Bonfire of the Governments, Part Two, by Robert Gore

wsj.com

Welcome to the bonfire of the governments, history’s greatest conflagration.

Part One

Think of an activity that’s essential for a government bent on subjugation: censorship and the suppression of expression. Governments on both sides of the present conflict have further jacked up their efforts to control expression from the plateau reached with Covid. Russia just passed a law imposing a 15-year prison sentence for anyone spreading “fake news” about its invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. and European governments and lapdog legacy and social media have blanketed populaces with official propaganda. Just as with Covid, questions and deviations from the approved narrative are stifled, censored, and punished.

It was all so much easier back in the post World War II, pre-internet good old days. In the U.S. and Europe, there were several “papers of record” that had been infiltrated by intelligence agencies, and state-licensed radio and television stations. In the Soviet Union there wasn’t even that, just a few official propaganda organs.

Yet even with that degree of control, government repression wasn’t wholly effective. In the U.S. the truth got out about the Vietnam War. The Soviets could stop everything but people talking with each other, albeit in hushed tones. The cynical humor became legendary. (“They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”) Humor always contains an element of truth, which is why statists can’t do humor. The number of citizens red-pilled to Soviet corruption and incompetence and the comparative freedom and wealth of the West reached critical mass and the government fell. It took way too long, but it happened.

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Today, there are billions of potential journalists and video producers—anyone with a cell phone and access to the internet—and trillions of text and email communications. People still occasionally engage in face-to-face conversations. The infrastructure needed to monitor all this is complex, gargantuan, and costly. Only algorithms and artificial intelligence can sort through it to identify threats to the state. Once identified, a separate infrastructure is necessary to apprehend, arrest, process, incarcerate and perhaps execute those engaged in wrongthought, wrongspeak, wrongwrite, and wrongact.

Repression’s seen costs are dwarfed by its unseen costs. Neither the jailers or the jailed are doing anything productive. Persecuting people for telling the truth amounts to cutting off a society’s eyes, ears, and tongue. Deliberate ignorance imposes costs of which the ignorant will, to their detriment, remain forever ignorant.

There is a meaningful cost imposed even on those who escape state persecution. Through fear or cupidity they trim their own sails, conforming, flattering, and propagating the party line. There are undoubtedly capable journalists in today’s legacy media, but they’ve smothered themselves as it’s become a purveyor of state propaganda.

The best and brightest have migrated to the alternative media, perhaps the freest endeavor left on the planet. From its cacophony—freedom is never quiet—has emerged 99 percent of disclosed truths and counter-narrative analyses these past few years.

The legacy media is comatose, having lost all credibility and whatever control it had of the narrative. Its dwindling though still sizable audience is simple-minded sheep and predatory wolves. The alternative media will continue to expose mainstream depredations, but it has other concerns as well.

Covid threw a curveball. It posed complex issues of medicine and science and evoked widespread fear—even within the alternative media —amplified by the barrage of propaganda. The alternative media was on its back foot until it became apparent that Covid wasn’t going to be the predicted scourge; most people who got it recovered.

The trickle of articles that questioned and debunked became a flood. Junk science was exposed. More importantly, so was Covid tyranny as alarms sounded about the totalitarian design behind masks, physical distancing, lockdowns, job loss, mandatory vaccinations, quarantine camps, vaccine passports, digital IDs, and digital currencies. In many instances exposure amounted to telling readers what the designers themselves were saying.

Debunking Ukraine propaganda will take some work, but it’s less demanding than Covid and will be punctured in far less time. There’s the historical record that runs counter to the “narrative”: the U.S.-backed 2014 coup, the government’s corruption, payola to American political figures and their children, neo-Nazis, the war on eastern Ukraine’s Russians, the failure of the Minsk accords, and U.S. supported bioresearch labs. These are facts, and while the mainstream media is ignoring them, the alternative media isn’t.

For all its ramifications Ukraine is also easier to understand than Covid’s scientific complexities and unknowns. The Covid commissars hid behind them and peddled fear: You could die! That gave everyone a personal stake in Covid that’s lacking with Ukraine, which most Americans can’t find on a map.

The Russians’ methodical military strategy drains the drama from the Ukraine story. An invasion with indiscriminate attacks on cities and civilians would have been over in a week or two and would have been far more spectacular. The Russian strategy has been the boa constrictor’s slow strangulation, not the viper’s venomous quick kill. The Russians want to break Ukraine and achieve their objectives, but they don’t want to own it.

Skepticism that they can do so is warranted. Invasions are easy, withdrawals difficult. Regardless, the butcher’s bill from laying waste to the country and slaughtering civilians would be far higher than it will be if Russia hews to its present course and the outcome will be the same—Ukraine will capitulate.

By then the West will have grown bored with the story, assuming Western leaders don’t do something stupid—military intervention or nuclear weapons deployment. Provided they don’t (not a sure thing), Ukraine flag emojis will be replaced by ones suitable for the next manufactured crisis, maybe Cyber Polygon.

