic recovery of several Central and Eastern Europe nations.

"He helped stabilise the Polish zloty in 1927 and the Romanian leu in 1928.

"In November 1932, the Chinese Minister of Finance invited Jean Monnet to act as chairman of an east–west non-political committee in China for the development of the Chinese economy where he lived (with a six-month interruption) until early 1936.

"During his time in China, Monnet's task of partnering Chinese capital with foreign companies led to the formal inauguration of the China Development Finance Corporation (CDFC) as well as the reorganization of the Chinese railroads".

The French Wikipedia entry additionally describes him as an "international banker" and mentions his involvement in the Marshall Plan, the financial mechanism for the occupation of Western Europe after WW2. [5]

The excellent Wikispooks site says that Monnet also represented the US Federal Reserve at the French central bank Banque de France.

It adds: "In the 1930s, together with the London-New York investment bank Lazard, he financed railway lines for the narco-feudal-capitalist government of General Tsiang Kai-shek in China (pictured), who was also supported by the US government, Mussolini and Hitler". [6]

Wikipedia, in both languages, manages to avoid mentioning the word "Rothschild" in its profiles of Monnet, but lets the cat out of the bag in its profile of Baron Robert Rothschild (1911–1998), an influential Belgian diplomat who "helped to draft the Treaty of Rome of 1957, the foundation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1958". [7]

Explaining that he was, like all the Rothschilds, descended from Moses Amschel Bauer of Frankfurt am Main, it reveals: "He was close to the French civil servant Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European Union".

Who'd have ever imagined, eh?

The "modernisation" agenda pushed by the Rothschilds and their associates has not, of course, been confined to France.

My recent piece on the industrialisation of Bolshevik Russia, when read in tandem with my booklet The False Red Flag, shows the same phenomenon being carried out by the same entity. [8][9]

The principal current target is Africa, where ZIM wants to force people off their land, destroy their traditional way of life and exploit them as "human capital".

This is a thread that runs throughout The Single Global Mafia, my booklet about The Rockefeller Foundation in which I confirm beyond doubt that that organisation forms part of ZIM. [10]

And I recently came across evidence of the same process being imposed on the United Kingdom between WW1 and WW2 – both of which manufactured bloodbaths were used to brutally accelerate the "modernisation" drive. [11]

This concerns the "think tank" called Political and Economic Planning (PEP), which was formed in 1931.

Wikipedia tells us that it was "a non-governmental planning organisation financed by corporations". [12]

It adds: "This prolific organisation was influential in the formation of the National Health Service, World War II and post-war planning, and the development of the African colonies".

PEP was involved in a "search for a formula of planning that would reconcile the techniques of planning with a private enterprise economy", reveals one study. [13]

President of PEP from its foundation, and its chairman until 1939, was Israel Moses Sieff ("Baron" Sieff), a businessman who became chairman of retailer Marks & Spencer.

So what interests did Sieff represent?

The Jewish Virtual Library explains: "British industrialist and Zionist Baron Israel Moses Sieff was born in Manchester, where his father, a migrant from Lithuania, founded a prosperous business.

"He and his brothers-in-law, Simon Marks and Harry Sacher, were closely associated in their devotion to Zionism, as well as in their commercial career.

"Sieff's wife, Rebecca Sieff, was among the founders of WIZO [Women's International Zionist Organization] and continued her active participation in that organization.

"It was in 1913 that Sieff (pictured), along with Marks, came to know Chaim Weizmann, who was at that time a lecturer in Manchester University.

"From then on until Weizmann's death, the three brothers-in-law were among his closest friends and collaborators, notably in the critical labors which led up to the issue of the Balfour Declaration.

"Under their leadership Manchester became arguably the major center of British Zionism.

"Sieff was one of the founders of and a regular contributor to the fortnightly review Palestine, which played its part in educating public opinion in England in favor of Zionism.

"In 1918, when the Zionist Commission headed by Weizmann went to Palestine to prepare the ground for the implementation of the Declaration, Sieff acted as its secretary". [14][15]

It notes: "His Zionist and Jewish activities were marked by his honorary presidency of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland and of that body's Educational Trust, his chairmanship and vice presidency of the Joint Palestine Appeal, and his chairmanship of Carmel College. He was made a life peer in 1966".

