The first weeks of the second Trump administration have been a wild ride. Like many, I’ve been blown away by the speed and scope of the blitzkrieg that Trump and his team have unleashed on the permanent managerial state in Washington. He has already fulfilled many of the priorities I outlined two months ago in “The Counter-Revolution Begins,” the most significant of which was to reject being conservative about institutions or the exercise of legitimate power. With its “you can just do things” energy, Trump 2.0 seems to be the first administration serious about delivering on democratic demands for real change in American governance since FDR.

In fact, the blows continue to fall so fast that it’s honestly hard to keep track of it all. I’ve therefore found it difficult to say anything about the specifics of what’s happening. To try to do so here would be to be overtaken by events almost immediately. But amid the furor kicked up by a dozen different world-shaking moves – from trying to annex Greenland, to the closing of borders and imposition of trade tariffs, to the dismantling of USAID – I think we can begin to glimpse a much bigger picture that is now coming into view.

There’s a 2018 quote by the late Henry Kissinger that’s circulated recently, in which he mused about whether “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” If that wasn’t true in 2018 it certainly is now. I believe that what we’re seeing today truly is the end of an era, an epochal overturning of the world as we knew it, and that the full import and implications of this haven’t really struck us yet.

More specifically, I believe Donald Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century.

The Long Twentieth

The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century.” The phrase recognized that to speak of “the nineteenth century” was to describe far more than a specific hundred-year span on the calendar; it was to capture the whole spirit of an age: a rapturous epoch of expansion, empire, and Enlightenment, characterized by a triumphalist faith in human reason and progress. That lingering historical spirit, distinct from any before or after, was extinguished in the trenches of the Great War. After the cataclysm, an interregnum that ended only with the conclusion of WWII, everything about how the people of Western civilization perceived and engaged with the world – politically, psychologically, artistically, spiritually – had changed.

R.R. Reno opens his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods by quoting a young man who laments that “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century.” His paradoxical statement captures how the twentieth century has also extended well past its official sell-by date in the year 2000. Our Long Twentieth Century had a late start, fully solidifying only in 1945, but in the 80 years since its spirit has dominated our civilization’s whole understanding of how the world is and should be. It has set all of our society’s fears, values, and moral orthodoxies. And, through the globe-spanning power of the United States, it has shaped the political and cultural order of the rest of the world as well.

The spirit of the Long Twentieth could not be more different from that which preceded it. In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity. But this resolution, as reasonable and well-meaning as it seemed at the time, soon became an all-consuming obsession with negation.

Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”

Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism. Adorno, who set the direction of post-war American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of a latent “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man to xenophobia and führer worship. Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.” For such intellectuals, any definitive claim to authority or hierarchy, whether between men, morals, or metaphysical truths, seemed to stand as a mortal threat to peace on earth.

The great project of post-war establishment liberalism became to tear down the walls of the closed society and banish its gods forever. To be erected on its salted ground was an idyllic but exceptionally vague vision of an “open society” animated by peaceable weak gods of tolerance, doubt, dialogue, equality, and consumer comfort. This politically and culturally dominant “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, relativize truths, and weaken bonds.

As Reno catalogues in detail, new approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character, vilify collective loyalties, cast doubt on hierarchies, break down all boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of all moral and relational duties. Aspiration to a vague universal humanitarianism soon became the only higher good that it was socially acceptable to aim for other than pure economic growth.

The anti-fascism of the twentieth century morphed into a great crusade – characterized, ironically, by a fiery zeal and fierce intolerance. By making “never again” its ultimate priority, the ideology of the open society put a summum malum (greatest evil) at its core rather than any summum bonum (highest good). The singular figure of Hitler didn’t just lurk in the back of the 20th century mind; he dominated its subconscious, becoming a sort of secular Satan, forever threatening to tempt mankind into new wickedness. This “second career of Adolf Hitler,” as Renaud Camus jokingly calls it, provided the parareligious raison d'etre for the open society consensus and the whole post-war liberal order: to prevent the resurrection of the undead Führer.

This doctrine of prevention grants enormous moral weight to ensuring that open society values triumph over those of the closed society in every circumstance. If it’s assumed that the only options are “the open society or Auschwitz” then maintaining zero tolerance for the perceived values of the closed society is functionally a moral commandment. To stand in the way of any possible aspect of societal opening and individual liberation – from secularization, to the sexual revolution and LGBTQ rights, to the free movement of migrants – was to do Hitler’s work and risk facilitating fascism’s return (no matter how far removed the subject concerned from actual fascism). It was established as the open society’s only inviolable rule that, as Reno puts it, it is “forbidden to forbid.” Thus a strict new cultural orthodoxy was consolidated, in which to utter any opinion contrary to the continuous project of further opening up societies became verboten as a moral evil. Complete inclusion required rigorous exclusion. We are familiar with this dogma today as political correctness.

The end of the Cold War then sent the open society consensus into overdrive. Far from moderating its zeal, the fall of Soviet communism (liberalism’s last real ideological competitor) seemed to validate the moral and practical superiority of the open society, and the post-Cold War establishment doubled down on the belief that the whole world could and should be rebuilt in its image, ushering in the end of history.

The crusade for openness took on for itself a great commission to go and deconstruct all nations in the name of peace, prosperity, and freedom. This conviction was only reinforced by the 9/11 attacks of 2001, which seemed to help demonstrate that the continued existence of closed-minded intolerance anywhere was a threat to tolerance everywhere. As one hawkish politician quoted in Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe put it not long afterwards, “We [now] live in a borderless world in which our new mission is defending the border not of our countries but civility and human rights.”

If you’ve been wondering why USAID was spending $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbian workplaces, $500,000 to “expand atheism” in Nepal, or $7.9 million to catechize Sri Lankan journalists in avoiding “binary-gendered language,” this is why. It’s the same reason the U.S. government was pouring millions into funding “charities” dedicated to breaking U.S. immigration law and facilitating open borders migration: they believed they were fighting the good fight against the closed society in order to stop zombie Hitler (while skimming a whole lot of cash on the side for their good deeds). It’s also why, for decades, anyone who’s objected has been automatically tarred as a literal fascist.

Meanwhile, the development of the open society consensus went hand-in-hand with the universal growth of the managerial state and its occlusion of democratic self-governance. There was a very direct and deliberate connection. As Carl Schmitt noted early in the twentieth century, an “elemental impulse” of liberalism is “neutralization” and “depoliticization” of the political – that is, the attempt to remove all fundamental contention from politics out of fear of conflict, shrinking “politics” to mere managerial administration. This excising of the political from politics was at the heart of the post-war project’s structural aims. Just as Schmitt had predicted, the goal became to achieve perpetual peace through an “age of technicity,” in which politics would be reduced to the safer, more predictable movements of a machine through the empowerment of supposedly-neutral mechanisms like bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, and expert technocratic commissions.

Actual public contention over genuinely political questions, especially by the dangerously fascism-prone democratic masses, was in contrast now judged to be too dangerous to permit. The post-war establishment of the open society dreamed instead of achieving governance via scientific management, of transforming the political sphere into “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering,” as Popper put it. The operation of this machine could then be limited to a cadre of carefully selected and educated “institutional technologists,” in Popper’s phrasing.

Thus the great expansion of our modern managerial regimes, including the American “deep state” that the Trump administration and Elon Musk are now trying to dismantle. Characterized by vast permanent administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, such regimes are run by an oligarchic elite class of technocrats schooled in social engineering, dissimulation, false compassion, the manipulation of allegedly-neutral processes, and a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance. The obsessive management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship also became an especially key priority in such regimes, with the objective being both to constrain democratic outcomes (to defend “democracy” against the masses) and to generally suppress serious public discussion of contentious yet fundamental political issues (such as mass migration policies) in an effort to prevent civil strife.

Nor was this managerial impulse toward depoliticization limited to the national level. The creation of a “rules-based liberal international order” – in which all political contention would be managed by quasi-imperial supranational structures (such as the UN and EU) and war between states would become a relic of the barbaric past – was the pinnacle of post-war Western ambitions. Backed by the military power of the United States and its allies, this new international order would show zero tolerance for unauthorized conflict, depoliticizing the world and allowing open societies to flourish in peace.

The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.

That dream didn’t work out though, because the strong gods refused to die.

Restoration of the Gods

Mary Harrington recently observed that the Trumpian revolution seems as much archetypal as political, noting that the generally “exultant male response to recent work by Elon Musk and his ‘warband’ of young tech-bros” in dismantling the entrenched bureaucracy is a reflection of what can be “understood archetypally as [their] doing battle against a vast, miasmic foe whose aim is the destruction of masculine heroism as such.” This masculine-inflected spirit of thumotic vitalism was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back. And it wasn’t, she notes, “as though a proceduralist, managerial civilization affords no scope for horrors of its own.” Thus now “we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere.”

Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.

But, as reality began to intrude over the past two decades, the share of people still convinced by the hazy promises of the open society steadily diminished. A reaction began to brew, especially among those most divorced from and harmed by its aging obsessions: the young and the working class. The “populism” that is now sweeping the West is best understood as a democratic insistence on the restoration and reintegration of respect for those strong gods capable of grounding, uniting, and sustaining societies, including coherent national identities, cohesive natural loyalties, and the recognition of objective and transcendent truths.

Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed thumotic desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth. And that in turn requires a rejection of the pathological “tyranny of guilt” (as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner once dubbed it) that has gripped the Western mind since 1945. As the power of endless hysterical accusations of “fascism” has gradually faded, we have – for better and worse – begun to witness the end of the Age of Hitler.

Energetic national populism is, then, a rejection of all the core obsessions and demands of the twentieth century and the open society consensus that so dominated it. The passionless reign of weakness, tolerance, and drab universalist utilitarianism being held up as moral and political ideals seems to be ending. And that means the gerontocracy of the Long Twentieth Century is finally dying off too. This is what Trump, in all his brashness, represents: the strong gods have escaped from exile and returned to America, dragging the twenty-first century along behind them.

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Dawn of a New Century

Trump himself is a man of action, not rumination (let alone self-recrimination), and he clearly possesses a high tolerance for risk. He is instinctual, not actuarial. He is relational, not rationalistic, valuing loyalty and possessing a prickly sense of honor. He utters common truths with no regard for whether this offends the sensibilities of others, and has little patience for endless “dialogue” or established procedures. And, an unabashed nationalist, he doesn’t hesitate to wield strength on behalf of American interests, or to put those interests ahead of others’ around the world. He is, in other words, neither cause nor mere symptom of populist upheaval but in a real sense an embodiment of the whole rebellious new world spirit that’s now overturning the old order.

Trump’s policies so far in his second term also reflect this new zeitgeist. His blitzkrieg of executive action has struck directly at the three pillars of the Long Twentieth Century: closing the nation’s borders and purging the state of the latest ideological evolution of open society orthodoxy (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”) while inspiring the broader culture to do the same; moving to dismantle the managerial state, including by affirming the elected Executive’s direct, personal control over the sheltered proceduralist (i.e. democratically uncontrollable and unaccountable) bureaucracy; and transforming U.S. foreign policy by rejecting liberal proceduralism in the international sphere as well, putting national interests ahead of the interests of the “international order” and declining to automatically play the role of global rule-enforcer.

The very boldness of this action reflects more than just partisan political gamesmanship – in itself it represents the stasis of the old paradigm being upended; now “you can just do things” again. This mindset hasn’t been seen in America since FDR and his revolutionary government remade the country and established the modern managerial state; no one has dared to so much as jostle the machine he created since the end of WWII. Now Trump has.

Abroad and in Washington, this brash attitude has caused much consternation and confusion (“Why is Trump threatening to invade Mexico, bully Canada, and annex Greenland from a NATO ally? Wasn’t he supposed to be an isolationist?”) But the principle behind all Trump’s behavior here actually appears to be quite straightforward: he is willing to use American might however may benefit the nation, rather than caring very much about protecting the status quo liberal international order for its own sake or adhering to polite fictions like international law. Turns out “you can just do things” on the world stage too. Diplomacy and alliances are logically seen as of value only insofar as they benefit America. This is indeed what “America First” always meant. In this way the Trump Doctrine is simply a rejection of the neurotic, confrontation-avoidant post-war consensus in favor of the restoration of standard muscular, Western Hemisphere-focused, pre-twentieth century American foreign policy, in the style of a president Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, or Teddy Roosevelt.

New Secretary of State Marco Rubio has even explicitly described the idealism of the global U.S.-enforced liberal international order as an “anomaly,” noting that it “was a product of the end of the Cold War” and that “eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.” This revitalization of the spirit of national sovereignty and international competition seems to already be spreading and inspiring a turn back towards stronger gods around the world. As Hungary’s conservative-nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, recently put it to a gathering of European populists, “Our friend Trump, the Trump tornado, has changed the world in just a couple of weeks. An era has ended. Today, everyone sees that we are the future.”

So while at a surface level the vibe of the Trump revolution might be mistaken as merely marking a return to circa-1990s libertarianism, with its individual freedom and “greed is good” free-market mindset, he represents a far more significant shift than that: back – or rather forward – more than a century. The globalist neoliberalism, interventionist one-world internationalism, and naive social progressivism of the 90s open society is dead and gone. Despite his political alliance with the Right-Wing Progressives of Silicon Valley, Trump’s new world is in a real sense distinctly post-liberal.

Reactionary Remnants

It is little wonder then why Trump so horrifies the aging aristocracy of the Long Twentieth Century: they fear above all the return of the strong gods, which their whole project of moral and political world-building was conducted to preclude.

Note, for example, the appearance of increasingly panicked admonitions (in between or in haphazard fusion with accusations of fascism) about the imminent danger of “Christian Nationalism.” This is a term that welds together two strong gods – nationalism and religion – and so is a particularly triggering phantom. This is also why a certain type of limp conservative (known most politely online as the “cuckservative”) displays particular hysteria about Trump and populism. This type really is a conservative, in the sense that his priority in life is to prevent change to the status quo, decrying any decisive action, including any legitimate exercise of democratic power, that risks disrupting the open society consensus. Although he may mouth selective disagreement with progressive “excesses” that also risk undermining that consensus, at his core such a man is foremost a servant of the weak gods of managerial timidity.

For eight decades now the old elite, left- and right- wings alike, has been unified by their shared prioritization of the open society and its values. Although it may have surprised some Americans to see previously right-coded figures like Dick Cheney side with the political left in the last election, it should not have. Cheney was a radical proponent of the open society consensus – just in the form of neoconservatism, the American church militant of imposing the gospel of openness around the world at the point of the sword. In this he was never that different from dedicated leftists like George Soros, who founded an activist institution named quite explicitly after his objective (the Open Society Foundation) and used its vast network of influence to subvert and deconstruct conservative cultures around the globe, including in the United States.

That both men would do this as powerful scions of the same Western establishment is not contradictory but completely logical, given that what united that establishment was the open society consensus. Even the most radical “counter-cultural” rebels of the 1960s were really no such thing, given that their goals were identical to those of the post-war establishment: to progressively advance the opening up of society. They disagreed only on the pace of change, and the establishment soon accommodated their zeal and brought them into the fold.

Trump and populist-nationalist movements are the first real break from this consensus since its conception. They herald the arrival of a very different world.

A New World Opens

Despite its obsession with “openness,” the world of the post-war open society has in truth always been, in its own way, a strictly enclosed and deeply stifling place. It is a world in which human nature, indeed our very humanity, is viewed with great suspicion, as something dangerous to be surveilled, suppressed, and contained – or, even better, remolded into a reliable cog to fit safely into a predictable, riskless machine. Its dream of a world of perfect freedom, equality, rationalism, and passivity has always been one “in which no great heart could beat and no great soul could breathe,” as Ernst Jünger once put it.

From the very beginning of the Long Twentieth Century, some clear-eyed liberal thinkers, such as Leo Strauss, could foresee that attempting to entirely ignore the realities and banish the values of the “closed society” in pursuit of “a pacified planet, without rulers and ruled” was always liable to end only in rebellion, bloodshed, and self-destruction. Open society liberalism’s dogmatic pursuit of negation would, Strauss warned, undermine the very virtues – like loyalty, duty, courage, and love of one’s own – that all societies rely on to survive and sustain themselves. As Matthew Rose astutely observes, Strauss understood that the strong gods of the closed society “are permanent truths, not atavisms, no matter how unpalatable they are to the progressive-minded.” And, that a “society that cannot affirm them invites catastrophe, no less than does a society that cannot question them.”

Such warnings were ignored, however. The traumas of the twentieth century made ideas like nationalism, or even any clear distinction between “us” and “them,” into taboos that were impossible to discuss seriously. That finding the proper balance between “closed’ and “open” values is necessary to maintain a healthy society was a fact carefully ignored for decades.

Now the strong gods are nonetheless being haphazardly called back into the world as the vitalistic neo-romanticism of our revolutionary moment of reformation tears down the decaying walls and guard towers of the open society. Their return brings real risks, or course – although the return of risk is kind of the point. The thing about strong gods is that they’re strong, meaning they can be fearsome and dangerous; which is precisely why they also have the strength to protect and defend. It remains an open question whether this necessary renewal of strength and vitality can be reintegrated harmoniously into our societies, or whether our world will again be plunged into a time of significantly greater strife, danger, and war.

But we no longer have much of a choice in the matter; the strong gods’ restoration has become inevitable, one way or another. We’re living in a whole new century now. The Long Twentieth Century has run its course, the world it bequeathed to us in the West having proved a wholly unsustainable mix of atomization, listlessness, self-abnegation, and petty impersonal tyranny. Our societies will either accept the offer of revitalization or fade out of existence, to be replaced by other stronger, more grounded and cohesive cultures.

As Reno rightly concludes in Return of the Strong Gods, “Our time – this century – begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home.” God willing, we can all find that home again as we enter the twenty-first century.

This is a set of facts and references compiled by independent researchers Debbie Lerman and Sasha Latypova.

Editorial note - my readers know that I have been vocal about covid as military operation since early 2022. I personally arrived at the conclusion that the massive harm from the covid shots and other government “pandemic response” measures was fully intentional. For purposes of this dossier, which Debbie and I disseminated to many other journalists and independent researchers, our aim was to remove any personal opinion and leave a dry, fact-only record. The readers can draw their own conclusions from this set of facts.

Due Diligence and Art is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We have also recorded a 38 min video where we discuss the background and our own thinking about the global military-intelligence campaign which continues to date:

Please help us share this information far and wide. Feel free to repost/use any material herein and use the reference for further investigation. We appreciate credit, but it is also not obligatory. These are the facts from publicly available documentation.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Covid Dossier is a compilation of the evidence we have amassed over the last three years supporting the following claim:

Covid was not a public health event, although it was presented as such to the world’s population. It was a global operation, coordinated through public-private intelligence and military alliances and invoking laws designed for CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) weapons attacks.

The Dossier contains information regarding the military/intelligence coordination of the Covid biodefense response in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. For some countries we have extensively documented information. For others, we have some documentation of military/intelligence involvement, but not all the details. For as many countries as possible, we list the military/intelligence agencies in charge of their country’s Covid response; dates on which emergency declarations were made in each country; military/intelligence-related agencies and bodies in charge of censorship/propaganda; and top people with military/intelligence jobs who were known or reported to hold leadership positions in the response. We also list connections to global governing bodies, including the EU and UN/WHO, through which the response was coordinated. In the final section, we provide a list of military/intelligence/biodefense alliances that provide multinational frameworks for responding to a bioterror/bioweapons attack.

By providing all of this information in one place, we hope to dispel the notion that Covid was a public health event, managed independently by each country’s public health agencies, with some limited, logistically focused military involvement. We also hope to drive home the shocking realization that not only were military and intelligence agencies in charge of Covid in all of these countries, but the response to what was represented as a public health crisis was coordinated through military alliances, including NATO.

This should be the subject of front-page news everywhere.

We are calling on investigators, whistleblowers, and anyone with information related to this topic to contact us and/or publish the information so that we can continue to construct the full picture of what happened to the world starting in early 2020 and continuing to this day.

HOW IT STARTED: FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY

Exactly five years ago, on February 4th, 2020, two things happened that almost nobody knows about, but that played an important role in the course of recent world history:

1. Two declarations for CBRN (weapons of mass destruction) emergencies – EUA and PREP Act – made by the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, were registered on this date. [ref][ref]

EUA stands for Emergency Use Authorization. Legally, EUA powers are intended for situations of grave, immediate emergencies involving weapons of mass destruction. They allow for the use of countermeasures against CBRN (chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological) agents without the regulatory oversight intended to ensure safety and efficacy, because the immediate threat of a CBRN attack is deemed so much greater than any potential risks caused by the countermeasures.[ref] The PREP Act is the legal indemnity granted to anyone involved in using an EUA countermeasure, because if a weapon of mass destruction is involved, the risk of the CBRN attack is so great that no one should face legal consequences for potential collateral damage caused by using unregulated countermeasures.

In order to activate EUA, the law requires “A determination by the Secretary of HHS that there is a public health emergency… that involves a CBRN agent or agents, or a disease or condition that may be attributable to such agent(s). [ref] So when the EUA was officially activated on February 4, 2020, it was in essence a declaration of a state of emergency involving weapon(s) of mass destruction.

This PREP Act Public Health Emergency declaration has been repeatedly renewed and is currently in effect through December 31, 2029.

2. A pharmaceutical executive was caught on tape saying that the U.S. Department of Defense called to inform him “that the newly discovered Sars-2 virus posed a national security threat.” [ref]

It is important to note that on February 4, 2020, there were fewer than a dozen confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus disease (later called Covid-19) in the US, and zero deaths. Worldwide, the death count was fewer than 500. There was nothing about the virus, at least as it was presented publicly, that would make anyone believe it posed a threat to national security.

These two events are remarkable for several reasons:

• They indicate that the beginnings of Covid were rooted in national security machinations, not public health considerations.

• They also strongly suggest that the deployment of the EUA “medical countermeasures” under Public Health Emergency declaration was officially launched at a time when an emergency, much less a national or a global one, could not possibly be determined. No public health parameters justifying that a novel virus posed a “threat to national security” existed at the time of the EUA and PREP Act declarations.

Thus, on this day five years ago, a military CBRN countermeasure deployment campaign was officially launched against a poorly defined illness that was alleged to have killed a few hundred people worldwide.