Meanwhile, the West’s sanctions against Russia will bite . . . the West. The Russian-Chinese alliance can cut off natural resources, minerals and materials vital for agriculture, industrial production, and high tech, although in Russia’s case the West has—suicidally—already cut itself off. De-dollarization will continue, and perhaps payment in gold will be demanded for whatever trade remains. Rubles, yuan or both could be backed with gold—Russia and China have plenty—instantly making them more attractive money than the West’s fiat crap.

It’s been suggested that Ukraine is merely the opening salvo, and a relatively minor one, in the alliance’s war against the West. The real war, according to this view, is the economic and financial one. With the Belt and Road initiative and related multilateral arrangements Russia and China are consolidating an Eurasian federation encompassing half the world’s population and a substantial share of its natural resources and production. Western sanctions on Russia have received little support from the federation or across the global South. Notwithstanding Western propaganda to the contrary, Russia is hardly “isolated.”

If such a war is in store, economic and financial salvos may be followed by military ones. China could invade Taiwan and consolidate control of its own neighborhood and Russia might do the same, perhaps conducting another “special military operation” in Georgia.

Massively over-indebted Western economies and governments are vulnerable, an avalanche awaiting the one-too-many snowflake. Russia and China have avalanche guns that can leave the West buried in its own debt and ruins, which all the central banks’ horses and central banks’ men won’t put back together again. Their proposed digital currencies will be no panacea. They’re just another mechanism for control and will be the same worthless fiat as what they replace.

If that’s the victory Russia and China seek, it will be Pyrrhic. Western financial and economic collapse will be a black hole that sucks in the entire world. The debt daisy chain is global and will unravel as it did in the last financial crisis. The U.S. and EU economies are the first and third largest in the world. If they are prostrate, where’s the replacement market for Russian natural resources and Chinese manufactured goods? The “Stans” don’t quite cut it.

The Belt and Road Initiative is a better approach to Eurasia than the U.S.’s bullets, bombs, and bribes, but it’s still a debt-funded, top down, state-directed project. It supposedly doesn’t infringe on the sovereignty of member nations, but every one of those nations heavily infringes on the sovereignty of their own people and bear the ever-increasing costs of repression.

In throwing out the bathwater of the West, they also throw out the baby that was the foundation of its advancement: the still radical idea of individual rights protected rather than infringed by the state. The evolution of the British common law’s protection of contract and property, the gradual acceptance of the once heretical notion that the state is to be subordinate to its people, and the ideal of protected, individual, inalienable rights—never fully realized and now abandoned—served as the philosophical springboard for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ innovation and progress.

Progress and the fulfillment of human potential require much more than just population and natural resources. How many people immigrate to Russia or China? Millions did so to the U.S. during its heyday of freedom, drawn by the opportunity to live their lives as they saw fit. Nowadays such opportunity is unavailable in Russia, China, the U.S., or anywhere else. Most of the immigrants now flooding the U.S. are here for the handouts rather than for its residual and dwindling freedom.

It’s been argued that Russia and China are not the counterweights to the New World Order crowd and the Great Reset they appear to be, that they’ll eventually stand revealed as integral components of the nefarious design. It doesn’t matter whether or not that’s the case. For ordinary citizens anywhere on the planet, it’s enough to know that would-be tyrants intend to exercise full control over their expression, actions, and thoughts. Their lives will be state property, regardless of who’s running the state.

The globalist plan is order emerging from the ashes of a world in ruins, built back better per their totalitarian design. By whom? With what? There’s that crucial contradiction: the chaos they will have fomented will destroy the energy, resources, and production necessary to control it. The globalists’ slaves will neither build much beyond their own barracks nor produce much beyond their own subsistence. Innovation is out of the question.

The transhuman fantasy is that they’ll be programmed to be highly productive and innovative, but docile and obedient—Einsteins under a social credit system. Good luck with that. Einstein escaped the social credit system of his day. Our money is on a world where the energy, resources and production needed to monitor, terrify, control, and murder the slaves, even transhuman ones, will be far greater than anything they collectively produce. The totalitarians will never be able to make subjugation and murder paying propositions—nobody ever has—even when, or more correctly, particularly when their power is absolute.

If human energy, thought, creativity, expression, individuality, and freedom are enemies of the state, the state is doomed. If that means every government on the planet is doomed, so be it. Welcome to the bonfire of the governments, history’s greatest conflagration.

Fully incinerated will be the idea that humanity is unfit for freedom but some humans are fit to exercise power over others. Somebody, somewhere is going to get it right, because freedom is the only system that works. It is noisy and dynamic, but it has its own organic and adaptive order, based on enlightened self-interest and private, mutually beneficial cooperation and arrangements. It is the one order that unleashes rather than chains or destroys human potential.

Freedom, not subjugation, will build back better. It will be a beacon for the best and brightest. They’ll be roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over the embers from the bonfire of the governments.