Anarchy from Above, Part I

Crushing Democracy

It continues to amaze me how few people understand what is actually going on. Especially Canadians, who often seem blithely unaware of what is happening in Europe and ready to give up their own country without fight. As Neil Oliver says, in his usual articulate fashion, even our most basic instincts seem to have deserted us. Perfectly obvious patterns go unnoticed. Overt bullying fails to disgust us, or to move us to action. We digest government hate propaganda, teach it to our children, and parrot it to pollsters. We are as out of touch with the actual facts, in matters of which we nonetheless speak confidently, as we possibly could be. And we have no idea who our real friends are, or our real enemies. We have no idea who is leading us or where we are being taken.

In The Sanity Tax I raised again the question, why every arm?  Why those constantly shifting goalposts? First we were we told that when 70% of the population was vaxxed, it would all be over; then it was 80%, then 90%, and now 100%. Leave aside the medical folly of mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic. Leave aside the fact that no one is promising any more that even at 100% we will hear the final whistle. Leave aside the contradictions, confusion, and downright stupidity. The problem is not that the authorities don't know what they're doing. It's that they do know what they're doing. Or, at least, the ones that matter know what they're doing. Hand in glove with the magnates of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they are using fallacious public health claims, together with fraudulent climate claims, to crush an institution they have never liked: democracy.

One hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton warned us of this. In 1922 he published one of the most prescient books ever written, Eugenics and Other Evils, which explains how what was already happening then would develop into what is happening today. Ten years later, in a column entitled "On Industrialism" (The Illustrated London News, 16 July 1932), he insisted that it was growing plainer every day "that those of us who cling to crumbling creeds and dogmas, and defend the dying traditions of the Dark Ages, will soon be left alone defending the most obviously decaying of all those ancient dogmas: the idea called Democracy." And he knew whom these benighted believers would be defending it against:  those who for public consumption now style themselves "inclusive capitalists" or "stakeholder capitalists;" viz., the Davos men, the men and women of the Great Reset.

Chesterton was content simply to call them industrialists or capitalists or monopolists or even plutocrats. He didn't know what labels they would later use for themselves, but he described them and us (we fools for "progress") with uncanny accuracy.

By the end of the nineteenth century, millions of men were accepting democracy without knowing why. By the end of the twentieth century, it looks as if millions of people will be rejecting democracy, also without knowing why. In such a straight, strictly logical and unwavering line does the Mind of Man advance along the great Path of Progress.

The organization of society by the industrialists, and our acceptance of it in the name of progress, could not but lead right through democracy and out the other side, as Tocqueville had also feared.  Modern man thinks himself very clever, very advanced, but what is being advanced to him at the moment is that he must leave democracy behind. "Modernity," said Chesterton, "is not democracy; machinery is not democracy; the surrender of everything to trade and commerce is not democracy. Capitalism is not democracy; and is admittedly, by trend and savour, rather against democracy."

Chesterton's alternative to this surrender was known as distributism, which (like Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum) sought a third way that was neither communism nor unfettered capitalism. The former concentrated property and power in the hands of the state, the latter in the hands of the industrialists. Distributists worked on the principle of subsidiarity, advocating for legal and economic structures that protected private property and local enterprise while preventing the formation of manipulative, controlling cartels, whether public or private.  

In other words, it was the very opposite of what is being aimed at today under cover of "covid containment" policies: the destruction of small businesses, the demolition of the middle class, the end of democracy and of autonomous nation-states, the triumph of the machine; ultimately, the computerized control of all economic, social, and political life, even indeed of religious life, on a centralized global basis. And what is being aimed at today has been aimed at, at least inchoately, for more than a century. It already lay exposed to Chesterton's penetrating eye. Situated between the World Wars, he described what he was seeing as follows:

Capitalism is breaking up; and in one sense we do not pretend to be sorry it is breaking up. Indeed, we might put our own point pretty correctly by saying that we would help it to break up; but we do not want it merely to break down. But the first fact to realize is precisely that; that it is a choice between its breaking up and its breaking down. It is a choice between its being voluntarily resolved into its real component parts, each taking back its own, and its merely collapsing on our heads in a crash or confusion of all its component parts, which some call communism and some call chaos. The former is the one thing all sensible people should try to procure. The latter is the one thing that all sensible people should try to prevent.

By the end of the twentieth century, it seemed to many that the latter had indeed been prevented. Communism had been defeated in the West and capitalism had not, or not openly, resumed its attempt to throttle its remaining competitor, the ordinary man and the free people to which he belonged. In the East, to be sure, the Chinese were taking up capitalist means without abandoning communist ways. The new means made possible fresh triumphs for the old ways. The surveillance society and a smothering social-credit system were born, or reborn, with almost unlimited reach and a withering efficiency. Capitalists began flocking together with communists in the confusing migratory gyrations of the jet set; beneath which, unobserved in the bowels of level-four laboratories, preparations for war against free peoples were again being made.

Preparations were being made also in the cities of the West and in their universities, which both capitalists and communists were busy seeding with their own people and ideas. Businesses everywhere were being bought out, and in the countryside farmland was (and is) being bought up. The media, where tares of tyranny could be sown surreptitiously and the wheat of freedom rooted out through censorship, was no exception. Operation Lockstep was being readied, as was the program for international health passports.

In 2020, as the covid darkness descended, a Trojan horse was prepared for delivery. Before long, its doors were flung wide to release the PPP warriors secreted within it. First, the world was thrown into chaos by anarchy from above—by deliberate pursuit of policies designed, not to end, but rather to perpetuate "pandemic" fears to the point of mass hysteria and psychosis. Next, the "vaccines" were rolled out as a universal remedy; and with the vaccines, in support of the remedy which has proven no remedy at all, the vaccine passports and other weapons of surveillance and control, the introduction of which was the whole point of the exercise.    