Within six weeks of this date, in order to ensure a market for the countermeasures (among other aims), the lockdown-until-vaccine response – which is a military/counterterrorism plan and has nothing to do with public health [ref] – went into effect all over the world.

WHY THIS INFORMATION IS CRUCIAL

It is crucially important to understand that Covid was a globally coordinated response, based on legal frameworks intended for biodefense/biowarfare situations. The attack that initiated the global Covid response could have been real, perceived or invented – regardless of the trigger, the lockdown-until-vaccine paradigm originated in the military/intelligence biodefense playbook, not in any scientifically based or epidemiologically established public health plan.[ref]

This means that nothing about the response – masking, distancing, lockdowns, vaccines – was part of a public health plan to respond to a disease outbreak. Rather, every aspect of the response was intended to induce public panic in order to gain compliance with biodefense operations, culminating with the injection of unregulated mRNA products, which were legally treated as biodefense military countermeasures (MCMs), into billions of human beings.

Who ordered and directed these operations? Who benefited from them? Who was and still is covering them up? We have been investigating these questions for the last several years, and we hope many who read this will join us moving forward.

CALL TO ACTION

Most journalists in both corporate and alternative spaces are either unaware or unwilling to cover the military/intelligence/biodefense/global coordination aspects of Covid. We need to change that.

Please help us shift the conversation to focus on the true nature of the Covid response and the existential questions raised by it.

To learn more, you’ll find extensive research and analysis on our Substacks:

Uncovering Fraud in Pharmaceutical R&D and Manufacturing. By popular demand, I will include my art pieces that have nothing to do with Pharma. If you are interested in my art, visit www.sashalatypova.com

Debbie Lerman's Substack
A gathering place for freaks, geeks and conspiracy theorists. I explore and expose the subtext underlying public health, political, and cultural artifacts. In other words, I try to answer the ever-more pressing question: WTF IS ACTUALLY GOING ON???

Top-level summaries of our understanding of the Covid response can be found in these articles:

Debbie Lerman's Substack
It’s been just over two years since my July 2022 article entitled “The Catastrophic Covid Convergence,” in which I attempted to explain the seemingly inexplicable cascade of events known as the Covid pandemic response (in this article shortened simply to …

Debbie Lerman's Substack
In part 1 of this story, I discussed events leading up to the global Covid pandemic response, including the rise of the war on bioterror and the expansion of global public-private partnerships…

#### Summary of Everything and Quick Links, Updated - end of 2024.

June 26, 2023

Covid Dossier: U.S.

Military/intelligence agencies in charge of pandemic response:

• National Security Council (NSC) [ref]

• FEMA/Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [ref]

• Department of Defense (DOD) [ref]

Dates when those agencies were known to be in charge:

• Mid-January 2020: NSC classified Covid meetings “starting mid-January” [ref]

• March 13, 2020: NSC officially in charge of pandemic policy in Pandemic Crisis Action Plan-Adapted – the U.S. government’s Covid response plan [ref]

• March 18, 2020: FEMA/DHS takes over as Lead Federal Agency, replacing HHS [ref]

Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:

• February 4, 2020 EUA declaration [ref]

• February 4, 2020 [retroactive from March 17, 2020] PREP Act declaration [[ref]](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/03/17/2020-05484/declaration-under-the-public-readiness-and-emergency-preparedness-act-for-medical-countermeasures)

• March 13, 2020 Stafford Act in all states simultaneously (1st time in history) [ref]

Military/intelligence agencies involved in public communications/propaganda/censorship:

• Government Task Force, coordinated by NSC, controls all pandemic messaging starting February 27, 2020 [ref][ref]

• Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [ref]

• Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) [ref]

• Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) (crossover US/UK) [ref]

Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, UN/WHO:

• Deborah Birx [ref][ref][ref][ref]

• Michael Callahan[ref] [See also PsyWar by Robert Malone MD MS, Kindle version p. 237]

• Richard Danzig [ref][ref]

• Richard Hatchett [ref][ref][ref][ref]

• Matt Hepburn [ref][ref][ref][ref]

• Robert Kadlec [ref][ref][ref]

• Carter Mecher [ref]

• Matt Pottinger [ref]

• Mike Ryan [[ref]](https://healthpolicy-watch.news/mike-ryan-announced-as-new-who-deputy-director-general/)\[[ref](https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/dr-michael-ryan-s-remarks-at-the-launch-of-the-who-hub-for-pandemic-and-epidemic-intelligence)]

Covid Dossier: U.K.

Military/intelligence agencies in charge of pandemic response:

• Ministry of Defense (MOD) “Operation Rescript” [ref]

• Covid Support Force (MOD Report - ref)

• Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) [ref][ref][ref][ref]

Dates those agencies were publicly known to be in charge:

• March 18, 2020: Covid Support Force (20,000 military personnel) [ref]

• May 2020: (at the latest) JBC [ref][ Wikipedia: “it’s existence was announced”]

Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:

• March 23, 2020 national lockdown [[ref](https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-address-to-the-nation-on-coronavirus-23-march-2020)]

• March 25, 2020 Coronavirus Act 2020 [ref]

Military/IC-affiliated groups involved in messaging/propaganda/censorship:

• Ministry of Defense team [ref]

• iSAGE [ref]

• 77th Brigade [ref]

• Nudge Unit [ref from March 11 2020] / Behavioral Insights Team – now “fully owned by Nesta” (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) [ref]

• RAF analysts [ref]

• Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) (crossover US/UK)[ref]

Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, UN/WHO

• Roy Anderson [ref]

• Dominic Cummings [ref][ref]

• Jeremy Farrar [ref] [ref][ref]

• Clare Gardiner [ref]

• Richard Hatchett (crossover US/UK) [ref][ref][ref][ref]

• Tom Hurd [ref] [ref]

• Thomas Waite [ref]

• Simon Manley (UK Director-General Covid-19) [ref]

Covid Dossier: Australia

Military/intelligence agencies and special committees involved in response:

• National Cabinet “exempt from freedom of information laws”[ref]

• National Security Committee of Cabinet [ref]

• Australian Defense Force COVID-19 Task Force [ref]

• National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board (NCC) [ref]

Dates those agencies/committees were publicly known to be in charge:

• March 9, 2020: Australian Defense Force COVID-19 Task Force [ref]

• March 13, 2020: National Cabinet established [ref]

• March 25: NCC [ref]

Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:

• March 5, 2020 National Coordination Mechanism activated [ref]

• March 13, 2020 National Partnership on COVID-19 Response [ref]

• March 18, 2020 Human Biosecurity Emergency Declaration (first in history) [ref]

Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, UN/WHO:

• Lt Gen John Frewen [ref][ref]

• Jane Halton [ref][ref][ref]

• Edward Holmes [ref]

Covid Dossier: Canada

Military/intelligence agencies and special committees involved in response:

• Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) Operation LASER 24,000-person response force [ref]

• CAF Operation VECTOR (vaccine planning and distribution)[ref]

• Cabinet Committee on COVID-19 [ref]

Dates those agencies/committees were publicly known to be in charge:

• January 23, 2020: first Operation LASER planning meeting [ref]

• March 2, 2020: Operation LASER officially launched

• March 4, 2020: Cabinet Committee officially announced [[ref](https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2020/03/04/prime-minister-creates-committee-covid-19)]

Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:

In Canada, the emergency declarations were made by the provinces, as follows [ref]:

• March 13, 2020 Quebec provincial public health emergency

• March 16, 2020 Prince Edward Island public health emergency

• March 17, 2020 British Columbia (BC) public health emergency

• March 17, 2020 Alberta provincial public health emergency

• March 17, 2020 Ontario provincial state of emergency

• March 18, 2020 BC state of emergency under Emergency Program Act

• March 18, 2020 Saskatchewan provincial state of emergency

• March 18, 2020 Yukon public health emergency

• March 19, 2020 Northwest Territories public health emergency

• March 19, 2020 Nunavut public health emergency

• March 20, 2020 Manitoba provincial state of emergency

• March 22, 2020 Nova Scotia provincial state of emergency

Military/IC-affiliated groups involved in messaging/propaganda/censorship:

• CAF began to gather intelligence on pandemic disinformation in January 2020 [ref]

• Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC) [ref]

• Canadian military intelligence unit - Precision Information Team (PiT)[ref][ref]

Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, UN/WHO:

• Bill Blair [ref]

• Crystia Freeland [ref][ref]

• Brian Santarpia [ref]

Covid Dossier: Netherlands

Military/intelligence agencies and alliances involved in response:

• National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) [ref]

• NATO [ref]

• European Union [ref]

Dates, types and names of unprecedented emergency declarations:

• March 15, 2020: “new additional measures to combat the COVID-19 outbreak” (closure of schools, restaurants, sports/fitness facilities)[ref]

• March 23, 2020: “intelligent lockdown” announcement [ref]

Military/IC-affiliated groups involved in messaging/propaganda/censorship:

• Ministry of Defense Land Information Manoeuvre Centre (LIMC) [ref][ref][ref][ref]

• National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV)[ref]

• National Core Team Crisis Communication (NKC) (led by the NCTV)[ref]

• Interdepartmental Working Group on Disinformation (includes Defense, Foreign Affairs and Justice Departments, among others) [ref]

Key figures in Covid response linked to military, IC, NATO, EU:

• Marion Koopmans [ref]

• Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg [ref]

Covid Dossier: Germany

Military/intelligence agencies, committees, and groups involved in response & dates they were announced

• February 27/28: Corona Crisis Team (Corona-Krisenstab) [ref] led by Ministry of Health and Ministry of the Interior (equivalent of DHS + DOJ) [ref]

• November 2021: new Crisis Team for vaccines (led by military)[ref]

• NATO[ref][ref]

Key figures in Covid Response linked to NATO, UN/WHO, military, IC:

• Major General Carsten Breuer[ref][ref]

• General Hans-Ulrich Holtherm[ref][ref]

• Christian Drosten [ref][ref]

• Bernhard Schwartländer [ref]

Covid Dossier: Italy

Although we do not yet have the full list of Italian agencies, dates, emergency declarations etc., we do have compelling evidence that NATO was involved in coordinating the Covid response in Italy:

The Italian CTS (Comitato Tecnico Scientifico, or Technical Scientific Committee) was established on February 5, 2020 “with consultancy and support competence for coordination activities to overcome the epidemiological emergency due to the spread of Coronavirus.” https://www.salute.gov.it/portale/nuovocoronavirus/dettaglioContenutiNuovoCoronavirus.jsp?area=nuovoCoronavirus&id=5432&lingua=italiano&menu=vuoto

Note the date as it relates to the events of February 4, 2020 (described in the Executive Summary above). Remember that on February 5, 2020 nobody in Italy had been diagnosed with or died from the coronavirus. In the entire world, a few hundred deaths were attributed to the virus.

Minutes of a CTS meeting held on March 5, 2020, obtained through FOIA [ref], include statements by General Bonfiglio [ref], identified as belonging to the “NATO UEO point of the DPC.” [ref]

Below is a screenshot of the minutes in Italian, followed by English translation:

[

](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb7b44898-569d-483b-918f-7cce5258bdb6_402x551.jpeg)

Gen. Bonfiglio, NATO WEU Point of the Department of Civil Defense, is invited and reminds of the commitments regarding the handling of confidential documentation that must be subject to the rules of restricted external communication and dissemination.

Gen. Bonfiglio recalls Law 124/2007 emphasizing that the transmission of documents produced in CTS (Scientific Technical Committee) will henceforth be done through the NATO WEU Point of the Department of Civil Defense and the Ministry of Health. ‎

Covid Dossier: military/intelligence/biodefense plans & alliances

The following plans and alliances provide frameworks for responding to a bioterror/bioweapons attack. The information provided in this Dossier suggests they may have been invoked in the global Covid response.

• U.S. Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Response (9/9/2016) This publication provides joint doctrine for military domestic or international response to minimize the effects of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear incident. [ref]

• Medical Countermeasures Consortium - a four-nation partnership involving the Defence and Health Departments of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.[ref]

• Quadripartite Medical Intelligence Committee (QMIC) the health equivalent of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance [ref]

• NATO - Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defence Centre of Excellence [ref]

• EU - Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) [ref]

Covid Dossier: Recommended reading for historical, economic, political and sociological context

Toby Green and Thomas Fazi. The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and The Poor – A Critique from the Left. C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2023.

C.J. Hopkins. The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021). Consent Factory Publishing, 2022.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race. Skyhorse Publishing, 2023.

Unlimited Hangout investigative series: Moderna’s “Hail Mary”

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, abridged and illustrated edition, 1972. (out of print; used copies available)

I have referenced Arnold Toynbee, an encyclopedic historian a few times in interviews, most recently in this discussion with James Delingpole.

There is a misunderstanding, usually divided along political party lines, about the United States and other nominally sovereign independent countries of the world. Typically the “leftists” call them “democracies”, while the conservatives in the US counter this with “we are a constitutional republic, not a democracy”. Other groups decry the corporate form of the US government. I think trying to pinpoint the ill invariably misses the point, as any state will undergo all of these forms before a given civilization ends.

According to Toynbee, a “universal state” is the last phase of a society before extinction. This doesn’t mean people go extinct: they don’t disappear as a group, however they may be reduced in numbers. We are talking about the concept of a “state” in this case. As Toynbee describes, universal states typically last a century or two, and all eventually disappear, but all proclaim that they are eternal right up to the point of their demise. The chapters I am quoting from primarily deal with Rome as a universal state, but draw comparisons and reference from many others - Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, Japanese. Toynbee postulates that the imperial Rome (but not its earlier versions, i.e., royal, magisterial and republican) became the universal state for the disintegrating Hellenic (Greek) world. Reproduced below without commentary. I hope the quotes from ~2000 years ago ring a bell…

One World Government is a desperate last-ditch “Indian summer” attempt at staving off the collapse and disintegration of the existing world order. IMO, it has no chance of coming to fruition now.

Objectively, no universal state has ever been literally universal in the sense of having covered the entire surface of the globe; but in a significant subjective sense these states have indeed been universal, for they have looked and felt worldwide to the people living under their regime. The Romans and the Chinese […] thought of their respective empires as embracing all the peoples in the world that were of any account…

[…]

Universal states are, let us remind ourselves, essentially negative institutions. In the first place, they arise after, and not before the breakdown of civilizations to which they bring political unity. They are not summers but Indian summers, masking autumn and presaging winter. […] There is, however, an element of ambiguity in them, for, while universal states are thus symptoms of social disintegration, they are at the same time attempts to check this disintegration and defy it.

[Universal states invariably position themselves and are perceived by contemporaries as immortal and divine.]

[After it’s establishment after the battle of Actium in 31 BC], the secret of Roman imperial government was the principle of indirect rule. The Hellenic universal state was conceived of by its Roman founders as an association of self-governing city-states with a fringe of autonomous principalities in the regions where the Hellenic culture had not yet struck political root. The burden of administration - which even at the end of the Hellenic time of troubles, was still publicly regarded as an honorable and covetable load - was to be left resting on the shoulders of these responsible self-governing local authorities; the imperial government was to confine itself to the twofold task of keeping the local communities in harmony with one another and protecting them against attacks from the outer barbarians; and for these limited imperial activities, a slender military framework and a light political superstructure were all that was required. This fundamental policy was never deliberately revised; yet, if we look again at the Roman Empire as it emerged from a spell of two centuries of Roman Peace, we shall find that its administrative structure had in fact been transformed as a result of innovations that were reluctant and piecemeal, but were far-reaching in their cumulative effect because they were all in the same direction.

By end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-80), the last of the client principalities had been gleichgeschaltet [uniformized, often in a forced or totalitarian manner] with the provinces, and, more significant still, the provinces themselves had become organs of direct administration instead of remaining mere frameworks for local groups of self-administering city-states. […] in the course of … two centuries, however, the human resources for the conduct of local government gradually ran dry, and the central government, faced with this increasing dearth of the local administrative talent on which it had been accustomed to rely, found itself constrained not only to replace the client-princes with imperial governors but to put the administration of the city-states in the hands of ‘city-managers’ who were appointed by the imperial authorities instead of being elected (as the city-state magistrates were) by the local notables, and who were indirectly responsible to the Emperor himself. […] while the self-complacent local magistrates and town councilors of the once self-governing city-states have been degraded into becoming unwilling instruments of the central exchequer for extracting ruinously heavy taxes from the local notables…

[…]

Another cause of the persistence of the belief in the immortality of the universal states is the impressiveness of the institution itself, as distinct from the prestige of the successive rulers who are its living incarnation.

[…]

Appian of Alexandria (AD 90-160) [a Greek who became a Roman propagandist, wrote] in the preface to his Studies in Roman History,

“the [Roman] state has reached its highest point of organization and the public revenue its highest figure, while as long and stable peace has raised the whole world to a level of secure prosperity. A few more subject nations have been added by the emperors to those already under the Roman dominion, and others which have revolted have been reduced to obedience; but, since the Romans already posses the choicest portions of the land and water surface of the globe, they are wise enough to aim at retaining what they hold rather than extending their Empire to infinity over the poverty-stricken and unremunerative territories of uncivilized nations. I myself have seen representatives of such nations attending at Rome on diplomatic missions and offering to become her subjects, and the Emperor refusing to accept the allegiance of peoples who would be of no value to his government. There are other nations innumerable whose kings the Romans appoint themselves, since they feel no necessity to incorporate them in their Empire. There are also certain subject nations to whom they make grants from their treasury, because they are too proud to repudiate them in spite their being a financial burden. They have garrisoned the frontiers of their Empire with a ring of powerful armies, and keep guard over this vast extent of land and sea as easily as if it were a modest farm”.

In the view of Appian and Aelius Aristeides [AD 117-181], the Roman Empire was eternal:

“…just as the sum total of things is eternal, because there is no room, outside it, for its components to fly apart, and there are no extraneous bodies that can collide with it and disintegrate it with a mighty blow.”

In these lines of the Roman poet Lucretius [BC 90-50], his teacher Democritus’s [BC 460] argument looks as impregnable as the Roman limes [borders] itself:

“Nor is there any force that can modify the sum of things. There is no space outside into which any kind of matter can escape out of the totality. Nor is there any space outside from which some new force can arise, break in, transform the whole nature of things, and deflect its motions.”

A universal state has indeed as little to fear from outer barbarians as the Universe has from stray star cluster that are ex hypothesi non-existent; yet the argument is a fallacy nevertheless, for, as we have seen in an earlier context, ‘things rot through evils native to their selves’ [Menander, BC 342-292, fragment 540]. In physical Nature there are elements whose atoms disintegrate by spontaneous radioactivity without requiring any bombardment from extraneous particles; and in human social life, universal states ‘are betray’d by what is false within’ [George Meredith] into revealing, for those who have eyes to see through their specious appearance of impregnability, that, so far from being immortal, these are spontaneously fissile polities.

However long the life of a universal state maybe drawn out, it always proves to have been the last phase of a society before its extinction. Its goal is the achievement of immortality, but the attempt to secure immortality in this world is a vain effort, whether blind or deliberate, to thwart the economy of Nature.

“Poets are often held in high repute in Russia and often feared by government not because of the power of poetry to move and shape souls, but because, in Russia only great poets dare speak the truth.”
Eric Hoffer

I know that many musicians and other creative spirits feel as if they have little significance or impact in our society. The prevailing metrics of success—money, power, whatever—relegate their work to the fringes and sub-fringes.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, they don’t even get the respect given, in an earlier era, to a counterculture.

In the past, you might not get rich as a member of the counterculture—but at least you had a voice that was heard by the mainstream, and occasionally received some tokens of appreciation. Mainstream elites were not so isolated and antagonistic as today, and felt they needed a reality check from outside—but not anymore.

Conformity is the safest path now. Sometimes it feels like the only path.

Why is this the case?

There are many reasons, but I would focus especially on the technocratic tone in today’s culture in which prominence and relevance is determined by metrics imposed by huge corporations.

Sometimes they won’t even tell you their metrics—who knows how Netflix evaluates its shows? Who knows how things go viral on Instagram?

But when we do learn what moves the wheels of digital media, it’s usually clicks, links, dollars, profits, and other extrinsic hierarchies.

If you look at art that way, you will avoid anything that deviates from mainstream entertainment. Or even just mindless distraction.

That’s why it’s useful to remind ourselves of other times and places when the free creative impulse of artists, even those of genius, genuinely seemed on the verge of eradication.

Yes, there were situations far more dire than our own.

So let me share a story that gives me comfort. It’s almost a parable of the creative life and its hidden power. This particular tale testifies to my belief that artists of vision and courage can even rise above the most brutal dictator.

Alas, this victory of art over tyranny only happens over the long run. But it does happen.

And when it finally occurs, the turnaround takes place so dramatically and resoundingly that we need to reconsider our conventional definitions of power and influence.

I’m referring to the case of Anna Akhmatova.

15-year-old Anna Akhmatova in 1904

Akhmatova, was a promising poet in the days before the Soviet Revolution, but her physical presence was just as compelling as her writing. Modigliani made at least twenty paintings of Akhmatova, and she had an affair with the famous poet Osip Mandelstam. Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak proposed marriage to her on multiple occasions.

Even far away at Oxford, philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—whom I considered the most brilliant person in the entire University when I was a student there—allegedly pined away with romantic longings based on his brief encounter with Akhmatova 35 years before.

I don’t think it’s going too far to claim that she could have been a movie actress, given her beauty and allure.

Nathan Altman’s Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1915

But Akhmatova was crushed under Soviet rule.

Not only was her poetry sharply criticized and censored, but the secret police bugged her apartment, and kept her under surveillance.

She was silenced so completely, that many people simply assumed she was dead.

One by one, the people closest to her were arrested, prosecuted, and often executed. Her ex-husband Nikolay Gumilev, falsely accused of participating in a monarchist conspiracy, was shot. Her common-law husband Nikolai Punin, an art scholar, got arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. (His offense was allegedly mentioning that the proliferation of portraits of Lenin throughout the country was in poor taste.)

But the most painful loss was her son, Lev Gumliev. After the execution of his father, when their child was just nine, Lev got sent to a Soviet labor camps. When he was finally released from captivity, authorities insisted that he fight in the Red Army. Then he was sent off to the prison camps again in 1949.