Wikipedia adds that Sieff "was asked in 1948 by the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, to become an adviser on transportation and supplies to the Israeli Defence ministry. Sieff joined the Israel Defense Forces and helped co-ordinate Marks & Spencer goods and finances to support the new state". [16]

Another PEP member was Solly Zuckerman, the first chief scientific adviser to the British Government from 1964 to 1971. [17][18]

"Baron" Zuckermann (pictured) is, according to Wikipedia, "credited for making science a normal part of government policy in the Western world".

Born to Jewish immigrants in South Africa in 1904, then moving to England as a young man, he "secured a Rockefeller Research Fellowship that enabled him to go to the United States", reveals one source. [19]

Archives reveal that he was involved with NATO, the BBC, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the United Nations and the World Health Organization. [20]

The Royal College of Physicians says: "Solly Zuckerman rose to be and remained, under governments of various political persuasions, one of the most influential figures concerned with major national decisions; he was adviser to the Establishment". [21]

A 1993 obituary in The Independent states: "Solly Zuckerman was one of the most remarkable men of the century.

"He was born in South Africa in 1904, and died yesterday as one of the most influential figures in the nebulous and powerful network, sometimes called the Establishment, which lies at the heart of much of Britain's national decision-making". [22]

They're painting a pretty clear picture here.

Zuckerman was also a trustee of the Bernstein Israeli Research Trust, which was established in 1963, following an initiative led by Sidney Bernstein (later Lord Bernstein) and Professor Max Gluckman of Manchester University's Department of Social Anthropology and Sociology.

The main object of the Trust was "to carry out a programme of research … into the sociological and social anthropological aspects of the influx of immigrants into Israel from all parts of the world and their welding together into a single nation". [23]

I know that it is difficult for people to accept that what we think of as unfolding history and organic social change are in fact being directed by a hidden and profoundly anti-democratic power.

We have been conditioned, throughout our lives, to think that any person advancing this interpretation must necessarily be unhinged.

If I go a step further and insist that the entity behind this manipulation is ZIM, then I have broken a whole series of deeply-ingrained social taboos.

It is, in our society, considered self-evident that any such analysis is not only wrong, but ridiculously wrong and, moreover, hatefully and even criminally wrong.

But, I beg sceptics to consider, what if the thesis were indeed true? How, in this case, would one expect the ruling group to protect its concealed existence and activities from an exposure that would scupper its Big Plan?

It would, of course, work very hard to ensure that public opinion felt any such suggestion to be absurd, unacceptable and even criminal.

This is called gaslighting and ZIM is very good at it.

[Audio version]

[1] https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/01/31/modernisation-means-pillage-and-profit/
[2] https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/enemiesofthepeopleol.pdf
[3] https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/02/06/the-acorn-100/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Monnet
[5] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Monnet
[6] https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Jean_Monnet
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rothschild
[8] https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/03/24/communism-and-industrial-imperialism/
[9] https://tinyurl.com/ykk9rmwu
[10] https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/cudenec-the-single-global-mafia.pdf
[11] https://winteroak.org.uk/2024/06/10/wars-resets-and-the-global-criminocracy/
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_and_Economic_Planning
[13] https://academic.oup.com/book/11683/chapter-abstract/160632777?redirectedFrom=fulltext
[14] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/sieff-israel-moses-baron
[15] https://www.wizo.org/wizo-history/1920/
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Sieff,_Baron_Sieff_of_Brimpton
[17] https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/2a0b3e2f-e643-33af-9e1a-136c6afb7311
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solly_Zuckerman,_Baron_Zuckerman
[19] https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/240104a7-ff89-3668-aaaf-056963f5855c
[20] Ibid.
[21] https://history.rcp.ac.uk/inspiring-physicians/lord-solly-zuckerman
[22] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-lord-zuckerman-1452840.html
[23] https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/b980f406-8bfc-32e1-b653-fa2475e054ba

8. Leaving the “Left” behind

by Paul Cudenec

I have never regarded myself as belonging to the "Left" or the "Right" – I think these labels have been manufactured and maintained in order to limit our individual thinking and to rule over us by division.

So, in a way, it's rather odd to find myself listed as one of the speakers at a May 3 London conference on "Uniting the pro-freedom & pro-Palestine-liberation left".

If I had chosen a title for an event like this, I would probably have opted for something that referred to dissidents in general, rather than specifically those on the "Left".

However, I do see that that there is a particular relevance to the framing chosen by conference organisers Real Left, formerly Left Lockdown Sceptics.

Since Jeremy Corbyn's spell as leader of the Labour Party, the active role of Zionist agents in the UK has become very clear to many who identify as being on the "Left".