PPP stands for public-private partnership, something the generals of the Fourth Industrial Revolution love to promote as an antidote to populism. But what is a PPP, really, if not a pact between the statists and the industrialists against the middle class and its naÏve democratic ideals?  What is it, if not the two enemies identified by Leo ganging up, like Stalin and Hitler, on the free world, the world in which populist, localist, and distributist notions, however muddled or impure, stand some sort of chance?

When democracy is all but dead, and it is very nearly dead now, the climate change agenda of the jet-setters (whose vapour trails attest to their insincerity) will complete the task of smothering the people's ambitions, not only to own their own homes and goods but to pursue their own livelihoods and run their own communities. "You will own nothing and you will be happy—because if you are not happy to own nothing we will punish you still more severely."

Let it not be forgotten that the first thing to be sacrificed to COVID on the eve of our dark night was the Aged P who died by neglect in the care home, if he didn't die by involuntary euthanasia. The second thing to be sacrificed was the constitution, with its guaranteed rights and freedoms. The first cannot be restored except by the resurrection of the dead. The second shows no immediate prospect of being restored because, in the state of exception, it no longer exists except as proof (precisely by having lost its own authority in the twinkling of an eye) of the new ground of authority: power, and power alone. As one "emergency" gives way to another, this authority which is not authority in the true sense—not a matter of "justice acceding to power," as Augustine would say, but merely of power unjustly accruing ever more power—is rendered perpetual. The constitution is not only killed but quite effectively buried.

People sometimes ask me whether the passport system will be dropped; whether the governments of the world and the new industrialists with which they have partnered will relinquish their track-and-trace powers as the destructive effect of the virus peters out; whether things will go back to normal as covid, the coronavirus with a level-four twist, recedes into the viral background. Will fines and coercive mandates at last be dropped, and liberties restored? Will privacy again be possible and independent initiative welcomed? Can the middle class hope again to flourish?

Here's my answer: not if the advocates of globalism can help it; not if the Fourth Industrial Revolutionists can prevent it; not if their surreptitious revolution is not met, quite openly, with a counter-revolution. The middle class, which was flourishing economically but declining spiritually and culturally, has taken the covid bait and is being played like a fish. The line is taken in, then let out, then taken in again—each time a bit further and a bit tighter as the fish tires. Health threats, supply-chain threats, cyber security threats, banking threats, crypto-currency controls, carbon emission limits; each will be used in turn, or even simultaneously, to play the fish into the net.  

The current passport system, which was not conjured by the covid crisis—the reverse seems to be true—is just the beginning. It can be dropped temporarily in some jurisdictions, if necessary, without letting the fish off the hook. The digitilization of identity will proceed apace, especially through the adoption of crypto-currency systems, complete with biodigital delivery. In the merging of man and machine through QR-code technology, implanted chips, and increasingly ambitious genetic therapies, passports as we know them will become obsolete. We will be our own passports, and those who scan and program us will be our masters. They will be masters inside as well as outside, masters from whom nothing is hidden and from whom there can be no escape.   

To this kind of tyranny even the distributist has no answer. Or does he? "Suppose," writes Chesterton, that  

a monopolist who is my mortal enemy endeavours to ruin me by preventing me from selling eggs to my neighbors, I can tell him I shall live on my own turnips in my own kitchen-garden. I do not mean to tie myself to turnips; or swear never to touch my own potatoes or beans. I mean the turnips as an example: something to throw at him. Suppose the wicked millionaire in question comes and grins over my garden wall and says, “I perceive by your starved and emaciated appearance that you are in immediate need of a few shillings; but you can’t possibly get them,"  I may possibly be stung into retorting, “Yes, I can. I can sell my first edition of ..."

"How very quaint," we interject, "but you won't be buying or selling anything if you're not properly digitalized." Chesterton, however, is a step ahead of us, as usual. By his illustration he means only to reinforce his general thesis "that we are not even at the moment doing everything that could be done to resist the rush of monopoly; and that when people talk as if nothing could now be done, that statement is false at the start; and that all sorts of answers to it will immediately occur to the mind."

Let us hope so, for the hour of the Beast, long delayed and ravenous, is soon upon us, and the capacity of our generation to credit the lie has been amply demonstrated.  Yet we may and should hope; for hope is the virtue that follows faith, the faith nourished by those creeds and dogmas and traditions that may have crumbled in society at large and in much of the Church as well, but not in all of it.  The Son of Man will indeed find faith upon the earth when he comes. But at this moment? What are those with at least a modicum of faith and hope to attempt just now?

“To that I answer,” says Chesterton in the same column,

“What we must do now is to stop the other people from doing what they are doing now.” The initiative is with the enemy. It is he who is already doing things, and will have done them long before we can begin to do anything, since he has the money, the machinery, the rather mechanical majority, and other things which we have first to gain and then to use. He has nearly completed a monopolist conquest, but not quite; and he can still be hampered and halted.

The world, as Chesterton says, "has woken up very late," but not so late that nothing at all can be done. There are, as I write, boots on the street in Washington, civilian boots, and convoys on the roads in Canada, freedom convoys headed for Ottawa. That is already something, particularly in a country where so many of us are still asleep at the wheel. But more, much more, will be needed.

The Commissioner of the RCMP doesn't want us to discuss this "more," lest we counter anarchy from above with anarchy from below, relieving ourselves of our turnips. But we can and will discuss it. It is the only charitable thing to do, as it is the only sensible thing to do. First, however, we must discuss Chesterton's fuller analysis of our situation in Eugenics and Other Evils. That will be attempted in Part II.