Akhmatova was desperate to save the life of her son. But what can a poet—even a poet of genius—do in such situations?

“I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad,” she later recalled. She traveled to Kresty Prison every day to hold a futile vigil. She tried constantly to get some word about her son’s status.

Or give him a parcel. Or find someone to beg for his release.

But to no avail.

Here each day she waited with so many other women, often in bitter cold weather—bundled in heavy clothes in front of the closed gates. One day someone in the crowd recognized the poet, who had once been so esteemed and beautiful. She asked Akhmatova whether her poetic gifts were capable of describing this scene of tragedy.

What could be more futile than a poem in the face of Stalinist purges and executions? But Akhmatova told her inquirer: “I can.” And in that horrible and desolate place, “something like a smile” appeared on the other woman’s face.

Akhmatova began working on what would be her greatest work, the long poem called Requiem. But this was a dangerous endeavor.

Publishing a poem of this sort, even overseas, was out of the question. Just putting the words down on paper could lead to her execution—the secret police might search her apartment at any time.

So she burnt the pages she used for rough drafts. The polished version was retained in her memory.

For seventeen months I’ve called you
To come home, I’ve pleaded
—Oh my son, my terror!—groveled
At the hangman’s feet.
So much I can’t say who’s
Man, who’s beast any more, nor even
How long till execution.
(From the translation of Requiem by D.M. Thomas)

This is one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. But the lines that inspire me the most come on the final page, where Anna Akhmatova makes that extraordinary prediction of the destiny for her and this forbidden work.

And if ever in this country they should want
To build me a monument
I consent to that honor,
But only on condition that they
Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,
Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

She is literally taunting Stalin and the Soviet secret police here, but with an authority of her own—one only the creative artist possesses. Yet, in some miracle, she triumphed over the dictatorship.

No, Akhmatova herself didn’t live long enough to see it happen. But she did survive Stalin, and her son was released from incarceration. He eventually witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Akhmatova got shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, and finally—the year before her death in 1966—was allowed to travel to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. Her global renown as a voice of courage and integrity was so powerful that even the Soviet authorities were now afraid of the consequences of cracking down on her.

So they did nothing when Requiem was finally published in Germany in 1963. And the long poem even got issued in the USSR in 1987, at a time when the regime was now the pathetic vulnerable party.

But the most remarkable moment of vindication came when they erected a statue of Anna Akhmatova in her native land.

It happened on the 40th anniversary of her death in 2006. By then, even the name of the city had changed—it was no longer Leningrad, but St. Petersburg once more. And Akhmatova was now returning to the scene of her greatest suffering and tragedy, but in towering bronze form atop a granite pillar.

Anna Akhmatova, larger than life, stares down Kresty Prison

Meeting her poetic demands, they placed her statue facing Kresty Holding Prison, where she had once waited before the closed gates, day after day.

Her visage is strong and defiant, and the inscription reads:

That’s why I pray not for myself
But for all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

This is more than the triumph of one woman.

Art is more powerful than pundits or politicians, or even the most brutal dictator. It survives the longest. It has an authority that comes from a higher source.

We do well to remember that—especially in times when the creative impulse seems so weak and ineffective.

That weakness is an illusion. Art triumphs in the end. The very hollowness of its opponents ensures that eventual victory. It’s really just a matter of time.

I would like a bit of a break from the military covid op. I am sick of it, I hate it, I despise those who are responsible and those who blindly obeyed, as well as those who keep obeying and keep staying willfully blind. I hate writing about it. I want to write about people I admire and not about the ones I hate.

I previously wrote about Nikolai Kozyrev, a Russian physicist who proposed a revolutionary theory of Time as the source of energy in the stars and all bodies in our World:

This Energy of Time - Part 1

This is Part 2 of the story, largely focusing on Kozyrev’s biography.

Kozyrev’s Selected Works is a book in Russian available in scanned image format at Ana’s Archive. It contains his most important papers on astrophysics and his own theory of causal mechanics, including experimental work and detailed astronomical, geological and atmospheric observations. The book was published by the Leningrad University Press in 1991.

I tried and failed to find an English translation, and I don’t think a full version of this book is available in English. However, I found Kozyrev’s biography translated into English, abridged included in a science journal article. The English translation is very awkward and some IMO very important information about the history of the repressions against scientists in the 30’s by Stalin’s regime is omitted. For most of this post I made my own translations from the chapter on Kozyrev’s biography by his one-time colleague Dadaev published in this book.

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Kozyrev’s life story is both tragic and astonishing.

Nikolai Kozyrev was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on September 2 (20), 1908 in the family of Alexander Kozyrev, a geologist who worked at the Ministry of Agriculture. Kozyrev senior came from a family of Russian peasants from the city of Bugulma, Samara province, but ultimately attained an administrative rank in the Russian imperial government giving him the rights of nobility. Note: my non-Russian, Tatar part of the family are also from Bugulma. Kozyrev’s mother, Yulia Nikolaevna was from the family of a merchant, Shihobalov.

Kozyrev graduated from the secondary school in 1924 and initially entered the pedagogical institute, but, with urging from his professors, transferred to studying astrophysics at the Leningrad University, where he completed his studies in 1928. He then began working at the Pulkovo Observatory (later became part of the USSR Academy of Sciences) as a postgraduate student. At Pulkovo he became friends with two other postgraduate students - V.A. Ambartsumian and D.I. Eropkin.

“The Trio” became memorable at Pulkovo due to their outstanding abilities, original early scientific publications, but also due to their rebellion against the bureaucratic administration which was being unrolled throughout Soviet academia during the 1920’s-30’s. The new regime’s objective was to eliminate any traces of self-governance in academia, such as replacement of the leadership previously elected by scientific peers with the Communist Party-appointed administrators. These changes were not in favor of any independent thinkers.

Kozyrev’s early publications included articles on spectrometry-based measurements of the temperature of solar flares and solar spots. He demonstrated that there should be a radial equilibrium within the solar spots, and that the spots are located deeper in the solar atmosphere than had been previously thought. In 1934, Kozyrev published a paper on radial equilibrium and extended photosphere of the stars in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (London). In the same issue of Notices, albeit with data published six months later than Kozyrev’s, S. Chandrasekhar proposed a more generalized theory. The theory became known as Kozyrev-Chandrasekhar.

Note that today it is hard to find a mention of Kozyrev’s work in the archives of Chandrasekhar (on the University of Chicago’s page dedicated to Chandrasekhar’s work, Kozyrev’s name is only mentioned in the photo collection).

Kozyrev maintained scientific collaboration with his friend Eropkin who was focused on the areas of geophysics. They jointly undertook several expeditions to perform spectrographic measurements of the polar lights. However, their work repeatedly ran into administrative obstacles, staffing intrigues and conflicts. In 1936 they were falsely accused of misusing funds for the expeditions. The false accusations were used to dismiss the scientists from Pulkovo and start a court case against them. The case was dismissed in 1936 with the court even issuing a reprimand to the administration of Pulkovo for “poor staff relations”. Kozyrev and Eropkin had to file a countersuit to get reinstated as employees at Pulkovo, and administrative court struggles continued for almost a year.

In the meantime, in October, 1936, in Leningrad, arrests of scientists had begun. One of the first to be arrested was the corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Boris V. Numerov (1891–1941), the director of the Astronomical Institute, an outstanding scientist in the field of astronomy and geodesy. He was accused of being the organizer of a terrorist anti-Soviet group amongst intellectuals. The wave of arrests reached Pulkovo. Kozyrev was arrested on the evening of the 19th anniversary of October revolution. On the night of December 5th (Day of the Stalin’s Constitution, the “most democratic in the world”) his friend Eropkin was arrested in Leningrad.

The wave of arrests and execution of scientists based on undisclosed accusations continued without any apparent logic - a new head of department would be arrested weeks after the previous head of the department was sent to political prison and/or executed. The full set of charges against 100+ scientists arrested in 1936-1937 in Leningrad alone was disclosed only decades later, in the late 1980’s. They were accused of being connected to a “fascist Trotsky-Zinoviev terrorist organization”, allegedly set up by the German intelligence forces in 1932 with an objective of overthrowing the Soviet regime. This formulation of the charges became available from declassified KGB documentation in 1989.

The Pulkovo astronomers, arrested between November and the following February, were tried in Leningrad on May 25, 1937. Most were sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, removal of civil rights for 5 additional years, and confiscation of all assets. The “trial” for each political prisoner lasted several minutes, without disclosure of charges, without defense representation, and only accepting “confessions of the accused” - confessions obtained by torture. Executions by firing squad for many followed later in the day of the trial.

According to the Soviet legal codes at the time, the 10 year imprisonment term was the maximum, beyond which was only execution. However, almost all political prisoners died or were executed before the expiry of their sentences.

Of all arrested and condemned Pulkovo scientists, only Kozyrev survived. Kozyrev’s friend Eropkin was executed along with many others. Many executions were performed in prisons by “special tribunals” without even nominal court sanctions. It is not possible to know the fate of many people who perished in the repressions. Death certificates, issued in 1956 to the families of the rehabilitated can hardly be considered reliable. As an example, one listed cause of death as “diabetes” for the same person listed as executed at the prison camp in the declassified KGB documentation.

While it was at some time proposed that Kozyrev was targeted in 1936-37 due to his prior conflicts with academic administrators, this was unlikely. The scope of the repressions was a much broader, and a largely indiscriminate operation. The repressions in the late 1930’s by Stalin’s regime implemented by the NKVD (predecessor to KGB) was designed to suppress any possible political opposition and especially target the “intellectual class”. Later disclosures, including by the Khrushev’s government, revealed that the repressions had been pre-planned in advance, with pre-manufactured scenarios of “terrorist plots”, accusations and plans of imprisonment/execution.

Note: if you think this totalitarian horror is only possible under a communist regime, this approach is very similar to the arrests of the J6 “insurrectionists” on made-up terrorism charges, or intense prosecution and lawfare against doctors who are trying to treat their patients during the DOD-faked “covid pandemic”, or scientists who do not want to participate in fraud - the standard approach of fabricating plots by the national security-intelligence apparatus for political aims. Apparently, every aspiring totalitarian deep state shares the same playbook:

Parents Catch FBI In Plot To Force Mentally Ill Son To Be A Right Wing Terrorist.

If you think the NKVD invented this, they didn’t. The tactic to set up “terrorist plots and sleeper cells of radicals” and then “foil their evil plans” to “protect” the public with ever increasing totalitarian control measures and the upward extraction of wealth was used by the tsarist Russia, and by many governments prior to that.

Specifically, the Leningrad bureau of NKVD dreamed up “terrorist cells” of “organized intellectuals” conspiring to overthrow the Soviet government and fabricated dossiers for the closed-door prosecution. Decades later, the farfetchedness of those materials was plainly obvious. But back then the atmosphere of the top-down terror incentivized snitching and witch hunts.

The imaginary rosters of the subversive organizations were created by the NKVD by going through the university HR records and identifying plausible targets to paint as a conspiracist - typically because the target came from a middle or upper class (deemed hostile to the proletariat by default), although that wasn’t strictly necessary. Any pretext to assign membership in the fictional counter-revolutionary organization was utilized. Another widely used pretext was an accusation of international espionage, which was quite easy because all Pulkovo scientists routinely corresponded with their academic colleagues in other countries. Thus the fictional “terrorist organization” was fabricated. Subsequently its “discovery and elimination” was implemented by beating out false confessions and false witness statements from the accused in order to provide convictions and further credence to the entire repression scheme.

Kozyrev was lucky to survive. Later in life he was reluctant to discuss his time in prison and in labor camps, although some parts of his memories were included in Solzhenytsyn’s GULAG Archipelago, and several works by other authors.

Some episodes of the prison and camp life of Kozyrev are very important to understanding of his subsequent scientific work. One episode concerns the textbook Course of Astrophysics and Stellar Astronomy (published by Pulkovo Observatory, 1934-36). While being held in prison, Kozyrev continued thinking about his scientific research in theoretical physics, specifically about the question of the source of stellar energy. He was stumped because he needed data about certain types of stars - data that he knew were contained in the 2nd volume of the Course of Astrophysics. Kozyrev’s cellmate was sent to the solitary confinement for five days and upon return was so mentally and physically damaged that he died shortly afterwards. Kozyrev was then left alone in his cell, clinging to shreds of sanity himself by intensely thinking about cosmos. And one day, mysteriously, the exact book that he desperately needed, the 2nd volume of the Course of Astrophysics was pushed through the observation port of his cell door by an unknown person.

By different accounts, Kozyrev used the book between one and three days, scanning through it and memorizing the data. Then the book was noticed by a prison guard and taken away. Until the end of his life Kozyrev thought that the book was from the prison library, but the way it appeared in his cell was “it fell from heavens”. However it is very unlikely that the exact volume of a highly specialized, small-circulation science textbook would have been found in a prison library. It is more likely that someone delivered it. It is also possible that under conditions of physical and mental deprivation, Kozyrev drew the necessary data from his memory, and may have had a dream/delirium about the book appearing in the cell.

Another known episode describes that once consumed by his thoughts, Kozyrev began to pace his prison cell. This was forbidden: during the day the prisoners were required to sit on a stool, and at night lie on the bunk. For this infringement he was sent to the solitary confinement for five days, during February. The temperature in the confinement cell was about zero degrees Celsius, and the prisoners were left barefooted, in underwear only. The daily meal contained a piece of bread and a mug of hot water. With the mug it was possible to briefly warm one’s freezing hands but not the body. Kozyrev began to pray to God. He recalled that after some time of intense prayer he began to feel internal warmth, and thus was able to survive the 5 or even 6 days of the freezing hell.

Later in life Kozyrev tried to figure out how the internal heat could have been generated, and noted in his theoretical works that people have an ability to survive for long periods of time without food, “sustained by the Holy Spirit”. What is the Holy Spirit? If He is the source of energy then energy can appear through Him in any natural body, whether a man, or a star, or a planet. What universal source can generate the energy? Twenty years later Kozyrev advanced these ideas in his theory of Time as the source of energy in our World.

Until May 1939, Kozyrev was in prison, then afterwards he was sent into the Norilsk labor camps. Being sent to labor camps might have saved Kozyrev’s life, as due to the war and shortage of qualified engineers, he became a needed specialist in mining and geology. In 1940 he was sent to the Dudinsky Permafrost Station as a geodesist. He was allowed to work unguarded as there was no possibility of escape anyway: he was surrounded by hundreds of miles of the frozen tundra.

On October 25, 1941, “for engaging in hostile counter-revolutionary propaganda amongst the prisoners” he was again arrested, and sentenced to death.

What kind of “counter-revolutionary propaganda” was considered grave enough to warrant the death penalty? Kozyrev recalled several official charges: 1) that he thought the theory of expanding universe was valid; 2) he thought that Esenin was a good poet and that Dunaevsky was a bad music composer; 3) during a fight in the barracks he declared that social being does not determine the consciousness (i.e. disagreed with Karl Marx); 4) he also disagreed with Friedrich Engels calling Isaac Newton “an inductive ass”. Regarding the last point, the accused was argumentative and said “I have not read Engels, but I believe Newton is one of the greatest scientists of all time”.

Therefore, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Russia reconsidered Kozyrev’s previous sentence as too liberal and replaced it with the death penalty. However, the warden of the Noril-Lag (part of the GULAG) tore up the order of execution in front of Kozyrev, saying that the regional center didn’t have any firing squads. In reality, Kozyrev was needed, as an expert, for the building of a copper-nickel mining facility, as the only other nickel mine near the Finnish border was then located behind the WWII front line. He worked as the superintendent for geology and prospecting expeditions until March of 1945.

In August 1944, a petition asking specifically for liberation of Kozyrev was sent to the Minister of Internal Affairs, signed by three members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Vavilov, Shayn, and Mihailov. What can explain this? In 1943, the Soviet intelligence agencies received the information about the creation of nuclear weapons by the USA and realized they needed to enter the nuclear race. Many Soviet physicists were in custody at the time. Many were already dead. It became a matter of urgency to return those who were still alive in prison camps, however, the question remains as to how the 3 academicians who supposedly signed the petition knew that Kozyrev was still alive? In addition, the judicial revision was almost inconceivable back then. The decisions of the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR had never been reconsidered.

The process of reconsidering his sentence took 18 months, and a key role was played by inspector N. A. Bogomolov (Note: interestingly, the name means “praying to God”) who was brave enough to conclude that there had been no basis to charge Kozyrev with a crime of treason in the first place. This was a dangerous position to take, as this opened the door to revise the convictions of all other scientists swept up in Stalin’s repressions. According to Kozyrev himself, the deciding factor at the end of the investigation was the question posed by the inspector “Do you believe in God?”, to which Kozyrev replied “yes”. Afterwards he found out that the inspector took this as the verification of his honesty answering all other questions of the investigation. This is indeed shocking, considering that professing religious beliefs and taking them as evidence of honesty at the time would have been the reason for another imprisonment or a death sentence for both Kozyrev and Bogomolov.

Kozyrev was liberated “conditionally ahead of schedule” by a special meeting of the KGB on December 14, 1946. This meant that with the slightest pretext he could be behind bars again. He was finally cleared of all charges only by February 21, 1958.

Kozyrev was invited by academician Shayn to work at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, then under construction. He accepted, but first he went to Leningrad to complete his yet unfinished doctoral thesis, the defense of which took place at the Leningrad University on March 10th, 1947, i.e. only about 3 months after his return from labor camps. Many colleagues were surprised: when did he write the dissertation? Apparently, he had composed the dissertation during his ten years in prison. By some accounts he carried it all in his head, although by other accounts, including that of his son, there was a rough draft in a notebook that he carried sewn into his clothes. Some pages from it were seen photographed and presented upside-down at an exhibit dedicated to his work shortly after his death (in order to not attract too much attention to the still prohibited topic of discussion), but the whereabouts of the notebook today are unknown. Still, it is a long way from a rough draft to a finished dissertation. In addition, how would one keep abreast of the scientific literature published during a decade of imprisonment?

His colleague Dadaev, who was present at the defense of the dissertation, and many years later researched and wrote up his biography, explained that Kozyrev had an incredible ability to review scientific literature. The library at Pulkovo was producing a biweekly exhibit of all newly arrived scientific literature, typically containing 100+ papers and books. He would review all of it in a couple of hours, zeroing in on precisely what he needed and without making any notes, as if he knew upfront who would produce anything worthwhile. Another reason noted by Dadaev as an explanation to how the dissertation was accomplished - Kozyrev’s work was so fundamental and so original that not much in science had changed to influence it one way or another during his decade in prison. In fact, this last point remains the same and perhaps even more true today. What 10 years? The major works of art as all original thinking are timeless: they transcend centuries as if they are but brief moments.

Dadaev wrote:

Defense of the dissertation occurred at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Leningrad University: the dissertation was titled “Sources of Stellar Energy and the Theory of the Internal Structure of Stars”. […]I was permitted to be present at this defense. Discussion was rather animated, because […] Kozyrev put forward a new idea as to the source of the stellar energy, subverting the already widespread conviction that thermonuclear reactions are the source of energy in the entrails of stars.

The Academic Council of the University awarded Kozyrev the degree of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Kozyrev’s dissertation was published in two parts, in the Proceedings of the Crimean Astrophysics Observatory in 1948 (part I), and in 1951 (part II).

Kozyrev’s dissertation proposed a radically different view on the internal processes of the stars, arguing that the stars are not nuclear reactors but rather machines that convert yet unknown energy - the energy of time - into radiation. The stellar “machines” are extremely efficient as they barely consume any of their own material for production of massive amounts of energy, contradicting the conventionally accepted theory of nuclear fusion as the source of the stellar energy. Later on confirmations of his theory came from, e.g., the failure to detect neutrino streams from the Sun and additionally from detection of the solar 160 min pulses or oscillations, measured by academician A.B. Severny and several other independent scientists, including by Stanford Observatory in the 70’s. Subsequently, similar oscillations were found for the Earth magnetosphere and ionosphere and for some stars and star clusters. Yet, today the internet search engines will proclaim that this finding is controversial and “unconfirmed” because it threatens the mainstream failed dogma of stars as nuclear furnaces and the fake Climate Change models that use these assumptions.

Kozyrev planned to write the third part of his dissertation, investigating further the source of the solar energy, however it was never completed. He produced an enormous research output making major discoveries about the geological and atmospheric properties of Venus, Mars and the Moon. In august 1958, the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union gathered in Moscow. Kozyrev’s “Causal Mechanics” paper was published for this event, describing the principles of his theory of time as the source of non-nuclear stellar energy. This work provided a fundamentally different view of the universal forces of nature, of life itself, acting simultaneously everywhere, defying the thermal death and giving us the World that, quoting Kozyrev “sparkles afresh, renewed each day”.

Also in 1958 Kozyrev was able to observe and capture a volcanic plume on the Moon and published a short letter in The Astronomical Circular (No. 197, 1958) as well as an article containing the description of his methods, with a reproduction of the unique spectrogram, in Sky and Telescope (vol. 18, No. 4, 1959). In response to this article the famous astronomer and planetologist, Gerard Kuiper, sent a letter to the Director of Pulkovo Observatory in which he declared that Kozyrev’s spectrogram was a fake. This resulted in years of ruffled feathers in international science circles, as the dogma of the Moon as a “geologically dead body” was “settled science” back then. To give credit to Kuiper, when presented with more information, he withdrew his claims of forgery. Ultimately, in 1969 Kozyrev’s discovery of Lunar volcanism was awarded the gold medal from the International Academy of Astronautics. The discovery that the Moon is not a “dead body” but has evidence of ongoing tectonics has been confirmed by independent observations. It is also claimed that Apollo missions brought back volcanic soil samples, and this forced the change of minds in the international science circles.

I am almost certain that NASA’s Moon landings were faked, so the question is - why did they decide to “confirm” Kozyrev’s discovery and even give him the prestigious medal? My guess is that there was too much other data pointing to the same thing - ongoing tectonic activity on the Moon. The Moon is the closest celestial body, and as the imaging technologies were becoming more powerful. Denying the tectonics would not be a smart idea for NASA in the long run. Tectonic activity on the Moon is consistent with Kozyrev’s theory that celestial bodies, just as everything else present in nature, are alive, continuously drawing the energy from the flow of time.