The complicity of media outlets like the BBC and The Guardian in endorsing the (ridiculous) claim that Corbyn was "anti-semitic" opened the eyes of many to the real nature of the British Establishment.

The blatant complicity of that same Establishment in Israel's genocidal land-grabbing in Palestine, together with the "anti-semitism" smears rolled out against anyone challenging the uni-narrative, confirmed these suspicions.

The pro-Zionist character of the UK system, so perfectly symbolised by the projection of the Israeli flag on to the façade of 10 Downing Street, is therefore no longer invisible to many on the "Left".

However, it seems to me that their understanding remains incomplete. I – too often – see people complaining about the influence of "Israel" or "America" on UK politics, as if the problem lay outside the country.

They refuse to see the obvious – that the Rothschilds, who paid such a key role in the creation of the state of Israel, are the hidden power in London.

It is their zio-imperialist mafia, ZIM, built on control of the global banking system and industrial supply chains, that calls the shots.

As I have demonstrated in numerous essays over the last few years, this Rothschildian entity is the British Establishment and has been for a long time now.

If the "Left" was what it pretends to be, it would be denouncing and opposing ZIM, which incarnates all the oppression, exploitation, theft, warmongering, environmental destruction and imperialism it supposedly opposes.

But, instead, it remains stuck at a strange half-way point, only daring to identify as its enemy those politicians and states that the "Left's" conventions say it is OK to dislike.

The abject collaboration of most of the "Left" with the Covid manoeuvre exposed the extent of this failure to confront globalist tyranny.

Any wider understanding of our society, beyond the "Left's" usual clichés, is regarded as the top of a slippery slope of "conspiracy theory" that risks sweeping unwary "Leftists" off their feet and propelling them down into the chilling ideological wastelands of the "Far Right".

I would love to see a reborn social movement that casts away all the fears and fetishes that render the "Left" impotent and deeply unappealing for much of the population.

But a certain blinkered and sectarian stance, accompanied by virtue-signalling postures, has become such a core feature of the "Left" – thanks, no doubt to decades of infiltration and manipulation – that this reborn movement would not be the "Left" any more.

For me, the task of "uniting the pro-freedom & pro-Palestine-liberation left" is just the start of a process in which we would salvage what is useful from the wreckage of that loose political category and then walk away for good.

What we urgently need is a new movement, free from the constraints of the old labels, which fixes the sights of its resistance on ZIM itself.

[Audio version]

I will be saying more about all this at the conference on Saturday May 3. Other speakers include Piers Robinson, David Hughes, Temora Yuile and Yael Kahn. Because venues in central London are notoriously expensive, and difficult to secure for dissident events, tickets are being sold in advance and the exact location will be emailed to all ticket holders 48 hours before the event. More info here.

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

by W.D. James

Our hearts know things.

Several times in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul states that the natural law is 'written on the heart.' That formulation itself is significant in light of the central role of the 'heart' in classical psychology as we have explored it in the first two essays of this series.

The idea is that it is somehow innate to us. In the words of the American Declaration of Independence, its propositions are 'self-evident.' Nevertheless, there is something of a paradox involved in that our understanding of the natural law can become obscured or distorted. Our conscience may be underdeveloped or warped through prolonged violation.

In The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind (InterVarsity Academic, 2022), Jason M. Baxter asserts that the fifth-sixth century philosopher Boethius was, in his academic work of revealing classical, medieval, and renaissance literature to his students, Lewis' role model. That fits with Lewis' self-description of his vocation in his inaugural address at Cambridge we looked at last time. Boethius has been described as the last philosopher of the classical era as well as the first philosopher of the medieval era. He knew his world was coming to a close and set himself the great task of translating the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, reconciling their thought, and also reconciling it with Christianity. He achieved only a fraction of this work before being executed. He had held the ancient Roman offices of Senator and Consul, but his actual boss was an Ostrogoth king with whom he fell out and was jailed, tortured, and executed for conspiracy. Yet, while imprisoned, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy which would be one of the main sources to transmit some of the achievements of classical wisdom to the medieval world. Lewis clearly saw himself as living within new barbaric times. The concept of natural law would be one of the gems of the past he attempted to reinterpret and pass along to those who might rekindle civilization at a future time.

The Tao and the Innovators

In the middle section of The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis sets out to define, defend, and illustrate what he calls 'the Tao' and which he says "others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes" (Lewis 1974, 43). He claims that "It is the sole source of all value judgments" and that "There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world" (Lewis 1974, 43). Those are bold claims.

