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The first time I mentioned CJ Hopkins in an article was in Dec 2021. Hopkins wrote one of the most significant paragraphs of the GMC for me (Global Medical Crisis; for those new to this substack).
Empire attacked the world. It was a geo-political act. This political act was ingeniously disguised, and made invisible, as a necessary medical act. Disguising the political as medical is such a brilliant move! Hopkins gets all the credit for helping me see that and giving me the language to articulate and understand it. Hopkins has a way with words. He is a playwright after all. He recently wrote a brilliant piece about The Monster. It is worth amplifying. I’m sprinkling in some other thoughts… With thanks and appreciation to CJ Hopkins.
CJ HopkinsI have been fighting this monster, in my art, in my mind, and out in the world for as long I remember. You have to fight it everywhere at once. To fight it in your mind, you have to fight it out in the world. And to fight it out in the world, you have to fight it in your mind. Let me tell you about the monster. The monster is legion. It goes by many names. It wears many faces. They change over time. William S. Burroughs called it “The Control Machine.” Some people call it the corporatocracy. I call it global capitalism. The monster doesn’t care what we call it. It doesn’t care who we are, what our politics are, or which side of what war we think we are on. It doesn’t care what we believe, which religion we profess. It couldn’t care less how we “identify.” All it cares about is power. All it cares about is control. This game is as old as time and never gets any less dirty. They do it because it works. They do it by relentless increment. They disorient, they frighten, then they take. When you wake up and push back, they give a little back, slide into the background, and wait for you to calm down. But you never get back 90% of what was usurped and it just normalizes such takings for next time. And there is always a next time. It is everywhere, and nowhere. It has no country. No nationality. It doesn’t exist. It is everything, and nothing. It is the non-existent empire occupying the entire planet. It has no external enemies because there is no outside, not anymore. So there is no real war. There are only insurrections, carried out by rebels, traitors, terrorists. What’s happened in the last four years is that Capital got tired of playing grab-ass (small rates of return in liberal democracies for the past 50 years), took off its mask, and regressed back into the naked brutality of conquest. With Covid, the biowarfare industrial complex just said, ‘F*ck you peasants, we’re more than willing to use violence on a massive scale to take your bodies, your DNA, your savings, and your lives and there is nothing you can do about it.’ Government, banking, and management consulting were more than happy to help them do that. And they proceeded to murder 17 million people and take all of their wealth and are planning to keep doing this for as long as possible (with the help of the WHO, WEF, World Bank, IMF, and other institutions). The monster, our non-existent empire, is the first global empire in human history. It is not a group of evil people. It is maintained by people, but they are all interchangeable. It has no headquarters. There is no emperor. There isn’t any “Bastille” to storm. It is a logos. A system. An operating system. People who are at the highest end of the pecking order, which is below the ruling class, often make this choice to secure some perks (speaking engagements, book deals, large philanthropic donations to their NGOs) that keep their own head above water, while they stand on the heads of those below, who have no choice and are forced to speak lies. It has no politics, no ideology. Its official ideology is “reality.” Thus it has no political opposition. Who would argue against or oppose “reality”? Lunatics. Extremists. The terminally deranged. And thus there are no dissidents, no opposing political parties. There are only apostates, heretics, blasphemers, sowers of discord, “reality” deniers. Once a belief system is in place, it matters not a jot whether it is 10% flawed or 95% drivel: anything that contradicts it will be covered up by those who are fanatical adherents to the cause…Believers beget believers, and then believers beget deceivers, who use racks and trial by fire and book-burning and concentration camps… It manufactures “reality.” Whatever “reality” it needs. The War on Terror. The War on Populism. The War on the Virus. The War on the Weather. The War on Hate. The War on Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It is all the same war. The same “Clear-and-Hold” op. The same counterinsurgency. It has been for about 30 years. If things seem crazy, if you’re wondering what’s happening, that is what’s happening. That is all that is happening. That is all that has been happening since the end of the Cold War. Far better is to pass legislation committing future governments to Do Something and let them deal with the mess. Then you can reap the short-term rewards of being tough on carbon emissions, without bearing direct responsibility for all the chaos that actually being tough on carbon emissions would unleash. The empire is eliminating internal resistance, any and all forms of internal resistance. The monster is monsterizing everything and everyone. Transforming societies into markets. It doesn’t have anything else to do. It is erasing values. It is dissolving borders. It is “sensitivity-editing” culture. Synchronizing everything and everyone in conformity to its only value … money. Rendering everything a commodity. I once asked the doyen of Australian climate realists, Ian Plimer, why he still bothered to fight the good fight on climate change. My view is that this war is over, and no amount of rational, evidence based argument against the net zero nutters will persuade them to change their minds. Ian agreed up to a point, but said that he and others on the side of climate truth had a duty to place on the record the real picture, for future generations and future historians. It is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, the part where the monster does away with democracy, with the simulation of democracy, and proclaims itself “democracy.” It is global-capitalist Gleichschalt That’s the monster I have been fighting. “They can pretend that's not what it's about, but the fact that the news media are participating in this, is grotesque. It's a complete destruction of whatever reputation and integrity they used to have,” he added. “Organisations like BBC and ABC… they used to have reputations for independence and integrity, but they've now decided to destroy their entire reputation on the mantle of them being the deciders of the truth. The Central Committee. That's totalitarianism that's not free speech.” Which makes me a terrorist. A conspiracy theorist. A Russian propagandist. A Covid denier. A right-wing extremist. An anti-vaxxer. An anti-Semite. A transphobic racist. An enemy of “democracy.” A Hamas supporter. A Donald Trump supporter. An AfD supporter. Whatever the official enemy happens to be today. It makes me a criminal. A thought criminal. An art criminal. Which I literally am. The German authorities are prosecuting me for disseminating art. For tweeting art. Pictures. Words. They banned one of my books. So maybe I’m marginally interfering with their ideological conditioning, with their programming, with their New Normal Gleichschaltung op. If so, good, because, if I can quote another German, “art is not a mirror held up to reality, it is a hammer to shape reality with.” And I’ll go a little further than Brecht. Every work of art we make shapes reality one way or another, whether we intend it to or not. It either feeds the monster or it fucks with the monster. The monster out there, and the monster in here, inside us, all of us … because it’s all the same monster. We live in times in which most of what we thought we knew about the strategies for social and political change have been blown up. That’s simply because the normal world we knew only five years ago – or thought we knew – no longer exists. Everything is broken, including whatever imaginings we had about the existence of this Overton window. What to do about it? I would suggest a simple answer. Forget the model, which might be completely misconstrued in any case. Just say what is true, with sincerity, without malice, without convoluted hopes of manipulating others. It’s a time for truth, which earns trust. Only that will blow the window wide open and finally demolish it forever. Thank you, all of you who are fucking with the monster. That is all. Let’s keep it up. |
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