In December 1969, the State Committee for Affairs of Discovery and Inventions of the USSR awarded Kozyrev the diploma for discovery for “tectonic activity of the Moon”. Despite the conferring of the medal and the diploma, the question of a non-nuclear stellar energy source was not acknowledged. While nominally respected, Kozyrev’s work was systematically sidelined and ignored. After some positive popular press appeared discussing Kozyrev’s theory of time by highly respected science writers, an academic committee was called to review and debate his discoveries. All were systematically shot down as “unconfirmed theories”. I am not a physicist or mathematician, but I do have extensive experience commercializing modern academic intellectual property. From what I have seen of Kozyrev’s papers - the experiments, observational work and theoretical reasoning are exceptionally thorough, lightyears ahead of the nonsense that gets Nobel Prizes today. Kozyrev did not get any official support, even for making the equipment necessary for his experiments. He was forced to work alone, and the only help in mechanical engineering he received was from a volunteer, engineer Nasonov, who one day showed up in Kozyrev’s lab and continued working for him, making lab tools. Nasonov worked evenings and weekends after his primary job at a manufacturing plant, without any pay, and took his own vacation time to accompany Kozyrev to the Crimean Observatory.

The two developed some successful experimental equipment, such as gyroscopic scales to study irreversible natural processes - melting of the snow, heating and cooling of copper wire, evaporation of liquids and fading of the plants.

Kozyrev repeatedly tried to get the attention of the academia to his research and discoveries, some truly unprecedented. For example, he was able to detect the effects of the solar and lunar eclipses on Earth without leaving his lab, simply using his experimental mirrors, the equipment that allowed him to shield and focus the flow of time and detect the disruptions introduced by the eclipses. He documented geological effects of the eclipses and the position of the Moon on the seismic activity on Earth. All of these discoveries fell on deaf ears. The establishment academia remained uninterested and continued treating him generally as a nuisance and a heretic. Ultimately, by 1979 he was forced into retirement that he did not want but had no choice as he would be left without any income otherwise. He died in 1983, aged almost 75.

Kozyrev was not able to complete his theory of causal mechanics, to which he dedicated nearly 40 years of his life. During his life, American probes Voyager-1 and -2 (1979) registered 8 active volcanos on Jupiter’s satellite Io, confirming Kozyrev’s position on wide spread active tectonic activity in the universe, even in the smaller bodies that were deemed too small to have it under prevailing physical theories. He was not recognized for this and other discoveries that he predicted. Nobody seemed to be interested in researching the nature of the “inconvenient” volcanism of smaller celestial bodies then or now - and no wonder! Observations like these defy the prevailing geological theories that are now being used to concoct the Climate Change narratives.

He worked most of his life, alone, with little support. His theory of time remains unfinished because he simply ran out of it.

In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.

That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.

In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.

With that in mind, what follows are some summations.

• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.

• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.

• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.

• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.

• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.

• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.

• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.

• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.

• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.

• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.

• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”

But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.

So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:

We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on

Bad advice.

There is no better time than now to read E. H. Carr\u2019s The twenty years\u2019 crisis 1919 39. It could have been written last month. The similarities of the situation that Carr describes (the first edition of the book was published in 1939) and today are striking. Not solely in the most recent events including the disregard of international law by the signatories of the Rome Statute which would not have surprised Carr since he believed that such a law cannot exist, or can exist only when it is supported by force, but more importantly and more ominously in the structural characteristics of the international system then and today: those that have led to the World War II and that seem to lead us to a new war.

Both systems were badly structured at their very inception (Versailles and the end of the Cold War). Both contained within themselves the seeds of destruction. The Versailles system began as a utopian and seemingly principled endeavor. The greatest responsibility for that is rightly laid by Carr and many others (including memorably by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace) on the doors of Woodrow Wilson. When we say \u201Cresponsibility\u201D it seems strange to blame somebody for the utopian or seemingly idealistic ways in which the international system should be organized. But at the very first step the application of the principles that were brought from Princeton and Washington D.C. to the world stumbled. It exposed hypocrisy more strongly than had the principles been less idealistic. The right of self-determination was doled out inconsistently to some nations while denied to others. As Harold Nicolson writes in his beautiful The Peace-Making 1919:

The most ardent British advocate of the principle of self-determination found himself, sooner or later in a false position. However fervid might be our indignation regarding Italian claims to Dalmatia and the Dodecanese it could be cooled by a reference, not to Cyprus only, but to Ireland, Egypt and India. We had accepted a system for others which when it came to practice, we should refuse to apply to ourselves. (p. 193).

Colonies, protectorates, trusteeships (with open-ended period of such trusteeship) were given to the lesser nations. Racial equality was rejected even as a rather benign formal principle despite the lofty rhetoric about equality of men. That rejection, bad in itself, was accompanied by the most cynical transfer of German-controlled possessions in China to Japan, thus leading to the May 4 movement and the beginning of modern Chinese nationalism.

The Carthaginian peace of Versailles created two types of nations according to Carr. The satisfied Anglo-Saxon nations and to some extent France (although France not feeling herself strong enough always had trepidation about its status) and the trio of large unsatisfied states of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The latter two were Western allies unhappy with the division of the spoils at Versailles. Germany tried in the twenties to change or invalidate some of the covenants of the Treaty by extracting herself from the obligation to pay the rather exorbitant sums in the form of reparations (which it indeed never paid in full) and surreptitiously initiated military cooperation with Soviet Russia thus trying to avoid the limits on the type and size of its army. But overall it led to very little gain and dissatisfaction increased. When Germany began to overturn, with gusto, the letter and the spirit of Versailles, it was done through military force and intimidation. \u201COur enemies are little worms\u201D, opined Hitler. The irony, as Carr notes, is that the more Germany was able to overturn the rules imposed on her, and the more those like Carr who disagreed with inequity of the Treaty in the first place thought that this would satisfy her, the more angry Germany was getting. Thus German (by then Nazi) anger increased in proportion to its success in overturning Versailles. What could have been given peacefully and would have been met with gratitude was now given under the threat of the gun and received with contempt.

In retelling of this well-known story although Carr never assigns the blame for the collapse of the system directly, he implicitly splits the responsibility between the two sides. He blames the satisfied nations for not being willing to share some of the gains obtained from having won the war. Carr often compares international with domestic relations. For the domestic relations to be stable the rich have to give up little bit more than in proportion to what they have. In other words, if a political system is to be stable\u2014whether domestically or internationally\u2014the strong have to be willing to make sacrifices, to accept \u201Csome give or take\u201D as Carr calls it. To create a sustainable international system, the satisfied powers have to share the spoils with other powers or impose relatively equitable (\u2018balance of power\u201D) peace so that others have a stake in the system. If they do not, the unsatisfied powers will have no stake. This is exactly, Carr writes, what happened between 1919 and 1939.

Any international order must rest on some hegemony of power. But this hegemony, like the supremacy of a ruling class within the state, is in itself a challenge to those who not share it; and it must, if it is to survive, contain an element or give or take, of self sacrifice on the part of those who have, which will render it tolerable to the other members of the world community. (p 168)

Even the peacefulness of the satisfied power is explained by Carr by analogy with domestic politics. The rich promote domestic peace because the maintenance of the current order is beneficial to them. \u201CJust as the ruling class in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested interest or predominant Powers\u201D (p. 82).

Calls for peace are not explained by varying morality of powers or classes but by the difference in their positions. Calling for peace is not per se something that may be considered morally superior. Should have American revolutionaries in 1776 followed the calls for peace?, Carr asks. Moralizing, sometimes made by the powers that want to maintain peace, is devoid of ethical superiority. It is simply based on the interest of such powers to maintain the status quo.

As this brief description makes clear similarities with today\u2019s situation are many. Whereas the conclusion of the Cold War did not have an official ending similar to Versailles, its main contours reproduced Versailles. The satisfied powers, the winners of the Cold War, were the US, UK, France and foremost Germany that regained unity. On the other hand, the \u201CNew World Order\u201D produced one large power (Russia) that was from the very beginning unsatisfied with the outcome, especially since Russia, like Germany in 1918, did not at all feel defeated. From the very beginning when under Yeltsin the country was half-destroyed and internationally behaved more or less like a US vassal, Russia was resentful of one aspect of the victors\u2019 policies: the extension of their military alliance to Russia\u2019s borders. As in the collapse of the system of Versailles we see the same dynamic here. Russia objected to the expansion throughout even when it reluctantly reconciled itself with NATO membership of its former East European satellites and the inclusion of Baltic republics but could not, or didn\u2019t want to, accept more.

The complaints, like in the German case, lasted for a very long time. They started under Yeltsin, continued during the first and the second Putin administrations and produced nothing. The by-now famous Putin\u2019s 2007 Munich speech brought no results. The message was very similar to the message that was absorbed by Germany in the 1930s: the structural features of the system cannot be changed peacefully and they cannot be changed by entreaties or complaints of the dissatisfied power. The dissatisfied power took more or less the same course of action that Germany took in the 1930s: the inequities, in its view, could not be set aright by conversations, discussions and negotiations but only through the sheer exercise of military power. The war with Ukraine was a way to overturn some of the implicit covenants of the end of the Cold War in the same way that for Germany the Anschluss and the occupation and the division of Czechoslovakia were the ways in which Germany took it upon herself to implement the principles of self-determination proclaimed by Wilson but denied to Germany.

Despite such similarities one would hope that the outcome would not be the same. It is nevertheless interesting to reflect on the fact that the book was written in 1938 and published in September 1939. Let us hope that we are not at the same historic point now as Carr was then.

Everything we do as humans is provisional. Because of time’s eroding power, everything is revisable. There is a reason for the word ‘decision’ being a part of our language. Not accidentally, the term derives from the Latin for ‘cut;’ in other words, when we decide something, we make a volitional ‘cut’ of sorts in the sequence of events, or in the reasoning concerning such events, that precede the decision – a concrete reminder that human beings are not equipped with an algorithmic device that enables them to know with absolute certainty what course of action to pursue. Every decision, therefore, represents an acknowledgment that we have to act with incomplete, provisional knowledge, and by implication, that more information and more comprehension could lead to a different decision.

Philosophers have known this for centuries, even if their philosophies sometimes give the opposite impression. Nietzsche – who was himself a thinker of provisionality, as evinced in his exhortation, to overcome the ‘spirit of revenge’ against time’s irreversible passage – did Socrates an injustice when he used his name as shorthand for the excessive rationalism of Western culture. Rather than ‘Socratism,’ he should have used the term ‘Platonism,’ provided he meant the reception of Plato’s work, and not the Greek master’s work ‘itself’ – even if, unavoidably, the latter is ‘itself’ only available to us after centuries of translations.

After all, anyone who has read Plato’s texts carefully – even in translation – and not only through the eyes of his countless commentators, soon recognises the distance that separates what may be called the two ‘faces’ of Plato. There is the metaphysical, idealist Plato, and there is the ‘poetically reflective’ Plato whose writings (perhaps unexpectedly) reveal what one might call his nuanced awareness of the ineradicable provisionality of even the ostensibly strictest distinctions. It is difficult to say which one of these has given rise to a never-ending series of ‘footnotes’ among Western philosophers since his time, according to Alfred N. Whitehead, who noted of Plato’s writings that the ‘wealth of general ideas scattered through them’ comprise a ‘an inexhaustible mine of suggestion,’ but I would opt for the second one.

In the Phaedrus Plato shows that he knew, for instance, that a “pharmakon” is both poison and remedy, that language is simultaneously a rhetorical instrument of persuasion and the arena where struggles for truth are enacted; both the soil where poetic powers germinate and metaphysical armour for the protection of mortal bodies. Poets and dithyrambic music do not belong in the ideal republic, according to him, but paradoxically the poet in Plato is harnessed for the sensorily evocative linguistic embodiment of the epistemic inferiority of the senses, as the myth of the cave in the Republic demonstrates, accompanied by his simultaneous claim that the truth represented by the sun shining outside the cave transcends the perspectival limitations of the senses.

Do these paradoxes not reflect Plato’s awareness of the provisionality of his metaphysical bulwark against human uncertainty and finitude, embodied in the supratemporal, archetypal Forms, in which all existing things participate, however imperfectly?

The clearest indication that Plato knew about the ineradicably provisional status of human life lies in his depiction of his teacher, Socrates, who did not write anything himself, as the archetypal philosopher of provisionality – unambiguously captured in Socrates’s famous ‘docta ignorantia’ (learned ignorance), that the only thing humans know with certainty is ‘how little they know.’ Despite these signs in Plato’s work, that he was quite conscious of the limitations to human knowledge (further demonstrated in his notion of the paradoxical, errant causality of the Khôra in his Timaeus, which simultaneously is and is not in space), what the philosophical tradition has sought to emphasise is Plato’s own strenuous attempt, in his metaphysical doctrine of the archetypal Forms, to provide supra-sensible protection against the inescapable erosion of human knowledge by time – for this is what is ultimately indexed in an awareness of provisionality.

These considerations – which could be extended significantly – make a mockery of the idea that there is a fail-safe research methodology (with its accompanying methods), that would guarantee the time-resistant validity of human knowledge, instead of acknowledging that, despite our very best efforts at securing precise, unassailable knowledge, it is nonetheless always already infected with the eroding germ of time. This is the sobering insight gained from one of Jacques Derrida’s most exemplary poststructuralist essays in Writing and Difference, namely ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences,’ where (following Claude Lévi-Strauss) he distinguishes between the image of the ‘bricoleur’ (tinkerer, handyman, Jack-of-all-trades) and the ‘engineer.’

The former avails him – or herself of any tool or material at hand to construct or ‘fix’ things in order to restore them to working condition, while the engineer insists on fail-safe instruments and working materials to guarantee exactitude of measurement and time-resistant functioning of the products of their design and work. Needless to stress, these two types function as metaphors for distinct ways of approaching the world around us – some people think like the ‘engineer;’ others like the ‘bricoleur.’

Contrary to the standard reading of this essay by Derrida (where this is but one of the stages of his complex argument), which erroneously attributes to him a kind of postmodernist privileging of the bricoleur over the engineer, he states explicitly that humans are in no position to choose between these two paradigmatic figures of knowledge – inescapably we have to choose both. What does this mean? Simply that while we have the epistemic duty to emulate the engineer, we also have to face the sobering thought that, our best efforts at constructing unassailable knowledge notwithstanding, our knowledge systems – even in its most ‘tried and tested’ form, namely the sciences – cannot evade the ruinous effects of time, or history.

This is amply demonstrated with regard to the history of physics in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), although Kuhn’s thesis, articulated in the book, has many rationalistic detractors, who cannot bear the thought of science being equally subject to temporal constraints as any other form of human knowledge.

Such champions of epistemic absolutism need only remind themselves of the exemplarily Socratic admission of the leader of one of the two teams at CERN’s Giant Hadron Collider that worked on the attempt to confirm the ‘existence’ of the ‘Higgs boson’ (or so-called ‘God-particle’) – an Italian woman physicist named Fabiola Gianotti – that the confirmation of its ‘probable’ existence, far from representing the summation of ‘complete’ knowledge in the realm of physics, merely means that the work of understanding the physical universe is only beginning. Socrates all over again, and from a natural scientist.

How is this possible? What she was referring to is the fact that physicists now face the daunting prospect of probing the nature of dark energy and dark matter which, they claim, together comprise the largest part of the physical universe, and of which physics knows hardly anything except its percentile extent. And who knows how many revisions will be made regarding the ‘standard model’ of physics in the course of unravelling the structure, nature, and functioning of these two ‘dark’ entities – if they can be called ‘entities’ at all? Another confirmation of the provisionality of human knowledge.

This, incidentally, is also related to Jacques Lacan’s notorious (but understandable) claim that the structure of human knowledge is ‘paranoiac,’ by which he evidently meant that we are deluded into believing that human knowledge systems are far more enduringly unassailable than they actually are – a Lacanian claim that resonates with the insights of the redoubtable English novelist, John Fowles, in his novel, The Magus.

Returning to Plato’s oft-ignored wisdom concerning provisionality, it is not difficult to establish a connection between him and Lacan, who was a very thorough reader of Plato, for instance of the latter’s Symposium – perhaps the most important of his dialogues on love. Just as Plato shows with admirable insight that, what makes one into a lover – and indirectly also a philosopher – is the fact that the beloved, insofar as she or he remains a beloved, instead of a possessed, always has to be ‘just out of reach’ of the lover. We are lovers, or philosophers, to the extent that we ‘desire’ our beloved, or in the case of the philosopher (and the same goes for the scientist), knowledge, neither of which we could ever totally ‘possess.’

What this suggests, of course, is that the lover or philosopher never quite reaches fulfillment of their desire – should you ‘attain’ the desired beloved, or knowledge, your desire would evaporate, because there would be no need for it any longer. Desire is a function of absence or lack. This makes a lot of sense – provisionally, at least.

If human beings were to be able, at last – which, by and large, they are not – to accept and embrace their own finitude and temporality, they would realise that all things human in the domain of culture and the arts, science, and even philosophy, are provisional, in the strict sense of being subject to revision, ‘correction,’ modification, or amplification. Many of the difficulties faced by people in the world today derive from their futile, hubristic attempt, to be ‘engineers’ in the sense of perfecting knowledge through science and technology, ignoring Derrida’s counsel, that we are also, finally, mere bricoleurs, or tinkerers, jacks of all trades.

Hardly ever before in human history has the futility of believing that one can overcome the ineluctable limitations on human endeavours been more amply demonstrated than during the past five years. What the international cabal of neo-fascists at the World Economic Forum (a misnomer if ever there was one) had regarded as a foregone conclusion, namely, to ‘condition’ people into accepting the proto-totalitarian regime they tried to impose through Covid lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and eventually by mandating, as far as possible, the deadly Covid pseudo-vaccines, has turned out, in retrospect, to have been merely provisional.

This is no reason for complacency on our part, however, as most of the awake tribe know. Their implicit belief in their quasi-divine powers guarantees that they will try again.

[This post is loosely based on my essay, published in 1998 in the Afrikaans Journal for Philosophy and Cultural Criticism, Fragmente, and titled ‘Filosofie van Voorlopigheid.’]

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Author
Bert Olivier
Bert Olivier works at the Department of Philosophy, University of the Free State. Bert does research in Psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, ecological philosophy and the philosophy of technology, Literature, cinema, architecture and Aesthetics. His current project is 'Understanding the subject in relation to the hegemony of neoliberalism.'

In Volume II, Book 4, Chapter 6 of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville writes the following about soft despotism: Chapter VI

I HAD remarked during my stay in the United States that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism; and I perceived, upon my return to Europe, how much use had already been made, by most of our rulers, of the notions, the sentiments, and the wants created by this same social condition, for the purpose of extending the circle of their power. This led me to think that the nations of Christendom would perhaps eventually undergo some oppression like that which hung over several of the nations of the ancient world. .

A more accurate examination of the subject, and five years of further meditation, have not diminished my fears, but have changed their object.

No sovereign ever lived in former ages so absolute or so powerful as to undertake to administer by his own agency, and without the assistance of intermediate powers, all the parts of a great empire; none ever attempted to subject all his subjects indiscriminately to strict uniformity of regulation and personally to tutor and direct every member of the community. The notion of such an undertaking never occurred to the human mind; and if any man had conceived it, the want of information, the imperfection of the administrative system, and, above all, the natural obstacles caused by the inequality of conditions would speedily have checked the execution of so vast a design.

When the Roman emperors were at the height of their power, the different nations of the empire still preserved usages and customs of great diversity; although they were subject to the same monarch, most of the provinces were separately administered; they abounded in powerful and active municipalities; and although the whole government of the empire was centered in the hands of the Emperor alone and he always remained, in case of need, the supreme arbiter in all matters, yet the details of social life and private occupations lay for the most part beyond his control. The emperors possessed, it is true, an immense and unchecked power, which allowed them to gratify all their whimsical tastes and to employ for that purpose the whole strength of the state. They frequently abused that power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the many; it was confined to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited.

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism tempers its rigor. We have seen how the customs of society become more humane and gentle in proportion as men become more equal and alike. When no member of the community has much power or much wealth, tyranny is, as it were, without opportunities and a field of action. As all fortunes are scanty, the passions of men are naturally circumscribed, their imagination limited, their pleasures simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself and checks within certain limits the inordinate stretch of his desires.

Independently of these reasons, drawn from the nature of the state of society itself, I might add many others arising from causes beyond my subject; but I shall keep within the limits I have laid down.

Democratic governments may become violent and even cruel at certain periods of extreme effervescence or of great danger, but these crises will be rare and brief. When I consider the petty passions of our contemporaries, the mildness of their manners, the extent of their education, the purity of their religion, the gentleness of their morality, their regular and industrious habits, and the restraint which they almost all observe in their vices no less than in their virtues, I have no fear that they will meet with tyrants in their rulers, but rather with guardians.1

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.

By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. I do not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. Of all the forms that democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst.

When the sovereign is elective, or narrowly watched by a legislature which is really elective and independent, the oppression that he exercises over individuals is sometimes greater, but it is always less degrading; because every man, when he is oppressed and disarmed, may still imagine that, while he yields obedience, it is to himself he yields it, and that it is to one of his own inclinations that all the rest give way. In like manner, I can understand that when the sovereign represents the nation and is dependent upon the people, the rights and the power of which every citizen is deprived serve not only the head of the state, but the state itself; and that private persons derive some return from the sacrifice of their independence which they have made to the public. To create a representation of the people in every centralized country is, therefore, to diminish the evil that extreme centralization may produce, but not to get rid of it.

I admit that, by this means, room is left for the intervention of individuals in the more important affairs; but it is not the less suppressed in the smaller and more privates ones. It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.

I add that they will soon become incapable of exercising the great and only privilege which remains to them. The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the play things of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men. After having exhausted all the different modes of election without finding one to suit their purpose, they are still amazed and still bent on seeking further; as if the evil they notice did not originate in the constitution of the country far more than in that of the electoral body.

It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.2

A constitution republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.