Attempting to derive a new set of value judgments is what the authors of The Green Book (what Lewis called the primary school textbook that set him to thinking) and what all 'Innovators' – as he terms them here – seek to do. He claims that "The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it" (Lewis 1974, 27). This is really the core of Lewis' argument, but to see why, we need to unpack what he understands the Tao or Natural Law to be.

We will remember from the previous essay that the authors of The Green Book, whom Lewis dubs Gaius and Titius, had set out to debunk claims of value by arguing that they were not claims about the objective world but merely claims about someone's subjective feelings. Hence, they represent a species of moral relativism. But, he asserts, "Gaius and Titius have shown by the very act of writing The Green Book that there must be some other values about which they are not subjective at all" (Lewis 1974, 27-28). Why is that exactly? Because they did not write their book debunking customary or traditional moral values to no purpose. They had a purpose and that presupposes they recognized some value which stimulated their action. It's rather easy to point out the formal logical problems with relativism: the proposition that all truths are relative except the truth that all truths are relative is obviously contradictory. Lewis is pointing out the corresponding problem of practical reason (of how to act): if values aren't actually valuable, why would you do anything, including writing a book claiming that values merely reflect subjective, emotional states?

Lewis observes that most 'debunkers' of 'traditional morality' themselves dogmatically hold a set of values that they operate from. If this was true of the 'progressive' of Lewis' era, it is true of the 'woke' of our era. Their skepticism towards value is only to be used "on other people's values" (Lewis 1974, 29).

The reductio

Lewis' argument proceeds via a series of really rather clever logical moves. He asserts of the values which comprise the Tao: "Unless you accept these without question as being to the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever. You cannot reach them as conclusions: they are premises" (Lewis 1974, 40). He further asserts that the validity of the Tao "cannot be deduced" (Lewis 1974, 83). "If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved" (Lewis 1974, 40).

He seems to have several points in mind here. First, he wants to follow traditional thinking that the Tao or Natural Law is given in our nature: it is the law of what is required for human beings to flourish. In this regard, it is a given: it is there and the only question is do we recognize it or not. In this sense it is rather like Pascal's point when he intoned: "The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing."

The second point is more complex. Oddly, it seems to me, Lewis accepts the modern 'fact-value dichotomy.' This holds that you cannot derive an ought (a value) from an is (a fact). No matter how many scientific facts you stack up, they never tell you what to do. He illustrates this along these lines: science may be able to tell us that if we pursue policy X or Y society will be destroyed and if we pursue policy Z society will be preserved as these are facts. Science can never prove to us that society ought to be preserved. Lewis asserts that for moral reasoning to occur, certain maxims, or axioms, like 'society ought to be preserved' have to be accepted (Lewis 1974, 32).

So, as Lewis sees it, anything we might hold as a value is ultimately rooted in the Tao as a moral given. As Michael L. Peterson observes, "The content of the Tao constitutes a framework of value within which distinctively human life flourishes and outside of which it decays and dies" (Peterson 2020, 71).

Hence, when the Innovator sets out to debunk certain values by (at least implicit) appeal to some other values it is a situation of "a rebellion of the branches against the tree" (Lewis 1974, 44). He asserts: "There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies', all consist of fragments from the Tao itself…" (Lewis 1974, 43-44). You distort the Tao if you take just one part of it, your totem value, and discount the rest. Human nature is complex and you need to be able to balance one value off against others and ultimately integrate them to achieve actual wisdom.

As a consequence, Lewis asserts that "Only those who are practicing the Tao will understand it" (Lewis, 1974, 49). That is, it is possible for this ancient and universal wisdom to be lost for good if the time should come when everyone has abandoned it. This is another reason education is so important in Lewis' view: cease to teach it and the knowledge of what it is to be fully human may be extinguished. Theoretically, since it is 'written on the heart,' it could always be rediscovered. Why this would no longer hold in our modern world will be the focus of the next essay.