In ancient times, people would spend their summer vacations reading books. It is a little quaint nowadays, but you can still do that. Above, you can see two novels I have been reading recently: “War and Peace” (1868) by Lev Tolstoy, and “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” by Serena Bedini (2016). Strangely, these two widely different entities have something in common beyond being both definable with the same term, “novels.” Sometimes, differences are the key to understanding what some things have in common with each other. In this case, common element is evil. More exactly, love.

A few months ago, I found a copy of “War and Peace” on my shelves, realizing that I had never read it from start to finish. So, I set myself to engage in the task. My gosh, that was a task.

This novel is more than 1300 pages in its English translation. It starts by doing all those things that manuals about novel writing tell you a writer should never do. It is a slap in the face to the basic suggestion “don’t tell, show.” Tolstoy tells all the time and rarely shows. He tells in the “omniscient” viewpoint that has the writer playing God and telling readers about the details of how characters feel and think. And it starts by throwing in a true crowd of characters. Evidently, when the novel was written more than one and a half centuries ago, people were able to manage such a feat of reading it and enjoying it. At the time, it was what we would call today a “bestseller.”

For a modern reader, it is a feat comparable to climbing Mount Everest wearing tennis shoes — we are just not equipped for that kind of task. Anyway, I managed to do that, but I frequently lost track of what was going on. There are no less than five separate plots ongoing, and I often had to backtrack to understand who was doing exactly what and why. Let me tell you, some books on quantum mechanics I read in the past were easier. But I can tell you it was worth doing — oh, yes. Worth a lot.

It is a story that, if Tolstoy were alive today, could be lifted almost intact from its settings in the early 19th century to our times. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, with all its ramifications in European politics, looks so much like what is happening today that it is both bewildering and mesmerizing to read how Tolstoy chronicles the story. Tolstoy is considered to be a genius as a novelist. He was a genius, full stop.

Before I tell you more about “War and Peace,” let me tell you something about another book I have been reading these days. It is “La Filosofia della Torta di Mele” (The Philosophy of the Apple Pie), a 2016 novel by the Italian writer Serena Bedini. In literar terms, it is the complete opposite to Tolstoy’s war and peace. It is light, like a pâte feuilletée, written from the personal viewpoint of a character whose main problem is a persistent cough. She engages in a search for a special recipe for an apple pie in the Tuscan countryside; not the same kind of drama you find when Napoleon’s armies invade Russia. An easy novel for the blasé 21st-century reader that you can complete in one hour or even less. It leaves you with the sensation of a session of wine tasting that didn’t make you drunk, just relaxed and happy.

Comparing the “philosophy of the apple pie” to “war and peace” looks like comparing a bicycle to a space shuttle. Yet, the universe is fractal, and the two novels do have one fundamental thing in common (besides the fact of being, well, “novels”). Before I tell you what is this thing in common, allow me to digress a little.

You know that one of the masterpieces of Jorge Luis Borges is “Historia del Guerrero y de la Cautiva” (history of the warrior and the prisoner). It is above and beyond the “masterpiece” term — it is on another celestial plane. And what makes it such a master-masterpiece is the audacity of the author, who puts together two stories so different that the very idea of trying makes your head buzz: what does a Germanic Warrior of the early Middle Ages have in common with an English woman captured by an Argentinean Indio tribe and wed to their chieftain? There is something, yes, a very fundamental thing: the acceptance of the “other”, that some of us call “love” which, if you think about that, means exactly “accepting the other even though different.” It is too easy to love something that’s exactly like you; that’s called “narcissism.”

Only a master-master writer such as Borges could take up the challenge of writing such a story. Picking up enormous challenges and meeting them in full is the hallmark of true genius. Now, of course, I don’t dare compare myself to Borges. I just like to point out how the two stories have exactly one point in common: they are acts of love. Read “War and Peace” from start to finish, and you’ll note something that you might have missed at first, but then it appears to you like a flash of light from heaven.

There is no evil in the whole novel.

There is drama, there are emotions, bewilderment, rage, folly, madness, the whole spectrum of human emotions is there in “War and Peace” — but you won’t find in it a character hating another character. Not that it is a light novel about apple pies and curing one’s cough. Tolstoy is a master writer who masters every facet of the events he describes. Even when he tells us of characters that he finds unpleasant, such as Napoleon himself, he describes them as bumbling idiots, which probably they were, but still human beings with all their feelings, their emotions, their desires. In the novel, French and Russian soldiers fight each other, but do not hate each other. When the French or the Russians take prisoners, they treat them as humanely as it is reasonably possible given the circumstances. Nowhere is there talk of exterminating inferior races nor of herrenvolk who should rule them. There is only one event in the novel that you could be said to be evil. It is a real historical event: the lynching of a Russian student named Vereshchagin guilty (perhaps) of having diffused pro-French pamphlets. But even Count Rostopchin, the person who acts in cold blood to direct a crowd to attack Vereshchagin, is described as having human feelings and conscious of his mistake.

You see the same in “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” where, of course, you won’t find battles or lynchings, but that has a light touch that makes everything glow with a certain inner light. A firefly in a hot summer night.

Now, think for a moment about the sad spectacle of our times, where hate for everything different has become the exchange coin of all discourse on the media or anywhere else. How is it that nothing can be done anymore without hating someone or something? What madness is overtaking us? We drink evil, eat evil, breathe evil, continuously see evil, think evil, speak evil.

Tolstoy, philosopher, and historian, couldn’t explain what madness had taken millions of Christians in 1812 to march on to massacre and slaughter other Christians without any conceivable reasons for doing that. He would be even more baffled by our age when millions of human beings can be so easily convinced to hate other human beings without any conceivable reason — they are not required to massacre them with their own hands but, at least, to acquiesce to their slaughter by hunger, artillery, and drones.

We know that love is mostly in the foolish things of the world that God chose to shame the wise and the weak things of the world that God chose to shame the strong. Maybe an apple pie is one of these foolish and weak things that are nevertheless God’s choice to send us a message.

What if there simply is no alternative to America's permanent war party?

[The firing of an Iskander ballistic missile. Photo Credit: By Mil.ru, CC]

What if politics in America plays out not so much via presidential elections, but through a constant, if often obscured, struggle between the permanent war party (the hawks) and, well, everyone else?   If this is the case, then it is not going to be enough to just hold our breath and wait for a more peace-loving Trump to assume office on January 20, at which time, supposedly, the threat of WWIII will be called off.  Instead, a strategy must be devised that hard-headedly accepts that the permanent war party is not going anywhere, even after January 20, and therefore a strategy must be devised which accepts this tragic circumstance, while still giving us a chance to survive.  Such is the conceptual framework which political historian Victor Taki uses as his starting point for discovering a response to the Ukraine war. -The Editors

In the old Soviet anecdote, Radio Armenia is asked about the likelihood that a Third World War will take place. Upon reflection, Radio Armenia declares that a Third World War is unlikely, but it expects such a ferocious fight for peace that not a single stone will be left standing. This joke about Soviet-American relations at the time of the (first) Cold War acquires an uncanny relevance today, now that President Biden’s permission to Ukraine to use American missiles for strikes inside Russia has shifted the discussion from possible scenarios for building a stable peace to ways of avoiding WWIII.

Paradoxically, an ostensible willingness on the part of the nascent Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine has helped the globalist hawks to secure Biden’s consent to take this highly provocative measure. Its limited potential impact on the purely military aspect of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation has long been emphasized by this policy’s opponents. After all, the Russians have already placed their bombers out of range of those few ATACMS missiles and launchers that Ukraine currently has. However, any analyst who attempts to describe the actions of the Ukrainian leadership and its Western backers in terms of purely military rationality will necessarily miss the intended political and psychological effects of those actions.

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For almost a year the theme of “permitting” Ukraine to use the ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles for strikes into Russia’s interior has served as clickbait to offset Ukraine’s steady loss of ground. It has helped create the impression that it is Russia’s and not Ukraine’s fate that hangs in the balance, and that the articulate representatives of smaller or bigger (East) European nations can decide this fate by convincing the American president to call Putin’s bluff. After the clearly disappointing results of the US presidential elections from the perspective of Zelensky and his American and European backers, this “permission” becomes the last trump card to be thrown on the table in a reckless attempt to thwart Trump’s announced pacification of Ukraine.

The move is Machiavellian enough. In view of Putin’s September announcement that “authorization” of such strikes would be tantamount to NATO’s entry into the conflict, it will indeed be difficult for the Russian leader not to retaliate without losing face once these strikes actually take place. Russia’s retaliatory measures will in turn make it difficult for Trump to continue presenting Ukraine as “Biden’s war.” Apart from the danger of nuclear escalation that this scenario harbors, it will surely bury the prospect of a stable peace in Ukraine, however much the returning American president and his unchanging Russian counterpart would like to see it happen. 

The desire of some to stop the war turns out to be what gives others the opportunity to continue it. Given this circumstance, the doves might have to focus on ways of keeping the conflict within acceptable limits and forsake for the time being the different peace formulas meant to bring the war to a rapid end. Even if some variant of the “Vance Plan” (i. e. Ukraine’s neutral and demilitarized status plus the [existing] frontline as the new de factor Russian-Ukrainian border) could ultimately be accepted by Moscow, last Sunday’s news demonstrates that the global war party will not step back and simply let such an outcome materialize. 

Conclusion 

When an escalating provocation becomes the only way for the sidelined hawks not to lose badly from a prospective peace, the doves might need to reappraise their attitude towards the conflict itself. Continued within certain limits, the conflict represents the lowest common denominator between the otherwise incompatible interests and stakes of the different parties involved. At the same time, once the conflict becomes routine, the logic of de-escalation is likely to eventually prevail, if only because of the implacable law of universal entropy.  

Taking this into consideration, the doves’ strategy should be the opposite of the strategy of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of Risorgimento, which was famously expressed in Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). Lampedusa’s characters repeatedly state that “[i]f [they] want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” By contrast, today’s doves should realize that if they want things to change, things will have to stay as they are. This minimalist approach to conflict resolution in Ukraine might strike some as cynical in light of the daily losses of hundreds of soldiers on both sides of the frontline. However, a straighter road to peace contains the even deadlier traps that have been set by those who would rather flip over the grand Eurasian chessboard than admit their defeat.

A guest post by

Victor Taki

I am a historian interested in imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. My latest book Russia’s Turkish Wars was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024.

St Moses the Black, from the Damascene Gallery

You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency … and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.

Wendell Berry

One of my many problems as a human being is that I can’t quite shake my activist mindset. For many years of my life, as a younger man, I ‘self-identified’, to use a phrase we had never heard of, as something called an ‘activist.’ Activism comes in many political colours, but my particular shade was the left-green variety, which set out to save the natural world from the Machine’s toxic impacts. This was not a bad thing to do. Quite the opposite: in its aims if not always in its outcomes, it was a good and a necessary one. The problem was that it trained the mind to see the world in a certain way.

Thinking about it now, I see that perhaps this last claim is the wrong way around. Perhaps my mind always thought that way, and my ‘activism’ was a way of doing something with it. Or perhaps my society trained me to think like that. For I think it is safe to say that ‘activism’ is a child of the Western way of seeing. We are an ‘activist’ culture. We like to identify problems and then solve them. We like to generalise about particulars. We like abstractions. We exist to ‘save the world’ or to ‘fix’ it, or to offer ‘solutions’. It is never enough for us to live in this world, to be content with who and what we are, to accept God’s will. No, we have to improve things; remake them in our image. This is the activist mindset, and it has been elevated to the status of a grand moral cause. It is, I would say, the West’s reason to live: our Big Idea.

My two recent essays about what I called ‘the Void’ of Western culture were certainly the product of Western abstract reasoning. I was trying to get a handle on what had happened to ‘the West’ since its rejection of its founding faith. I suggested in part one that our present moment was not a time of ‘repaganisation’ so much as an empty ‘Void’ with no spiritual core to it at all. Then, in part two, I proposed that we were unconsciously replaying the Christian story in various secularised forms, but that this would not be enough to fill the Void. Some other spiritual force would come to inhabit our throne.

The problem with talking like this is that a logical question then arises: alright, then: what shall we do about this? Once you have offered a great big abstract idea about what’s wrong, you really need to follow it up with a great big abstract idea about how to put it right. This is how we got all the grand and terrible ideologies of the 20th century. My problem - again, one of my many problems - is that while I am still tempted sometimes to identify a Big Idea about what’s wrong, my faith in putting it right with another one has long since collapsed.

I used to believe in Big Movements and Big Ideas. I wrote whole books about them. Not any more. For a long time, I have believed something else instead: that if there is any world-saving to be done - if this notion is not in fact just hubristic and stupid in itself - then it is only going to come from the small, the local and, above all, the spiritual. And if there is no world-saving to be done - well, then our work remains exactly the same.

‘Our work’, in fact, is probably just another bit of generalising. Maybe I should instead just say ‘my work’ and stop trying to palm off responsibility for my own inquiries onto society as a whole. Because the question now, here in the Void, is probably the same one as we have always wrestled with: how, then, shall we live?

Once upon a time, I thought I knew the answer: we should get out there and ‘save the world’. Then, one day, I realised that Chesterton had the number on this way of thinking when he asked, ‘what’s wrong with the world?’ and concluded, ‘I am.’ Much later, I followed Chesterton along the unexpected path into the Christian Church, and now I have another, very different notion of what ‘our work’ is. Unfortunately, it is much harder than coming up with another clever Big Idea. It is also almost impossible to match the Christian solution to the secular problem - at least in the world’s terms. In the world’s terms, in fact, it makes no sense at all.

Rather like Christianity, in fact.

In my recent Erasmus Lecture for First Things magazine, I argued against one response to the Void that is growing in popularity: a certain type of ‘civilisational Christianity’, which sees the Christian way as a useful ‘story’ with which to ‘defend Western civilisation.’ This project seeks to use the ministry of Jesus to promote values which are directly opposed to those he actually taught us to live by. Some of the people pushing this supposedly ‘muscular’ brand of the faith are Christian, but many others are agnostics who see the Christian faith as a mythological prop with which they can support their favoured ideologies, be they liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, ‘the Enlightenment’ or whatever. Whether or not the Christian religion is true, in this argument, is less important than whether it is useful.

This is, in other words, just another breed of activism, and it is still at heart a secular project. It seeks to use an unworldly faith to achieve worldly ends, and it will fail for that reason. C. S. Lewis, who was apparently having to deal with the same thing seven decades ago, explained why:

Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.

Lewis’s final sentence contains, to use activist language again, the ‘solution’ to the age of the Void. But what on Earth could it mean? And how could it ‘solve’ anything?

More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction - ‘do not resist evil’ - is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.

But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:

If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?

I seem to think about this almost daily. What does it imply? The same thing, it seems, as all the other terrifying teachings: that God turns the world upside down. That in order to ‘save the world’ - and indeed our souls - we must be upside down too. That this whole faith, this whole path, is a paradox. That when we do the thing we do not want to do - the thing we fear - it turns out alright. That trying to ‘save the world’ may destroy it, but that sacrificing yourself for the world may, in the end, save it.

Every fibre of our being screams out against this. Christianity is otherworldly, and we are this-worldly. We want our faith to confirm our human ideas. But it doesn’t, and every time we try to make it do so, we get something like civilisational Christianity or ‘conservative’ Christianity; or, from the other side, liberation theology or the ‘progressive’ Catholic reforms of Vatican II. All of these, from different angles, want the faith to serve the world, because this is what we want. We all have to live our lives, after all.

And yet, on each occasion, the faith is bent by the world instead, and weakened. Why do we see so many young people, especially men, coming into Orthodoxy and ‘traditional’ Catholicism now? Because they want a faith that has not been bent in that way. Because they have seen what Seraphim Rose saw:

Christ is the only exit from this world. All other exits - sexual rapture, political utopia, economic independence - are but blind alleys in which rot the corpses of the many who have tried them.

What a mystery. What a weird, frightening, exciting mystery: that only through death can we achieve life. That he who tries to save his life loses it, and he who sacrifices his life saves it. That God’s wisdom is foolishness to the world, and that Christ has called us out of that world, to a place where we will be hated precisely because we walked away from it. The more you meditate on this, the more impossible it seems. Impossible and ridiculous and obviously true. Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Christ allows the authorities to kill him, without resistance. His helpless and agonising death sparks a global revolution which is still playing out.

St Anthony gives away everything he owns, runs off to the desert and holes himself up in an unused tomb. His certifiable behaviour creates Christian monasticism by accident.

Thousands of ordinary Christians allow the Roman authorities to burn them alive, feed them to lions, crucify or impale them in public. They do not resist their fates, and they often die smiling. Their sacrifice ends up Christianising the entire empire.

Other ordinary Christians share everything they own, give away the rest, and tend to the sick and dying even if it kills them too. Their sacrifice of love spreads their faith across continents, without the need for either missionaries or state support.

Later Christians, also everyday people, withstand the mass brutality of the communist empire. As they are tortured and persecuted, and as their churches and monasteries are bombed and shuttered, they refuse violent resistance and continue practicing their faith. Their strength gives their Church a strength that the weakened Western Church(es), so long in power, can only envy as they crumble beneath the onslaught of the modern anti-culture.

There are many more such stories, and they all illustrate that living paradox: that only through sacrifice does Christianity ever flourish. This kind of sacrifice is not ‘giving up’, and neither is it ‘doing nothing.’ Do we think that St Anthony or St Francis were ‘giving up’? On what? On the world, perhaps; but not on God or on humanity. Quite the opposite. By walking towards God they made themselves more fully human. They made themselves more able to serve the world than someone who is immersed in it.

What does any of this have to do with the modern Void? Well, all I can say is that my intuition points me hard towards all of these stories and many more like them. What is the ‘solution’ to our modern ‘problem’? For a start, it is to stop thinking like that, because that is Machine thinking. We do not have a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’ by politics or war or top-down civilisational projects. We just have a repeat of a very old and familiar pattern: a turning-away from God, and thus from reality. This ‘problem’ is only ever ‘solved’ by turning back again, and societies can’t do that. Only people can, one at a time.

Damn, activism was so much easier.

Still, activism and action are not the same thing. Nobody is called on to be inactive, as if such a thing were even possible. Jesus was so active in the world that he regularly needed to retire from it just to get his breath back. Sitting in a cave all day praying is certainly a form of action: try it if you don’t believe me. But most of us are ‘in the world’, and so the world will challenge us. It will bring us evils like this. What are we to do with them? Stand up for the truth in love. Practice what we claim to believe. Loving our enemies implies that we have enemies - and we have them because we stand for something. Being called out of the world tends to make you unpopular.

Christianity, now as ever, is a radical counter-culture, and the most radical thing about it is what the Orthodox call kenosis: self-emptying. Emptying ourselves of all our petty passions so that we are better equipped to take the world into ourselves. How can you love your neighbour if you can’t see him? How many of us can even see ourselves? Sometimes I get glimpses from the outside and I feel like hiding under the duvet for the next four days.

What, then, should a Christian response to the Void be? I can only offer that same, stumbling intuition; that it needs to be sacrifice. Total sacrifice. There are some who say that such a notion is ‘weak’ or ‘winsome’; that what we need is battle and the crushing of the enemy. They can take their complaints to Christ and all the martyrs. Me, I can’t think of anything stronger than walking towards death confident of God’s love. Are you strong enough to be eaten by lions for your faith? I’m not. Sacrifice does not mean weakness: it requires great strength.

More to the point, it is sometimes the only realistic path. Mythologist Joseph Campbell had some advice about the correct road to take at times like these:

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the disintegrating elements. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. 

Campbell was no Christian, but he knew what the Void represented, and he knew too what had to be done when the end of a culture arrived:

Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally and then reborn.

Activism is no good to me anymore. I have had to let it go. All I am left with is this exhortation to sacrifice, and I don’t really know how to do it. But I know it has to be done. And I know that it has been, so many times, the paradoxical path to renewal. Change comes through walking away, walking through - and thus walking into something new. Only by losing our lives do we save them. This applies to cultures as well as people.

This means, I think, that we have to walk into the Void with a smile on our faces, like the Christians walked into the Roman arenas. Like them, we will be carrying, concealed beneath our cloaks, little spiritual bombs which will, in the end, dismantle their whole edifice. The way of Christ is a spiritual bomb. It detonates under all of our worldly projects, be they from left or right or up or down.

I suppose this comes down to radical trust. I wouldn’t pretend that I have this trust very much of the time. But I do have this intuition, which probably I cannot justify in words: that we are in a desert time again. A cave time. That we need to be ‘dismembered totally, and then reborn.’ That we need to go back to the root and the heart of the matter.

Once there was a slave in Egypt, who worked for a government official. Suspected of murder, he fled his employer and became a bandit, roaming the deserts with a feared gang. He murdered many, and robbed many more. One day, pursued by the authorities, he took refuge in a monastery. The life of the monks affected him so much that he gave up his old ways to become a Christian. He took the name Moses as his new identity.

Moses did not find the monastic life plain sailing, though. He was a violent man, and he struggled with his passions all his life. It was the struggle, though, that gave him the insight he needed. The battle he fought in his heart each day allowed him, perhaps, to see the same battles going on in the hearts of others. Once, he was invited to a meeting that had been called by the Abbot of the monastery to decide what to to about the misbehaviour of another monk. Moses turned up with a basket full of sand on his back. There was a hole in the basket, and the sand was pouring out all over the ground behind him. What are you doing? demanded the Abbot. My sins run out behind me where I cannot see them, replied Moses, and yet I am asked to judge the sins of another.

Moses the Black, or Moses the Egyptian, or sometimes Moses the Robber, is a saint these days, and what I like about him is that he could never have imagined such a thing. He had a deeply inauspicious start, and in that he was just like the rest of us. He was prone to discouragement on his spiritual path, too. To help combat it, the Abbot once took him up on to the monastery roof to see the sun rise. Look, Moses, he said. Only slowly do the rays of the sun drive away the night and usher in a new day, and thus, only slowly does one become a perfect contemplative.

Moses met a fitting end, as he perhaps knew he would. When the monastery was attacked by robbers, he refused to flee. By this time Moses was Abbot himself, and he refused the requests of some of his monks to be allowed to take up arms against the attackers. If they wanted, he told them, they could run, but he would stay. Christ, after all, had told him that those who picked up the sword would die by it. Moses had picked up the sword many times. Now it was his turn to face it. And he did, like a Christian. We are still telling his story 1500 years on.

We are all like Moses. We are carrying our manifold sins and imperfections and passions around on our backs all day, while the Void roars around us. But there is no battling the world, only ourselves. I wish I could clean up all these paradoxes with my Western left brain, but they are not to be conquered. As Moses knew in the end, war gets you nowhere. Only by surrendering do you truly become powerful. Again, the world is upside down. Again, we are called to do the impossible. The impossible turns out to be the true path to victory.

Here we are, at the end of a culture, in the howling Void we have made by walking away from God. How could we possibly save ourselves? I suppose we do it by just being Christians. By following our orders. Paradoxically as ever, we might find that, as a result, a Christian culture is born again and flourishes, for this is the only way they ever emerge: not through the sword, but through the cross.

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During his first term, President Trump decorated the Oval Office with a portrait of President Jackson.

Almost all commentators do not understand what the re-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, is doing because they wrongly interpret his actions through the prism of Republican or woke ideologies. However, Trump, who has successively frequented the Democratic Party, the Tea Party, and today the Republican Party, claims to be a follower of a fourth ideology: Jacksonianism. During his first term, he decorated the Oval Office with a portrait of his predecessor Andrew Jackson.

But what is Jacksonianism?

Andrew Jackson, whose family had almost all died as a result of the wars against the English, was a lawyer. In this capacity, he wrote the Tennessee Constitution (1796). It was considered to give too much power to the Legislature and not enough to the Executive (the governor), and it did not establish a Supreme Court. However, it was hailed as "the least imperfect and most republican of constitutions" by the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson.

Section 1 of Article III gives the right to vote to all free men (white and black), 21 years of age or older, who own freehold property or have resided in the county for six months. There is also a provision giving men serving in the militia the right to elect their officers. The Bill of Rights contained in it states that agnostics and atheists have the same rights as believers. These last three provisions were a direct blow to the puritans of the East Coast.

During the war between France and the United Kingdom in 1812, Paris and London imposed a naval blockade. It was to force the Russian Empire to respect it that Napoleon attacked Russia and because Her Majesty’s Prime Minister confiscated 900 American ships that were trying to trade with France that Washington once again went to war against its former colonizer.

During this "second war of independence", Andrew Jackson, who had become a general, distinguished himself as much by his military as by his diplomatic skills. He managed to maneuver Creek Indians, especially Cherokees. This war was useless because it ended with a treaty that established a return to pre-war conditions, but General Jackson won the first military victory in the history of the United States.

Andrew Jackson later retired to Florida, where he was elected governor. He had two British spies executed, although this was not explicitly within his power, which his opponents called an assassination. He ran for president of the United States in 1824 and won a majority of the popular vote and a majority of electors (designated by the governors), but, following a sleight of hand (a post-election agreement by the two other candidates), he was not considered elected. The electoral college (i.e. the representatives of the governors) nominated John Quincy Adams (as in 2020, it nominated Joe Biden against Donald Trump). Furious, he created the current Democratic Party to rally his supporters. The reality of the election stolen by the corrupt political class served as an electoral theme for Andrew Jackson (as for Donald Trump).

He was elected by a landslide in 1828, when many states had adopted the consultative vote to indicate to their governors the electors they should choose (Reminder: the United States Constitution does not indicate that the president must be elected by universal suffrage, direct or indirect, but by the representatives of the governors. In the words of the "founding fathers", it was especially not a question of establishing a democracy). He was therefore the first president elected, not by, but with the support of universal suffrage. In his inaugural address, he pledged to push the Indians back to the West. His popular base came to cheer him at the White House, but his supporters were so numerous to crowd that they devastated it and forced him to flee through a window.

Jackson had married young Rachel who believed she was divorced, but in reality the act had not been registered. His opponents made a scandal of it, accusing him of living with a married woman. In fact, Rachel died before his second term. He therefore entrusted the role of "first lady" to his niece Emily who married her cousin, Andrew Jackson Donelson, who was his private secretary.

When he formed his administration, Andrew Jackson dismissed corrupt officials. Unable to replace them, he ultimately appointed his relatives and friends. Jackson appointed one of his friends, John Eaton, Secretary of War. For reasons of convenience, he was staying at the White House during the absence of the president. The anti-Jacksonians then spread the rumor of a scandalous life of the Eaton couple.

These sex scandals, all invented by his puritan opponents, caused Jackson to separate from his vice president, who thought like the East Coast elite.

In 1830, Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act. It was about sharing the territory of North America by placing the Indians west of the Mississippi. 70 treaties were signed for $68 million in compensation. Jackson then opposed the legendary David Crockett (representative of Tennessee). About fifty tribes were displaced, including the Cherokees who also signed a peace treaty. The tribe appealed twice to the Supreme Court to clarify its meaning. The exodus of the Cherokees (the episode of the "Valley of Tears") was particularly hard, a quarter of them died during the displacement. However, this genocide did not take place under Jackson, but under the presidency of his successor. Today, the Cherokees, who, unlike the other Indians, did not question these treaties, are the only tribe that is prosperous.

Andrew Jackson, like George Washington and many others, was a slave owner. Two centuries later, the woke movement presents him as a slave owner and a slaughterer of Indians, an adversary of minorities. In reality, he had adopted as a son an Indian baby, orphaned by war, whom he named Lyncoya. He was therefore accused, by his contemporaries, of corrupting civilization by introducing an Indian to the governorship of Florida, then to the White House.

He approved of the "Monroe Doctrine" which meant, at that time, that the European powers abstained from colonizing the Americas while the United States forbade itself from intervening in Europe. This principle was only twisted half a century later to allow the United States to colonize Latin America without European rivalry.

In 1832, he vetoed a law extending a private/public Central Bank of the United States (initially created by Alexander Hamilton). Similarly, in 1836, he vetoed the creation of the Federal Reserve (today’s Fed). In the meantime, he made sure to repay all of the country’s public debt. This is the one and only time in their history that the United States was not in debt (the public debt is now $34.5 trillion, or 122.3% of GDP).

Andrew Jackson, who symbolizes in the popular imagination the resistance to the power of financiers, appears on the $20 bill. The Democrats wanted to remove his image to replace it with that of a black woman symbolizing the dignity of minorities.

His opposition to the central bank crystallized the conflict between the elites and the farmers. He believed that this bank had monopolistic powers and played a role in political life, implying that it corrupted parliamentarians so that they would vote against the interests of the people. Andrew Jackson managed to broaden the electoral base in many states so that at the end of his mandates, seven times more citizens could participate in the electoral consultations. His re-election, in 1833, was triumphant: 55% of the popular vote against 37% and 219 electors against 49 for his rival (Reminder: in the United States the president is not chosen by electors. The popular vote indicates to the governors the color of the electors that he asks him to choose. It is only these electors who designate the president). His opponents accused him of populism.

Then came the dispute over customs duties, which would turn into a civil war 25 years later (which, contrary to official history, has nothing to do with the abolition of slavery that both sides practiced). South Carolina decided not to apply federal customs tariffs (sectionalism). Andrew Jackson, presenting the danger of a civil war, condemned these actions as well as the idea of secession. He threatened to kill those who took this path. The president managed to restore calm and preserve the unity of the nation by successfully proposing a middle position between that of the southerners (free trade) and that of the northerners (protectionists).

Andrew Jackson was the first US president to be assassinated. At that time, presidents had no personal protection measures.

Andrew Jackson always defended the central power against the governors, not out of a centralizing principle, but out of distrust of local elites. He tried to prevent civil war by appealing to the people. In his view, the interests of peasants and early workers coincided, while those of large landowners and captains of industry diverged. In this conflict, the central bank played the main role by speculating internationally and making the US economy dependent on fluctuations in foreign markets. It was therefore he who concluded tariff agreements with the United Kingdom, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. He designed a vast network of means of communication across Latin America to export US products to the Far East. He negotiated with the European powers for indemnities for the Napoleonic Wars. He was intractable with the French king, Louis Philippe. He failed, however, to buy Texas from Mexico, probably because he surrounded himself with bad diplomats. Although the expression is later, Andrew Jackson began to think of the "manifest destiny of the United States" ("To extend ourselves over the whole continent which Providence has allotted us for the free development of our millions of inhabitants who multiply every year"). However, it was only after him that this concept justified the extension of "the perfect form of government" throughout the world.

Jackson’s puritan opponents presented him as an atheist fighting against the Churches, as a manipulator of the populace against the educated elites.

On July 13, 2024, an individual linked to the US Intelligence services in Ukraine attempted to assassinate candidate Donald Trump. The Secret Service, responsible for his security, acknowledged a malfunction, but none of its members were sanctioned.

Jackson and Trump

The example of General Jackson has become a doctrine under the leadership of the President’s private secretary, Andrew Jackson Donelson. It is organized around two strong ideas:
• From a tactical point of view: move the conflicts opposing the federated states to the federal power towards the division opposing the people to the puritanical elites of the East Coast.
• From a strategic point of view: substitute trade for war. Tactics For example, during his first term, President Trump pushed the Supreme Court to refer the issue of abortion to the responsibility of each federated state. This led to his woke opponents, including Kamala Harris, wrongly accusing him of banning abortion, even though it is legal in 38 states.

Tactics

For example, during his first term, President Trump pushed the Supreme Court to refer the issue of abortion to the responsibility of each federated state. As a result, his woke opponents, including Kamala Harris, wrongly accused him of having banned abortion when it is authorized in 38 states.

Andrew Jackson tried to reform the electoral system in order to give the right to vote to all males, regardless of their skin color. He only succeeded in imposing universal suffrage for the election of senators. Donald Trump intends to extend universal suffrage to the election of the president by eliminating the electoral college designated by the governors.

Let us remember that the Constitution was designed by large landowners who wanted to found a monarchy without nobility and especially not a democracy. In their minds, and in the text they wrote, there was not supposed to be universal suffrage. Contrary to what we think, the debate on the 2020 election refers first to the ambiguity of the text of this constitution and not to the counting of the votes cast. The massive re-election of Donald Trump has proven that the reality of the popular vote has nothing to do with the impressions of the ruling class.

Trump, like Jackson, has consistently relied on the popular vote. Both have designed “populist” election campaigns, meaning, in their case, that they respond to people’s expectations rather than endorse the solutions they imagine. Trump has relied on Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica techniques: scanning social media to analyze what people think, then targeting specific profiles with messages designed for them. In contrast, his opponents have relied on Cass Sunstein’s behavioral and cognitive techniques.

A quick note on crowd reactions. Andrew Jackson’s supporters who came to cheer him devastated the White House, not because they wanted to destroy it, but because there were too many of them. Similarly, Donald Trump’s supporters damaged the Congress buildings, not because they wanted to destroy them, but because there were too many of them. There was never an attempted coup as their opponents claim, but rather a mismanagement of the crowd by the police as Joshua Philipp (The Real Story of January 6) has shown.

Strategy

Andrew Jackson wanted to end the Indian wars by compensating and deporting the tribes, with the mixed success that we have seen. It is to be feared that Donald Trump will approach the Israeli-Palestinian question in the same way by compensating the Palestinians and forcibly displacing them to the Sinai. However, this would be to put on the same level the “manifest destiny of the United States” and the expansionism of the “religious Zionists”. This risk exists, but for the moment, there is no evidence that this will be the case.

Andrew Jackson expanded U.S. trade around the world, negotiating bilateral (not multilateral) deals. Donald Trump, a businessman, has withdrawn from multilateral trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While his predecessors were about setting standards with their economic partners and then imposing them on China, Trump has no use for international standards as long as the U.S. can penetrate markets.

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  [@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)

In politics — the Kremlin is no exception — politicians don’t mean what they say.  In gardening, the plants always mean what they say. Gardeners, obliged to record what that is, are more likely than politicians to tell the truth.

In the records of Russian politicians since the Bolshevik Revolution, only one leading figure stands out as having the eye, ear, and nose for what plants have to tell. Not the present nor the founding one. The only gardener among them was, and remains, Joseph Stalin.

Nothing has been found that he wrote himself on his gardening except perhaps for marginal comments in books he read.  There is no mention of books on gardens or gardening in the classification system Stalin’s personal library adopted from 1925. He kept no garden diary. Without a diary recording the cycle of time and seasons, the planting map, colour scheme, productivity of bloom and fruit, infestation,  life and death, he must have committed his observations – “he possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation” (US Ambassador George Kennan) – to memory,  as peasants do.  

Unlike the tsars who employed English, Scots, and French architects and plantsmen to create gardens in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the royal fashions of Europe, defying the Russian winter to display their power and affluence without shovelling for themselves, Stalin dug his gardens himself in the warm weather of his dacha at Gagra, on the Black Sea. There he was photographed with his spade tending parallel, raised beds of lemon trees (lead image, top).  There is no sign of him wielding trowel and fork in the garden at Kuntsevo, his dacha near Moscow, where the photographs show him strolling in a semi-wild young forest or seated on a terrace in front of a hedge of viburnum. No record of Stalin digging at Kuntsevo has been found.

There is just one reminiscence of Stalin speaking to a visitor about his gardening. “Stalin is very fond of fruit trees. We came to a lemon bush. Joseph Vissarionovich carefully adjusted the bamboo stick to make it easier for the branches to hold large yellow fruits. ‘But many people thought that lemons would not grow here!’ [He said]  Stalin planted the first bushes himself, took care of them himself. And now he has convinced many gardeners by his example. He talks about it in an enthusiastic voice and often makes fun of would-be gardeners. We came to a large tree. I don’t know it at all. ‘What is the name of this tree?’ I asked Stalin. ‘Oh, this is a wonderful plant! It’s called eucalyptus,’ Joseph Vissarionovich said, plucking leaves from the tree. He rubs the leaves on his hand and gives everyone a sniff. ‘Do you feel how strong the smell is? This is the smell that the malaria mosquito does not tolerate.’ Joseph Vissarionovich tells how, with the help of eucalyptus, the Americans got rid of the mosquito during the construction of the Panama Canal, how the same eucalyptus helped with the work in swampy Australia. I felt very embarrassed that I did not know this wonderful tree.”   

Stalin read a great deal of philosophy, Roman and Russian history, art, and agronomy, and so he is bound to have reflected on the way in which the ideas of the classics he read took physical form in the gardens of the time. Especially so on the ancient idea of the paradise garden. It is this transference between thinking and digging, between the idea of paradise and the cultivation of it, which a new book, just published in London, explores in a radical way.

Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise, knows nothing whatever about Russia or its gardens or its politics – except for propaganda on the Ukraine war she has absorbed unquestioningly and briefly repeats from the London newspapers. That’s a personal fault; it’s not a dissuasion from the book of reflections she has written out from her garden diary to an end which Russians understand to aim at, not less than the English.

In this wartime it’s necessary to keep reflecting on this end, on the aesthetic and philosophical purpose of the paradise garden. Laing begins her book and her garden with John Milton’s lament for gardening in wartime – in his case, the English Civil War of 1642-46 and the counter-revolution of 1660. “More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d”, Milton observed at the beginning of Book 7 of his Paradise Lost, “to hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes/ On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues;/in darkness and with dangers compast round,/And solitude.”  

At the same time, Laing records for herself and Stalin certainly knew, “what I loved, aside from the work of making [the paradise garden], was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking.”

Source: [https://www.rulit.me/](https://www.rulit.me/books/vstrechi-s-tovarishchem-stalinym-read-60539-2.html)

Through the near eighty years of my life, I’ve made gardens in each of the houses I’ve lived in, four of them are in Russia. The first was on the bank of the Osetr (“sturgeon”) River, in the only brick cottage of the dying village of Ivanchikovo (“Little John”).

In a semi-circle around the front of the old house and its timbered verandah (Russian has also adopted the Hindi word, веранда), I excavated a trench in which I planned a tall hedge of roses, with underplanting of blue and white scilla siberica for the early spring, iris siberica for late spring, and mauve colchicums for late summer and autumn.

They were the evil days of Boris Yeltsin, however. Ivanchikovo’s collective farm had collapsed, and there was almost nothing, certainly no seed, no bulbs, not even flowers in the local shop or nearby market. What I should plant, I decided, was what I could fossick from the wild of the untended sovkhoz fields, the verge of the river stretching up to Kukovo (“Baker”) and down to Tregubovo (“Three Lips”), and the forest nearby. I started with wild roses. 

I also asked for the advice of the other villagers, my neighbours. They were unused to speaking with foreigners: the last of them they told me were German soldiers in retreat fifty years before. The only gardener in the village was a Soviet Army officer who had been made redundant at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and pensioned off with a pittance. In his cottage garden he had planted an orchard of apple trees. By patient experiment and skilful grafting, he explained, it was his ambition to revive as many of the old varieties of Russian apples as he could find. His paradise garden was filled with apples. Ground flowers he had excluded,  he told me.

In the rear garden of my cottage the hedgerows were composed of raspberry and blueberry bushes. A tree of Bolshevik vintage cast ample shade on to the narrow sward. Shade meant more specialized plantings for which there was no obvious source but the forest. For the time being, my priority was the front garden.

After a week of hiking, searching and excavating I had enough wild rose bushes to fill the trench and promise a luxuriant screen of flowers, blooming twice in the summer, I hoped. To cheer the poverty-stricken husband and wife on the left who had taken my fence palings for their oven fire, and to deter the wealthy transplant from Moscow who was erecting a double-storey house to the right, I engaged the local priest to conduct a ceremony of exorcising the evil spirits inside and around the house and to bless the garden for fertility and beauty.

But money and force defeated the plan. Without a preliminary word, the neighbours from Moscow — formerly high-ranking officials of the now defunct Communist Party — arranged for  construction trucks to make their deliveries of bricks, cement, timber, and workers by driving  across my garden. Dozens of tyre tracks destroyed the roses.

This was a violation of my private property rights, as the Yeltsin regime had announced them. But like everything else he did, this was false, and for me there was no recourse. My little paradise garden, blessed by the Church, hadn’t been nipped in the bud. It had been annihilated before it had a chance to bud.

My second Russian garden was planned and planted at the same time in Moscow. It was in the square in front of my apartment house at Kolobovsky pereulog (“Bun Lane”), in the Tverskaya  district of the old city. The building dated from the time of reconstruction after Napoleon had left. The square had been intended for the residents, my new neighbours. Its four corners had been planted with shade trees which had survived the Revolution and the Germans. But the space underneath had long ago been covered by refuse, then cars in various states of disrepair, poisoned by patches of oil, suffocated by weeds.

As the only non-Russian to own an apartment in the building, I was the only one to think of spending personal cash on the public space in front, for the benefit of our collective, so to speak. My neighbours gave their consent to my tossing my money on to the garden.

To remove the cars first of all, I installed a waist-high fence around the square in the wrought-iron style of the century before. The next task was to clear the surface rubbish; dig up the impoverished sandy soil, adding black top soil and worms; prune the dead boughs of the trees and fertilize the roots; lay down out diagonal paths from corner to corner; and plan plantings of spring and autumn bulbs in the quadrants formed by the paths, as well as an annual display in a raised circle in the centre.

Restored public benches on Strastnoy Boulevard.

Four old wrought-iron park benches, salvaged from elsewhere in the city, were placed in the quadrants, bolted to concrete foundations sunk into the soil, repainted. The babushki of the house were invited to take their morning and afternoon sittings there. They would become the guardians of the budding paradise. They shouted off drivers attempting to repair and oil their engines. They stopped dog defecation. They prevented anyone cutting the spring display of snowdrops and daffodils. In thus defending the Kolobovsky Pereulog garden, these women were, unlike my neighbour at Ivanchikovo, true communists.

Both gardens were ruined by theft.  To steal is a venal sin but in Russia not a mortal one. It was common in Russia, not only during Yeltsin’s time in the Kremlin, but after. It continues for me. Venal sins can be repented, reversed, compensated. But to ruin a garden is a mortal sin. No  punishment fits that crime.

This is because the paradise garden is a morality play on the soil —  as Laing has discovered, without her forgetting the deadly simple mechanics of how the land is owned, the labour paid for, the neighbours fenced off.  The English garden is not such a thing, Laing concludes in a revolutionary fashion.  Rather, it’s a “confidence trick. To reshape the land in your own image,  to reorder it so that you inhabit  the centre and own the view. To fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes  and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring…”

In trying to understand the idea of the paradise garden and to make it for herself, Laing writes of the English precursors of communism – the Levellers  and the Diggers of the Civil War period. About them, she notes, they are remembered for “declaring the earth to be a ‘common treasury’, given by God equally to all men and never intended to be bought or sold.” Laing has studied Karl Marx and the English socialists, some of whom gardened seriously  – William Cobbett, William Morris, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson. With their point of view, Laing goes on the attack against the English style in gardens – the fashion which was aped by Catherine the Great and her tsarist successors  in those palatial gardens which remain on show in St. Petersburg.

One of the “English views” in Catherine the Great’s garden at Tsarskoye Selo, nationalized in 1917.

This month it is the 93rd anniversary of Stalin’s idea, implemented by the Central Committee on [November 3, 1931](https://johnhelmer.net/russian-gardens-and-the-war-against-the-anglo-american-grass-sward/), to design, build, and pay for public parks and gardens as national policy. The pleasure garden of the rich and powerful for the preceding three thousand years had been revolutionized and democratized for the first time. “The parks of culture and rest,” the Central Committee declared, “represent a new kind of institution that has numerous political and didactic obligations to fulfil, all of which are for the wellbeing of millions of workers”.  The creation of Moscow’s Gorky Park had been an idea of Stalin’s inside the new layout he conceived for Moscow from Red Square to Sparrow Hills (called Lenin Hills between 1935 and 1999).  

For Laing, the privatisation of peasant farmland, the enclosures by Act of Parliament, the replacement of the village common with the aristocratic lawn and the ha-ha  to view it, the creations of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton – all are to be understood now to be “status symbols and adornments, a way for money  to announce its presence in a more comely or displaced form.”

“But where does the money come from?” Laing asks. Her answer is unique in the modern English gardening literature. In probing for the origins of the great English gardens, Laing goes from the corrupt Elizabethan trade and privateering concessions of the 16th century to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the US and Caribbean worked by slavery and the East India Company slaughter of India during the 18th and 19th centuries.  “There are gardens that have come at far too high a price, and I am glad that Crowfield is now obliterated, and that the historians at Middleton Place have tried to recover and foreground the stories of the enslaved people who build and paid for its garden, with its rare camellias and azaleas.”