The content of the Tao

As an appendix to the book, Lewis deduces, by surveying world moral teaching, what a sketch of the content of the Tao might look like. He formulates eight meta-laws, many with subdivisions, and then many illustrations. Here is my own summation (quoting Lewis, my insertions are bracketed to illustrate some of the examples he uses, but leaving out all of his actual quotes from pre-modern texts):

1. The Law of General Beneficence. Negative [do not murder, do not bring misery upon people]. Positive [wish that human society should exist, speak kindness].
2. The Law of Special Beneficence [brothers should not fight one another, natural affection is a thing according to Nature].
3. Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors [honor your father and mother, give the old person your staff].
4. Duties to Children and Posterity [Nature produces a love of offspring, the killing of young boys and girls is especially saddening].
5. The Law of Justice. Sexual Justice [don't beguile other's wives]. Honesty [don't cheat people]. Justice in Court, & C. [don't take bribes, don't bear false witness].
6. The Law of Good Faith and Veracity [don't lie, don't commit fraud, the foundation of justice is good faith].
7. The Law of Mercy [give special regard to the poor and the sick, feed the hungry, have a tender heart].
8. The Law of Magnanimity (a) [it is unjust to fail to protect those you could have, as you become weaker you will have more need of courage], (b) [choose death before slavery or shame, the soul should lead the body], (c) [the love of wisdom is to practice dying, unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die it will bear no fruit] (Lewis 1974, 83-101).

How are we to evaluate if Lewis' listing does a decent job of articulating the Tao? That is actually rather easy. It is supposed to represent the law of our nature, what moral values we would need to hold to flourish. Lewis had stated this negatively in asserting that a society that adopted a contrary education was destined to self-destruct. So, we can ask: would holding and acting out of these 'laws' tend to build a healthy society? Contrariwise, can we imagine a society that is at once healthy and happy and which systematically violates these 'laws'?

Now we can possibly get a better sense of what Lewis was thinking when he asserted that in trying to introduce a new set of values the Innovator was inevitably taking one value or set of values out of the whole list of valid values and, hence, setting the branches against the trunk. Isn't that actually the situation of many of our modern values struggles? We like our individual liberty, but don't want to recognize our duties to others. We like being brash, but don't want to afford special respect to our parents. On Lewis' account, one must try to understand as much of the Tao as possible and interpret each value in light of the others. He admits that this sort of internal development of our understanding of the tradition is essential, but rejecting the whole thing or ejecting parts of it (that we don't like or that don't seem 'up to date') is disastrous.

The post-human option

Startlingly, Lewis asserts his argument so far is valid only against those who are essentially confused about values but who still hold to some guiding set of values. But what about those who would venture to live beyond values? Who will simply exercise power with no attempt at moral justification? Lewis grants they do not act inconsistently:

"Let us decide for ourselves [they say] what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.

"This is a very possible position [Lewis maintains]: and those who hold it cannot be accused of self-contradiction like the half-hearted sceptics who still hope to find 'real' values when they have debunked the traditional ones. This is the rejection of the concept of value altogether" (Lewis 1974, 51).

In the next essay, we will look at how Lewis takes up this sort of person who promises the final 'abolition of Man.'

References

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

Peterson, Michael L., C.S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview, Oxford University Press, 2020.

10. The toxic stench of industrial corruption

by Paul Cudenec

Beneath the idyllic green rolling hills of a well-off rural area lurks the stench of mafia-dumped toxic waste, polluting the air, the water supply and the food chain, killing off the wildlife and giving cancer to the people who live there.

What finer metaphor could one imagine for the industrial society which has been imposed on us all by the global criminocracy?

And yet this is not so much metaphor as truth, as American author Biff Thuringer makes clear in his powerful, entertaining and finely-crafted novel Wasted: A Story of Love Gone Toxic. [1]

Yes, of course, the form is fiction, complete with all the action, humour, sex and suspense required to keep those pages turning in the reader's hands.

But the core content – beneath the fictional surface – is all too real.

As the book's back cover explains, key revelations are based on the author's own investigations over a five-year period and the book's mission is to expose "the devastation being wrought by unscrupulous members of our nation's power elite in the name of greed".

In the words of the novel itself, we are talking about a rural part of New York State "and how its despoiling at the hands of industrialists and organized criminals has proceeded unabated for more than 60 years, despite all efforts to curb it". [2]

We also learn how elected officials "are not only responsible for policies that perpetuate the process of illegal toxic waste dumping, but are intimately involved in proceedings at the meanest local level to snuff out all attempts to investigate and rectify known toxic waste dumps and prosecute the perpetrators". [3]

And we see unveiled "this Byzantine underworld of mob hijinks, political favors, cover-ups and fancy maneuvring by high level government officials and connected law firms" which is "all in the name of toxic waste dumping for dollars". [4]

In the novel, one of the big sources of the pollution and corruption is the manufacture of the silicon microchips that are needed for the construction of the global digital prison to which our slavemasters would dearly love to confine us.

The cheapest production technique involves the use of large amounts of toxic chemicals which, when spent, have to be disposed of.

Environmental regulations mean this is an expensive matter for the various businesses which produce such waste products and the result is a profitable black market in their disposal.

For half the price of the official path, the crooked companies pay their friends in organized crime to take them off their hands.

The barrels of deadly chemicals might be secretly stored in warehouses for years, slipped into general landfill waste, poured into the drains or buried in various construction projects.

"Toxic waste is under every superhighway, parking lot, high school, shopping mall, golf course, children's park and sports stadium, making the air above them dangerous to breathe and the water below them undrinkable". [5]

The mafia even manage to sell some of this waste – bribed local government officials might buy it as "cleaning" fluid, it might be added to asphalt for roadbuilding or even dispatched to Latin America to manufacture cocaine and other drugs.

Thuringer depicts "a complicated shell game", "a billion-dollar shadow economy in dirty toxic chemicals". [6][7]

And he provides some fascinating insights into the mechanisms of public-private corruption.

For instance, he writes of one fictional character: "Since moving to Roosevelt County in 1968 from the Bronx to start a housing construction firm, Vince Rocco had insinuated himself into local politics.

"Starting in the Town of Pinksterkill and moving town by town through much of rural central and southern Roosevelt over the next 32 years, Rocco would attain each municipality's tax assessor post.

"Once in the position […] he would manipulate assessments upward to the point that beleaguered farmers and old-line families would be forced to sell their land or have it appropriated for back taxes.

"Commonly one of three or four big developers would be conveniently waiting in the wings to snap the property up for a song". [8]

We are also introduced to the financial scam of so-called industrial development bonds.

"These are billions of dollars in essentially worthless bonds, backed by public money, that are falsely marked up, repackaged with other bond types and sold as derivatives.

"It's a vast pyramid scheme, where the people who are connected on the front end get rich and the people down the line get left holding the bag.

"When the loans these bonds were financing aren't paid back by the mobsters who have long since spent the money, the taxpayers of the localities in which the bonds were produced foot the bill.

"If this ever became known by the general public, it would be a financial crisis that would make the Enron debacle pale in comparison". [9]

Thuringer describes how one character "was visibly flabbergasted" to hear accounts of "vast, nation-wrecking financial scams, international cabals of criminals who ran the world's governments and a shadow economy in toxic chemicals that was giving everyone asthma, cancer and AIDS". [10]

While toxic waste is the symptom on which the novel focuses, the underlying cause is clearly identified as industrialism itself.

Not only is the central character, Nate, an anarchist, but he has (like me) a long-felt aversion to the modern world which has stolen from us the free and natural lives we should have been able to enjoy. [11]

"It had always irked Nate that this birthright was taken from him. He remembered when they flattened his childhood wonderland of sand dunes and scrub pines to make way for a gigantic shopping mall and a surrounding forest of McMansions.

"He recalled the hellish scenes of industrial America from his many road trips, and the shock of having encountered them for the first time.

"The almost unbroken chains of poison-belching oil refineries, chemical factories and plastics plants lining Interstate 95 from New York to Philadelphia and beyond.

"The barren, sooty wastes of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The brutal breakneck urbanization and industrialization of vast stretches of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Arizona, New Mexico and much of the West Coast…

"These images, smells and sounds had been festering in his brain for years, eating at his helpless soul". [12]

The gravity of the threat to humankind and nature presented by the global industrial mafia could hardly be overstated.

As Nate tells his friend: "Don't you get it? These people are evil. They're killing us, Nicole". [13]

And I'm sure many of us can relate to him when he says: "I've sat on my ass my whole life and watched them turn this beautiful country to shit. And now I've just been told that it's worse than I imagined in my wildest dreams.

"Somebody's dropped a gauntlet at my feet and I picked it up. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm going to do something, believe me". [14]

[Audio version]

[1] Biff Thuringer, Wasted: A Story of Love Gone Toxic (Rhinebeck NY: Chronic Publishing, 2018). All page references are to this work.
[2] p. 114.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] p. 239.
[6] p. 175.
[7] p. 53.
[8] p. 104.
[9] p. 168.
[10] p. 169.
[11] p. 127.
[12] pp. 180-81.
[13] p. 231.
[14] p. 182.