Laing is confident enough of her own values to record her debts for gardening imagination and skill to the English garden writers Monty Don, Beth Chatto, Rosemary Verey,  Christopher Lloyd, and to several garden custodians at the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. She leaves out the best known of them, Robin Lane Fox, the classics don at New College where he has been the Garden Master.  Lane Fox is also the longest continuing garden  columnist for the Financial Times, platform for the display of what very large sums of money can buy. Laing calls that money laundering – “us[ing] gardens to cleanse and frame their reputation …to rise above the degraded and exploitative sources of their wealth.”

Source: [https://johnhelmer.net/](https://johnhelmer.net/cabbages-and-rothschilds-%e2%80%93-the-special-horticulture-of-spreading-manure-grafting-and-forcing-for-the-enrichment-of-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-almost-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-somebody-with-ta/)

For the land, the peasants are bound to fight the aristos, the communists against the oligarchs, the garden writers against each other – for the idea of the land and the idea of the paradise garden are collectively and personally a moral geography that’s worth fighting for.  

Laing correctly identifies this idea with John Clare (right), the 19th century farm labourer poet who ended up locked in an asylum. “His knowledge,” Laing writes, “was another way of saying his familiar ground , the place he knew… that knowledge  is itself a function of place, in which one’s capacity  to make sense of things, to generate understanding , is a product of being in some way rooted  and at home, and that, even more strikingly, this sense of home  is reciprocal: that one doesn’t  just know, but is known.”

In the story of this book, Laing succeeds in keeping the garden she makes. Milton wasn’t so fortunate. He went blind and was pursued by the counter-revolutionaries empowered by King Charles II. They are the “evil tongues”, the “dangers compast round”, and the “evil dayes” against which Milton wrote his Paradise Lost, “propelled” — Laing retells the story — “by an almost intolerable need to understand what it means to have failed and what one ought to do once failure has occurred, both by imagining a process of future reparations and by re-envisaging  the nature of an intact , untarnished world.”

Laing’s has got the question right, but not quite the answer. “A garden dies with its owner”, her book concludes.

I believe the opposite, and Laing is honest enough to allow it — the owner may die, the garden may remain in place. I am obliged to conclude so because my third garden in Moscow is being stolen from me as I write, but not quite yet.

The fourth, in the village of Kurlek, by the Tom River in the Tomsk region of Siberia, is the garden of Tatiana Vasilievna Turitsyna, my dead wife.   

By the acts of oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, this garden too is being stolen from me, but not quite yet.

Yet is a long time, mind you.

For how long, Old Blind John claimed optimism at the very end of his Paradise Lost, “Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;/The World was all before them, where to choose/Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide.” In the Russian politics I know, as Stalin knew, there is no place of rest and no Providence.

by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2024

Mike Benz delivered this lecture at Hillsdale College reviewing the origin and structure of the "intelligence state," often referred to as "the blob."

Timestamps:
1:19: The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare
11:20: NSC 10/2 and the Plausible Deniability Doctrine
15:08: Diplomacy Thru Duplicity
16:04: Smith-Mundt Act, The CIA Media Empire
19:40: The Department of Dirty Tricks
20:36: The CIA As Servant Of The State…

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 24, 2024

Selected transcript:

MIKE BENZ: The "intelligence state" is a concept that implies that intelligence has taken over the state and that it has somehow gone rogue. Something has gone very wrong -- that intelligence, which is supposed to serve the state, has subsumed it. I will present the essential history of the intelligence state, but there is something beyond it that I think, beginning with, helps elucidate.

...

We'll sort of speed-run the essential history all the way up to the present, but we're going to start in the year 1948. This is the sort of "Year Zero" of the founding of the intelligence capacities of the U.S. government. Instead of learning what you'd find in an ordinary history book, we're going to start with a document that I'm curious if anyone has ever seen, called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare."

Did you know that George Kennan, in 1948, wrote this memo called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare"?

George Kennan is known as a godfather figure of American diplomacy and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was famous for this "long telegram" and was the chief strategist of the containment strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

But before all that, when all of this was getting started, he penned this top-secret memo, which was not declassified for 60 years. It was declassified in 2005, and I think it helps elucidate the story as we're going to proceed here. We're going to go through this memo, but I want to give some context first. "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare" was written just 12 days after the Central Intelligence Agency did its first government overthrow operation, its first election-rigging event. That was on April 18, 1948, and this memo was written just 12 days after that.

The particular focus was what had just happened in Italy. Italy was having its first democratic election after World War II, and it posited a U.S.-backed candidate on one side and a Russia-backed candidate on the other. When the rules-based international order was being established in 1948, we had these coordinating bodies through the National Security Council. The very first memo, which I have on screen here, emphasizes how important it is for the U.S. to control the political affairs of Italy. You'll see National Security Council Memo 1-1 is titled "The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy."

Kennan wrote, "Italy is obviously the key point. If the Communists win there, our whole position would probably be undermined."

What happened in this case was that in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was established under the National Security Act, and it was originally intended to focus on gathering and analyzing intelligence. But because of the key importance perceived by the U.S. State Department to influence the Italian election, the CIA developed a makeshift, ad hoc, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute, $250 million operation to swing that election in favor of the U.S.-preferred candidate. I have some statistics here and a little bit of context because we’re going to see this as a repeating theme.

About $250 million of U.S. taxpayer money was spent to prop up our preferred candidate. The CIA made use of off-the-books sources of funding to finance it. Bags of money were delivered to selected politicians to pay for their political expenses, campaign expenses, posters, and pamphlets. We threatened the Italian government that aid money from the U.S. would be withheld if the wrong person got elected. Newly created CIA proprietary media organizations like Voice of America Radio and Radio Free Europe set up a vast spawn of Italian news networks to create a surround sound inside that country to broadcast U.S. propaganda and messaging. We funneled aid money through churches and charity fronts to mafia and union street muscle. We worked with Hollywood to project Greta Garbo films and others into the country.

The reason I’m starting with this context is not just because it will help explain the rationale for the beast that was created six weeks after this memo was penned—also by George Kennan—but to help understand that this is the intelligence services co-opting all of these organizations. This means that when the U.S. government provides funding or assistance, suddenly the churches they were working with are no longer simply churches—they are instruments of statecraft. The nonprofit charities are no longer simply charities; they become instruments of statecraft. The media is no longer independent; it becomes an instrument of statecraft. Hollywood becomes an instrument of statecraft, and organized criminal mafias do as well.

The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS, together with our War Department (as it was called at the time), was working with criminal groups in Italy as well as with church organizations and others who were being prosecuted by Mussolini. They served as a sort of guerilla resistance to assist the U.S. Army and intelligence operations. We had that network established. It was unseemly but seen as necessary in a time of war, but it was maintained in times of peace for political warfare. Suddenly, organized crime becomes not a criminal offense but rather a sanctioned instrument of statecraft. To drive that point home, Miles Copeland, one of the founding members of the CIA, wrote in his own book that, "Had it not been for the mafia, the Communists would by now be in control of Italy."

Why was all this necessary? Well, in the eyes of the U.S. State Department, we would have lost the election if the intelligence community hadn’t rigged it. They assessed that 60% of the vote would have gone to the Communists -- but for CIA intervention.
I urge you throughout this to remember that when you hear "Communist" or "fascist" in the historical data points we’re going to go over, understand that in the post-2016 world, all of this infrastructure has been repurposed to take out populism. Every time you see "Communism," as much as we abhor that with every fiber in our souls, the biggest threat right now to the intelligence state and to the "blob" (as we’ll come to discuss) is domestic populism. This is actually the language they use.

When you hear them say "the Communists would have won," today they use the exact same language to describe stopping the rise of populism and stopping populist political candidates.

...

This is from George Kennan, April 30th, 1948, just the week before the Central Intelligence Agency had achieved this incredible win in Italy. George Kennan, the State Department, and the White House were so overwhelmed with delight about the world of possibility if we could simply scale the Italian operation.

But the problem was, it was very much against everything this country had stood for, for a century and a half before that. I'm going to read some of the highlighted items here. You’ll see the phrase "political warfare" dots this in a very deliberate way: organized political warfare by the U.S. government to further our national objectives, to further our influence and authority using means both overt and covert, including black psychological warfare and many other techniques.

George Kennan says here, "We have been handicapped, however, by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war." You’ll see he actually crossed out part of the draft because, again, this is a top-secret memo that was written in 1948 and wasn’t declassified until 2005. The hard record preserves his own scrawls. You’ll see at the bottom, it says, "We’re hamstrung by this basic difference between peace and war, by our public’s yearnings." Then that’s crossed out, and it says, "by a national tendency to seek a political cure-all and a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations."

Basically, he is saying, "Listen, we answer to the voters, the people, and they’re not going to like this. They don’t understand international relations. They think there’s a difference between peace and war." World War II is over; it just ended three years ago. But if we go into peacetime mode and do not continue political warfare, then we will lose the opportunity to dominate the 20th century.

You’ll see here references to the Italian elections, right? We had just engaged in the Italian elections 12 days prior. This political warfare has to be directed and coordinated by the Department of State. We’ll come back to that because, as we’ll see, the shape of the intelligence state extends far beyond intelligence—it’s really a tool of statecraft.

Here is an interesting and telling vision from this CIA godfather. It says, "We cannot afford in the future, in perhaps more serious political crises, to scramble into impromptu covert operations as we did at the time of the Italian elections." He’s saying, we did this. It was great. It was amazing. But we need this capacity everywhere. We need it in every country on earth where there might be a political crisis, where there might be a need to protect U.S. national interests, trade interests, financial interests, or security interests. We need the same network we had in Italy, working with everyone from cultural influencers to the media, to the churches, to the charities, to organized crime networks—even if we don’t use it, just in case we need it. So we don’t need to scramble if an opposition politician decides to go sideways against a U.S. national interest agenda.

I’m setting the stage with that before we go back in time and go through the history of this. Less than two months after George Kennan wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," saying, "Since 1789, we have never done this sort of thing in any organized fashion. The American people aren’t going to like it, but we have to do it." Less than two months after that, George Kennan sponsored the very act that would permanently change the structure of the American government and the way our country works.

This was National Security Council Memo 10/2. Now, for folks who are not familiar, the National Security Council (NSC) is called the "interagency." It coordinates with the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA -- everyone -- so that they are all working in a complementary fashion. It's in the White House and provides executive oversight of everything.

You’ll see this memo here, NSC 10-2, and it’s right here on the State Department website, under state.gov. What I’m about to read here sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations, including propaganda, economic warfare, demolition, subversion, and sabotage. It was sponsored by George Kennan. He pushed for this right after he wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," but he would later say it was the greatest mistake he ever made because of the monster it created.

What NSC 10-2 did was give the intelligence community -- this burgeoning, newly created CIA -- and what we now have, 17 intelligence agencies plus the ODNI, not just spy organizations but lie organizations. What I mean by that is because of the phrase used in NSC 10-2, I'm going to read it, "All of these activities, which are normally illegal, can be carried out so long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them."

This is from 1948: "All covert operations, including sabotage, demolition, and controlling the media, are now legal as long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility is not evident to unauthorized persons." So, effectively, you are cast out of Eden. If you eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, you are not allowed to know, and they are not allowed to tell you. Their job is to lie to you. If they get caught, the U.S. government can then lie above the agency level, above the CIA. The State Department gets to lie to the world because the CIA had these covert links, and they could say it was not an officially sanctioned U.S. government operation -- something went rogue, someone wasn’t authorized, someone took it into their own hands.

I’m going to read this analysis that I think is a useful summary: "Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of this newly created CIA, which was created the year earlier, and other covert action agencies in order to protect the visible authorities of the government."

We’re going to come back to that as we discuss the power structure of all these different organizations. But I want to drive this point home immediately, which is that this was seen as a major growth opportunity because of how effective it was in the 1940s and 1950s to be able to take over the world through diplomacy and duplicity.

The problem with diplomacy through duplicity is that plausible deniability is the core doctrine that governs the interagency, which controls all major U.S. government operations on national security, foreign policy, and international interests. Because you lie to the outside world, you also need to lie to your own citizens to prevent the outside from finding out.

While the lies may help you successfully acquire an empire, you now have to permanently maintain an empire of lies, not just abroad but at home.

...

In 1948, when the founding fathers of the intelligence state were setting this all up, they were intensely aware of the monster they were creating. In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, because, again, in 1948, as all of this was being established, the CIA was brand new, and NSC 10-2 had just come out. Congress said, "Okay, okay, listen, you guys are creating a monster here. We want to make sure that we don't build this empire of lies and that Americans are not being inundated with this sprawl of information control that you are conducting around the world in order to conduct organized political warfare on all countries on planet Earth."

Many folks in this room are probably familiar with what happened during the Obama administration, which repealed this essential safeguard, which had been with us since the moment all of this was created in 1948, with very little fanfare. It was tucked into an NDAA. It was really only discovered by the public after the damage had been done that the Smith-Mundt Act was modernized to get rid of that restriction. It was effectively amended, and the headline was, "U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans."

For decades, this anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arms from delivering programming to American audiences. "Mammoth" is not a big enough word. After World War II, at this exact time in 1948, the UN Declaration for Human Rights came out and forbade the territorial acquisition of other countries by military force. Against these new international norms and standards, international law, you could not simply have a military occupation of the Philippines like the United States had in the early 1900s.

So, with hard power ruled out as the dominant means to have an empire, the U.S. transitioned to a soft power empire, dominated by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, democracy promotion programs at the State Department, later USAID, and the whole swarm army we're about to meet. But even right out of the gate, the Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved into the media space to control the messaging that people around the world experienced.

...

One essential way to cut through how this is structured is to understand that there is a key distinction between the American homeland and the American Empire. We live in the American homeland, but the American Empire is everywhere else.

Today, even though all the major U.S.-domiciled corporations get the lion's share of their markets, revenues, and supply chain resources from everywhere else on Earth, we, as a country, pale in comparison to the globe. The issue arises when people on the homeland want to put their own interests first—they run up against the empire managers, and therefore against this blob apparatus, and, by extension, the intelligence state.

In this inauguration of organized political warfare, you see that even though the emphasis is on giving the CIA this capacity, the entire operation is coordinated by the U.S. State Department, which does not have a plausible deniability license. It’s supposed to be our official U.S. government policy, but secretly, the CIA answers to the State Department in all things.

...

What happened after 1948? There is a list of CIA regime change operations after Italy. The CIA orchestrated coups in 85 countries following the Italy operation that George Kennan and other State Department officials were so inspired by. They did achieve their goal of expanding this strategy to virtually every country, continent, and region on earth and building these networks, whether they were needed or not.

Fifty of these regime change operations took place during the Eisenhower administration between 1952 and 1960. By the early 1960s, this began to come home, leading to a chain of events that caused the first real structural change to the intelligence state. During that time, the intelligence state was targeting the New Left within the Democratic Party in much the same way it is targeting the populist right today. There was a new faction within the Democratic Party, made up of not necessarily limousine liberals but anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and supporters of third-world people's movements. Many in the Democratic Party were socially, politically, and informationally aligned with countries targeted by the CIA.

The CIA was seen as a right-wing force because it was primarily targeting socialist and communist governments, aiming to privatize state-held industries. The agency began to do the same things against the left that they are now doing against the populist right.

Huge CIA operations were reported in the U.S. against anti-war forces. The CIA was bribing the National Association of Students and launched something called Operation Chaos, which was designed to permanently shape the composition of the Democratic Party by purging the popular populist leftist faction. Does that sound familiar? The intelligence state isn’t targeting George Bush, Mitt Romney, or John McCain—it is targeting one faction of the conservative wing of the GOP in order to purge that out.

The next image I have here on screen is COINTELPRO. This was on the FBI side, but it was done in tandem with the Central Intelligence Agency. The "COINTEL" refers to counterintelligence, which is basically when the FBI deals with threats from foreign countries using this foreign predicate. I’ll get to that a little more in a second.

Now, the first thing that forced the restructuring of the intelligence state into its current form was a series of scandals that led up to and ultimately culminated in what was called the Church Committee hearings. Also, there was the Pike Committee. On the left here is Frank Church. He was the Democratic senator who spearheaded those hearings. It was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency ever had congressional oversight. It had been around for 30 years, and members of Congress were not allowed to see what it was doing. There was no oversight, no accountability—no one was saying, "Hey, let me look at that." There was no gang of eight. It was only with the Church Committee that we created a House Intelligence Committee to allow a select handful of members of the House to conduct oversight. It was only then that we created the Senate Intelligence Committee to do the same on the Senate side.

This is Frank Church here on the left, holding up the famous "heart attack gun," which was in the CIA assassination guide and part of their research and development. They were assassinating world leaders, political dissidents all over the world, and were working on ever more extreme ways to kill people and get away with it, adhering to their government license for plausible deniability. The heart attack gun, which you can look up on YouTube, was discussed in an open hearing of Congress, with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency testifying. It was essentially a dart gun that induced a heart attack, making the cause of death appear natural.

On the right here is Christopher Pyle. He was one of the first whistleblowers to expose what was going on—not from the CIA, but from the U.S. Army. He provided very damning evidence that the U.S. military had active operations to survey and infiltrate any public meeting of 20 or more people in the United States, regardless of the group’s political affiliation—right, left, mothers’ knitting groups, religious groups, etc. He revealed troves of documents showing that the U.S. military perceived it was necessary to maintain political control over the civilian population to prevent any popular bills from getting passed or people from getting elected who might undermine the military agenda. This amounted to a basic usurpation of the concept of civilian-run government in a democracy.

At that time, many thought leaders within the targeted section of the Democratic Party began to realize, due to these disclosures, that almost everything around them was not real—their media, culture, and music were all being used as instruments of statecraft, often directly against them. On the left is a memo from the Church Committee hearing notes on the CIA's use of journalists and clergy in intelligence operations. The center picture is the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a giant network of CIA-funded and directed cultural and media institutions, primarily in Europe but extending globally. The CIA co-opted thought leaders in leading magazines, musicians, poets, and even hosted musical events to attract people in dozens of countries, aligning them with the U.S. State Department agenda.

Very famous figures were involved in this, including many from spaces you might not expect. For example, Gloria Steinem, the famous feminist, was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. At the time, our State Department was using this as a means to win the Cold War by promoting feminism to oppose patriarchal structures in countries east of Germany.

Even in the 1960s, labyrinthine money laundering and hiding it from public accountability were already very robust. The Church Committee hearings popped off, and then Jimmy Carter won in 1976, coasting on popular resentment against the intelligence state. He was fiercely opposed by the intelligence state and conducted what became known as the "Halloween Massacre," where he fired 30% of the CIA’s operations division in a single night, dramatically cutting the agency’s budget. There was this brief moment of accountability and a rollback of these plausibly deniable octopus-like operations against the American people.

Then Ronald Reagan came to power. In 1983, he embarked on structural changes to the way the intelligence state worked in order to restore the powers the CIA had lost during the Carter administration, including signing into law the bill that established the National Endowment for Democracy, which is now today's premier CIA cutout. The CIA became less visible because of its previous scandals and diffused itself into a liaison role within a public-facing network of captured institutions. The intelligence state moved into the whole of society, embedding itself into cultural and media organizations, universities, NGOs, and other publicly visible sectors.

Fast forward to 2016, and I’ll wrap this up. As our NGO sphere, university centers, media organizations, union groups, and cultural groups developed a "favors for favors" relationship—this "you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours" dynamic—they would get grants from the State Department, USAID, or the National Science Foundation in exchange for cooperation. What we are up against is this network, this blob, this congealed structure where the intelligence state serves the public-facing functions of government. The CIA is simply a support agency for the State Department on national interest grounds and for the Pentagon on national security grounds.

When you see the CIA or the intelligence state do something, understand that it’s to serve a State Department official, a Pentagon official, or the stakeholders around them. It’s not a rogue agency in the sense that it answers to the State Department and does the dirty work.

Maybe I’ll close with a Sopranos reference. Tony Soprano runs a mafia outfit in New Jersey, and he has these goons, these enforcers who do the plausibly deniable dirty work so that the FBI can’t trace it back to him. There’s a character, Furio, who is the muscle, breaking into people’s homes, beating them up, and undermining their "democracy." If you are in that home and it’s your democracy being destroyed, your friends and family being arrested, you might say, "Oh, the CIA did that." But what’s gone rogue is something much deeper than just the intelligence state—it’s the entrenched forces in diplomacy and defense that the CIA is tasked with serving and doing the dirty work for.

I recently shared a list of 26 essential books about technology.

But there was an unusual twist to this list—none of these books were written by technologists. They all came from wise humanists, philosophers, novelists, and social thinkers.

This is quite unconventional nowadays—STEM rules everything and everywhere, while the humanities are in crisis. But these are the books I’d assign if I taught in Stanford’s entrepreneur program.

They would give techies a mind-expanding vision from outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber. These books would guide them to concepts and solutions that tech, on its own, will never deliver.

Back in August, I promised that I’d write about some of the individual books on my list.

Today I’m doing just that—offering a rapid-fire overview of some insights from Hannah Arendt, one of the deepest thinkers of the 20th century.

Hannah Arendt

As many of you know, I often study predictions made 50 or 100 years ago, and try to see how accurate they were.

I have done this in the past with J.G. Ballard, Arnold Mitchell, Chris Anderson, Paul Goodman, Oswald Spengler, and others.

Today I turn my attention to an extraordinary analysis from Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition (1958). It’s so accurate, it’s almost scary.

Arendt is a constant source of inspiration for me. In this book, she warns us about technologists who are dangerous becuse they are so completely out-of-touch with their humanity. She wrote this book in the mid-1950s, but you might think she was living in Silicon Valley today.

Here’s what she says about these dangerous individuals in the opening pages of her 1958 book:

1. On page one she says that people who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to “escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.”

2. On page two, she says that these people are “directed towards making life artificial”—sort of like virtual reality.

3. On page three, she claims that they will eventually want to create “artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking….we would become the helpless slaves…at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”

4. On page four, she warns us that scientists have already shown (with the development of the atomic bomb) that they create dangerous things but are “the last to be consulted about their use.” So any prediction a scientist makes about the use of new tech is totally worthless—politicians and tyrants will decide how it is used.

5. On page five, she explains that in this kind of society, freedom becomes almost worthless, because people are deprived of the “higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”

6. On page six, she says that the people pursuing this escape from the human condition are thus creating “modern world alienation.”

7. On page seven, she says that they inhabit “an ‘artificial’ world of things distinctly different from all natural surroundings”—so that their tech innovations will lead to an inevitable degradation of the environment, and a detachment from the real world.

I read all this in astonishment.

It sounds like Arendt had anticipated my recent article about Silicon Valley turning into a creepy cult—and grasped this potentiality more than 60 years ago.

In other word, she saw all this even before Silicon Valley had a name or a mission.

Arendt’s entire book is filled with insights. I won’t try to summarize everything, but I will share a few more of her provocative views.

Here are 12 more key passages from The Human Condition:

1. “Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world.” [It sounds like she is describing scrolling on a smartphone but Arendt wrote this before the first integrated circuit was built!]

2. “The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.” [Does that sound familiar?]

3. “The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of the last stage of this modern development.”

4. “Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism.”

5. “Society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion….imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”

6. “Behavior has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship.”

7. “The mass phenomenon of loneliness…has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.”

8. “The loss of human experience in this development is extraordinarily striking. It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a func­tion of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfill these functions much better than we ever could.”

9. “We have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented.”

10. “For mortals, the ‘easy life of the gods’ would be a lifeless life.”

11. “This does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities….although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist.”

12. “It is quite con­ceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprece­dented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”

Does any of that ring true today? Let me remind you that all this was written in the mid-1950s.

I will have more to say in the future about other books on my subversive tech reading list. But even this quick survey of Hannah Arendt’s worldview shows how much we gain from adopting a larger vision of technology from a wise and compassionate human standpoint.

During the period of the Wagner Group insurrection in the spring of 2023, the biography of the mercenary group’s founder and principal owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was spread far and wide. The fact that he had once served meals to Vladimir Putin prompted sniggering among our mainstream commentators. Just imagine that such a person could rise to the power, influence and wealth of Prigozhin! This was proof positive of the endemic corruption and distorted values of the ‘Putin regime,’ they opined.

However, my point in writing today’s installment is to demonstrate that upward mobility of those with great talent and imagination has long been and remains a competitive advantage of Russia. That was so under Peter the Great in the first quarter of the 18th century, it was certainly true in much of the Soviet period until the 1980s. And it revived very nicely in the ‘Roaring 90s’ when the hero of this piece, Sergei Gutzeit, restaurateur, vineyard owner, restorer of landmark buildings at his own expense, founder and chief benefactor of a lyҫėe for aspiring talents from the lower classes began his steep rise up the success ladder in the circle of another rising star, Vladimir Putin.

All of these issues came to mind this afternoon when my wife and I took lunch in Gutzeit’s first and still best earning restaurant Podvorye located in the Petersburg suburb of Pavlovsk where he has kept his primary residence and focus of his charitable works for decades.

Pavlovsk is named for the Emperor Pavel (Paul I), son of Catherine the Great and father of Emperor Alexander I, best known as the conqueror of Napoleon. Paul’s elegant and modestly sized palace is a ‘must see’ tourist destination for both foreign and domestic visitors to Northwest Russia, alongside the much larger and more demanding Summer Palace of Catherine in the town of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo), 5 km away.

However, the success of Gutzeit’s restaurant opposite the palace park had little to do with location, location, location. Gutzeit opened the Podvorye in 1994 on an unpromising plot of land that the grudging city authorities offered him. It is wedged between the train tracks on one side and a busy local highway on the other. It was his unique architectural solution and his talents in hospitality services that won him a loyal clientele from among the top business and political circles of Petersburg after a very few years.

As for architecture, the Podvorye restaurant and the ensemble of outbuildings adjacent to it are made from immense stripped logs in a style that resembles the stage settings for 17th century or still earlier Russia as shown in Rimsky Korsakov operas in the Mariinsky Theater. The basic menu was built entirely around traditional hearty Russian cuisine that is very well turned out, in copious portions and priced very fairly. And on weekends it was the rule to regale diners with rounds of Russian folk songs by musicians who invited the children especially to join in.

Gutzeit’s fortune was assured in October 2000 when Vladimir Putin decided to celebrate his first birthday as president in…the Podvorye. The specially prepared meal for the presidential party remains on page one of the printed menu and is currently priced at 55 euros in ruble equivalency. In typical Russian fashion, the meal opens with a shock and awe array of eight different meat, fish, salted vegetable, marinated forest mushroom and other appetizers which invite rounds of vodka shot glasses, then moves on to a fish or meat soup followed by the mains of fried fish or meat. Fasting for a day ahead of such a meal is a good idea.

On the other hand, for normal dining, the out of pocket cost is much lower. By way of example, I mention that our favorite dish is half a roast duck served with stewed cabbage and a baked pear with lingonberry filling. One portion is more than sufficient to serve two and today costs the equivalent of 12 euros. Back in the 1990s, when Russian farming was reeling from the shock therapy administered at the advice of Western advisers, Gutzeit had to import his ducks frozen from France to be satisfied with quality and uniform portions. Then when relations with France soured, he shifted to frozen ducks from Hungary. Now chef assures me that they arrive fresh from farms in Rostov (Russia) and I assure you that the quality is superb.

But, to resume my story of Gutzeit’s rise: once word of the President’s visit got around, the Podvorye was filled daily to capacity. Back in the 1990s and early in the new century, the diners were predominantly foreigners whose reservations were made for them by the premiere hotels in St Petersburg where they were lodged. I recall how in about 2004 my wife and I spotted former British prime minister John Major at another table.

Those were the glory days when Gutzeit made a fortune that he immediately invested in other commercial ventures and also in charitable works, the first of which, was a free of charge soup kitchen for the poor run daily from a large, specially built canteen adjacent to the restaurant.

Nowadays the clientele is almost exclusively middle class Russians from near and far. They arrive as couples, as families with kids, and as groups of friends.

Aside from opening other restaurants in the region, Gutzeit created the ‘Russian Village’ in Upper Mandrogi, a Russian equivalent to America’s Williamsburg on a riverbank site jointly agreed with tour operators of cruises in the rivers and canals running north from Lake Ladoga that are very popular in the summer season. This venture provided work opportunities to artisans in traditional decorative handicrafts.

With the proceeds of his businesses, with his own money Gutzeit undertook the restoration of dilapidated buildings from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries in the Pavlovsk area. In one of these complexes he opened what I would call his most ambitious and far-sighted project which was inspired by the lyҫėe within the Catherine Palace which Alexander I created initially with a view to educate his younger brothers together with a small group of talented students from outside the royal entourage. Today it is best known as the school where the young Pushkin studied. Gutzeit’s vision was to help create a new patriotic but broadly educated and widely traveled elite to help guide the country’s future.

The school was named for Russia’s revered Foreign Minister in the second half of the 19th century, A.M. Gorchakov. Gutzeit directly oversaw the selection of the 18 candidates for the first class and following classes from among children of low income intelligentsia families. He oversaw the program of travel abroad in the West and domestically around Russia that the students were given gratis. The school is still going strong and I expect to hear more about its graduates when I meet with Gutzeit at the start of next week.

In reviving the tradition of what was called in Pushkin’s time the Tsarskoye Selo lyҫėe, Gutzeit was a good 20 years ahead of the Putin government. It is only now that a project to revive that school in the original Catherine Palace complex is being realized.

Meanwhile, Gutzeit never abandoned the love for fresh produce that directed him to cooking and restaurant ownership. Originally born and educated in Odessa (Ukraine), Gutzeit got his start in business in the food markets of the north where he traded in vegetables. The latter partly explains his decision early in the new millennium to buy a farming estate in the Crimea. His main crop there is grapes for wine, and he began well before it became popular for Russian arbiters of taste like Dmitry Kiselyov, director of all Russian state television news, to become a vineyard owner in Crimea. Gutzeit indulges in his gentleman farmer avocation in the south from late spring to autumn.

His most recent acquisition, agricultural land near the regional center Gatchina, brings together various interests. The location has its own logic: Paul 1 had his earliest palace in precisely Gatchina. On this farm, Gutzeit is now growing most of the fresh vegetables, herbs, fowl and dairy products that will be featured in Podvorye. With this latest accent on cooking mainly what you get from your surroundings and can personally control, Gutzeit’s restaurant is sure to vie for a star in the Michelin guide if and when sanctions are lifted.

That, in a nutshell, is my Exhibit Number 1 of a successful and wealthy benefactor of his society with outstanding vision who began, like Prigozhin, as ‘a waiter to Putin.’ When you care to scratch the surface, this country has a great many surprises that help you to better understand why it is now the fourth biggest economy in the world as measured by Purchasing Power Equivalency and likely has the number one army in the world.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. He chose this third career of 'public intellectual' after finishing up a 25 year career as corporate executive and outside consultant to multinational corporations doing business in Russia and Eastern Europe which culminated in the position of Managing Director, Russia during the years 1995-2000. He has publishied his memoirs of his 25 years of doing business in and around the Soviet Union/Russia, 1975 - 2000. Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up was published on 10 November 2020. Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s was released in February 2021. A Russian language edition in a single 780 page volume was published by Liki Rossii in St Petersburg in November 2021: Россия в бурные 1990е: Дневники, воспоминания, документы. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow

On history's repeating itself

Excerpts from the History of the Peloponnesian War

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge.

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings.

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense.

Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all.

Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever.

These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime.

If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence.

And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out.

Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves.

In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour.

Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action.

[… the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand.]

As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.

As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion.

As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-maneuvered in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, overconfident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.

Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order.

There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions.

Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice.

Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.

…

People always think the greatest war is the one they are fighting at the moment, and when that is over they are more impressed with wars of antiquity; but, even so, this war will prove, to all who look at the facts, that it was greater than the others.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, late 400s BC

The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism

First Things has just put out an essay by

Nathan Pinkoski

, titled “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” that I think is one of the most intellectually important pieces to be published in some time, and which I’ll go out of my way to recommend here.  

It is essentially a detailed account of how and why the United States government decided it needed to surveil and control the bank accounts and financial transactions of the entire world in the name of fighting terrorism — and then authoritarianism… and then the hazy universal evil of “hate.” More generally, it’s the story of how Western liberalism’s former separation of public and private spheres of life was torn down, thrusting us into our current hellscape of technocratic “global governance,” in which dissidents are liable to find themselves debanked from the financial system in the name of inclusion.

With this account Pinkoski fills in some important gaps in the record by identifying and documenting some of the key figures and decisions-points that led us to where we are now. In particular, he expertly reveals just how bipartisan the scheme to transform national “government” into global “governance” was, with the twin “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” sides of American politics working hand-in-hand to advance the same ambitious revolution after the end of the Cold War.

This includes uncovering some rather spectacular facts and quotes that I at least was unaware of, such as an open declaration by Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor that America’s post-Cold War strategy would be to “pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-governmental groups,” including “private firms” and “human rights groups,” in order to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” across the planet and isolate “backlash states” “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Which is exactly the foreign policy chimera we got and still labor under decades later.

Or the fact that it was not some shadowy cabal of Blackrock and the UN that first invented manipulative “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) investing standards, but the George W. Bush administration’s national security staff, who noted that private finance “could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments” and predicted that “the banks will fall into line” once “our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

Or the timely reminder that in 1989 the supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal declared its commitment to achieving the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.”

Hence why we ought not be surprised that in 2021 G.W. Bush would stand beside his erstwhile establishment-left opponents on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and declare that the real threat to America comes from “extremists at home,” from the populist Trump supporters who, “in their disdain for pluralism,” are “children of the same foul spirit” as foreign terrorists — and who therefore necessitate that the same regime of coordinated public and private coercive force be applied at home as abroad.

Overall, Pinkoski’s essay powerfully demonstrates just how dramatically different Western “liberal-democratic” countries are from a mere three decades ago. Its publication is also something I’ve been awaiting impatiently for half a year now, because this summer I was present at the romantically-clandestine underground meeting of dissident scholars (aka a First Things seminar) at which Pinkoski originally presented his argument, then in the form of a much longer academic paper.

I was asked to present my own response to Pinkoski’s paper at the gathering, which I did, and which I will publish here below in case it is of interest. (Note that many of the lines cited in my response will not match the shortened version published in First Things, but I’ve decided to leave them unaltered here anyway.) In it, I make two main arguments: that the revolution Pinkoski describes is best thought of as the expansionary process of totalitarian managerialism (as described in The China Convergence), and — more disagreeably — that what he describes as “postliberalism” is in fact the triumph of liberalism unbound.

Definitely read Pinkoski’s essay first though! I expect and very much hope that he will continue to expand on it in the future, and that it will become a much-cited work in the years ahead.

Response to Nathan Pinkoski (N.S. Lyons, Palo Alto, June 2024)

Nathan Pinkoski has produced a bold, detailed, and compelling case study illuminating what is perhaps the signal phenomenon of our era: the abandonment of any meaningful distinction between state and society, between public and private power, and between public and private spheres writ large. In recent decades we have experienced the rapid rise of Western regimes that transcend any such distinction, and which thus — to cut to the point — grow increasingly totalitarian in aspect.

Pinkoski describes this as the collapse of 20th century liberal civilization and its replacement by something new. He has examined this rupture through the history of recent transformations in international monetary policy and finance. This includes the relentless expansion of the EU as a monetary union and then as a federalist empire, accompanied by the swift intrusion of the state into private finance in the name of maintaining stability and security — a trend also pioneered by the U.S. government’s expansive efforts after 9/11 to use state power to freeze first terrorist groups and then entire countries out of the putatively neutral global financial system. In doing so he traces a direct line of evolution from the neoliberal enthusiasms of the post-Cold War era to what he describes as the West’s “actually existing postliberal” present, in which “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics” means political dissidents and cultural thought criminals can now regularly find themselves de-banked by putatively private institutions in the name of “safety” and “reputational risk.”

With this history I can offer no significant disagreement. But it is only a case study of a larger pattern. And if I have any productive criticism to offer, it is that, in prudently limiting his scope to merely the realms of finance, monetary policy, and foreign affairs, Pinkoski has perhaps not been quite bold enough. Without a fuller picture of the leviathan that menaces us, we risk mistaking but one part of the beast for the whole, mere consequences for causes. In fact, let me posit that searching for the source of our era’s public-private collapse among the shadowy decisions of bankers and national security spooks — as noteworthy and telling as these decisions are — is to risk potentially getting causality backwards and understating larger forces at work.

After all, throughout his paper Pinkoski repeatedly notes that various policy decisions defy explanation in terms of pragmatic national interests. The architects of Clinton’s foreign policy are cited themselves describing taking actions they knew were unnecessary but felt to be of alluring “historical consequence.” The opening of borders to mass migration is described as a “quasi-theological event,” a “repudiation of a core culture or a fixed set of national values,” and “a response to Western guilt.” While in general after 1989, as Pinkoski puts it, “On both sides of the Atlantic, the spiritual principle became a resolve to construct a new national, social, and cultural identity.” From my point of view, such language hints that deeper forces were indeed at work. And it might be most profitable for us to try to more clearly uncover and connect at least some of these forces.

A year or so ago I wrote a long essay titled “The China Convergence,” which I bring up here because I think its main themes are quite relevant. Namely, that the same specific form of oligarchic technocratic governance, described by James Burnham and others as “managerialism,” has today successfully taken over almost the whole developed world, West and East alike.

Managerialism is, in short, the instantiated belief that everything can and should be deliberately engineered and managed from the top down, and that this necessitates an expert class of professional managers whose business it is to do so. Rooted in the techniques of bureaucratic organization and “scientific management” that sprang from the revolution of mass and scale brought on by the Industrial Revolution, managerialism took off with the early Progressive movements and flourished following the bureaucratic explosions produced by the two world wars.

Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power and resources for the managers as a group within the system; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucratic apparatus to take over an ever-larger range of functions; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be trained and educated, which requires more managers… and on and on. I call this expansionary dialectic the managerial doom loop.

But this process works just the same at the level of a country, or even an entire civilization, as it does for a company, non-profit, or government agency. The result, in the case of our societies, has been the exponential growth of a “professional managerial class,” with a permanent interest in seeing the continual expansion of managerial control into every area of state, economy, culture, and even international affairs. In this it has wildly succeeded, producing a new kind of regime — the managerial regime — staffed by a constituent managerial class and dominated by a distinct managerial elite. These elites all behave with flock-like similarity, no matter what institution or part of the world they are located in, because they all have the same basic managerial interests and personality.

To begin connecting this back to Pinkoski’s study, these managerial interests have over time in the West congealed ideologically into what we can describe as a managerial consensus: a unifying system of moral and philosophical beliefs that just so happen to not only rationalize the interests of managerial elites, but also to elevate them to a position of moral superiority, serving to legitimize their right to rule. This ideology consists of a number of core tenets, including technocratic scientism, utopian progressivism, a devotion to the “liberation” of individuals from all former norms and constraints (whether of nature or tradition), and an incentive to flatten any particularity of people, nation, or culture so as to produce more “free” individuals — in other words more predictable and easily interchangeable “undifferentiated human material,” as Renaud Camus has put it. R.R. Reno has similarly described the post-WWII ideological complex as the “open society consensus,” which I think is also accurate and an appropriate name for the same thing.

Now, I’ve rehashed these points from my own essay because I would propose that most of the events and decisions that Pinkoski observes in his history can actually be best explained as products of the sweeping advance of managerialism after achieving victory in the Cold War — or rather the victory of one particular form of managerialism: liberal managerialism.

We might divide the ongoing managerial revolution into roughly three eras, the first running from the French Revolution’s Cult of Pure Reason through to WWII; the second through the “post-war” era until 1989; and the third dawning with the end of the Cold War, alongside the concurrent emergence of the digital revolution. The end of the Cold War proved a transformative moment because, with the collapse of the Soviet Union — but before the rise of China — the Western liberal managerial regime appeared to have triumphed over its last remaining major competitor. The world had once contained not one but three rival ideological forms managerialism: liberalism, communism, and fascism. Fascism was crushed in WWII, but for decades Soviet communism still remained a competitor to liberalism. With its fall, however, liberal managerialism was effectively liberated from all restraint, the last dam was broken and the way opened for it to rush into the global power vacuum and seek complete domination.

Pinkoski argues that “1989 unleashed the revolutionary impulse in Western elites.” I concur completely. But what was the nature of this revolutionary impulse, exactly? He writes this in the context of resurgent appetite for both a new European monetary order and a new American security order. Which, true enough, are among the things that Western elites rushed to achieve. But I think these were only expressions of the full revolutionary impulse unleashed within the managerial elite: a giddy urge to fulfill their manifest destiny by expanding the mandate of their managerial apparatus to an unprecedented, truly global scope.

Whereas once these managers’ drive for technocratic control, social engineering, and cultural bulldozing had been largely restricted to the national level, these impulses could now be advanced to their maximum extent — i.e. to the whole world. And so we see the managerial elite almost immediately declare the nation-state obsolete once grander supranational opportunities beckon. The objects of managerial ambition become “global problems” necessitating “global solutions” and indeed “global governance.” Suddenly issues like the flow of “human capital” (aka mass migration) become complexities to be managed at the level of a global system, removing them from the legitimate concern of mere nations. This is the true meaning of the “globalism” which happened to appear at this moment in history: not free trade or anything so utilitarian, per se, but the conceptual expansion of the managerial elite’s eager, grasping reach to the entire planet.

In this context, the American managerial regime’s compulsion to begin attempting to surveil and manage the bank accounts of the whole world is wholly unsurprising — indeed it was essentially inevitable, as was the EU’s thirst for imposing monetary, regulatory, and ideological unity across the whole of Europe (and now beyond, as Elon Musk and others have discovered); as was the reckless expansion of NATO; as was the near-universal transformation of representative democracy into “managed democracy,” and so on. These things happened for exactly the same reason that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” apparatchiks invented themselves and burrowed into all our institutions, and why we now face the emergence of a transnational “censorship industrial complex” determined to minutely manage every word uttered on the internet: managerialism is a cancer, and cancers metastasize, it’s just what they do.

Before I conclude, however, let me address what I expect is one key difference in perspective between Pinkoski and myself: that is, the question of whether or not this managerial regime should be described as “liberal.” Pinkoski calls our actually existing regime “postliberal” on the view that “the cornerstone commitment of liberalism is to a meaningful distinction between society and the state.” But from my perspective that isn’t really a particularly liberal commitment at all; rather, liberalism has always been first and foremost about “liberation” (which is, after all, right there in the name).

Now, I’ve already described liberationism as a key part of managerial ideology, but this is perhaps to understate its centrality. For any managerial regime there is no more important task, no higher calling, than to relentlessly seek to crush the only real threat such a regime can face: any other social force able to compete for the loyalty and obligation of citizens. Any independent social sphere — any guild, association, church, tribe, or family, and any home town, region, or today even nation — is an obstacle to universal management (and to the universal proliferation of managers). For managerialism, all such communities and attachments represent competing power centers, and thus all barriers must urgently be dissolved, all bonds broken, all distinctions homogenized. All bottom-up functions once performed by other social spheres, from insurance against the risks of life to the achievement of personal fulfillment, must be replaced by top-down bureaucratic management. The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

Did liberalism ever really stand in opposition to this crusade for total liberation? I honestly can’t see a time that it ever did; in fact, it seems to have always served as precisely the universal acid employed to do the job. Dissolving traditional bonds and limits has always been the heart of the liberal project. Thus I’m not sure we can say that liberalism ever held back the invasion of the public into the private; the progressive collapse of that distinction was actually its inevitable outcome. And so I think it’s fair to argue that we don’t yet wander in a postliberal age, but at liberalism’s apogee.

If a new, truly alternative civilization is ever to arrive, it will only do so in the wake of liberal managerialism’s self-induced implosion, and will have to be deliberately constructed — or, rather, reconstructed — out of the very same kind of strong communal and spiritual ties and identities that liberal managerialism has always sought to tear apart and devour.