"Resisting Global Tyranny: Nationalism, Religion and the Golden Chain of Tradition" by Paul Cudenec

 

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Source: Winter Oak

RESISTING GLOBAL TYRANNY: NATIONALISM, RELIGION AND THE GOLDEN CHAIN OF TRADITION

Posted on October 9, 2023by winter oak

by Paul Cudenec

I have always felt an extreme dislike for globalisation.

It flattens our cultures, annihilates our autonomies and steals our futures. It rips up the roots of our belonging and flings us into the greedy gaping jaws of its all-devouring worldwide Machine.

Why then, some opponents of globalisation might ask, having also noticed my enthusiasm for Indian spiritual warrior and nationalist Sri Aurobindo, [1] am I not myself a nationalist?

On a particular and personal level, this is partly because I am English, or British. Here we see the first problem I have with nationalism – I don’t even know how best to describe my nationality!

Moreover, in either case, what is the entity against which English or British nationalists should be asserting their sovereignty?

With the EU out of the way, this would presumably be transnational and global institutions like the WHO, the IMF, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, NATO, the WEF and the UN.

While I, like many others in my native land, long regarded the USA as the source of this globalist imperialism, the truth is, in fact, on our doorstep.

As reflected in the fact that the Great Reset was officially launched by the man who is now King Charles III, [2] the global criminocracy [3] has deep historical connections – administrative as well as financial – with London.

So a primary target for the independence-asserting efforts of an anti-globalist English/British “nationalism” should be London itself.

I am now placing “nationalism” in inverted commas because this is clearly no longer what we are dealing with: a nationalist struggle for English or British independence from London is a strange notion indeed!

In truth, our freedom-affirming anti-globalist energy must necessarily go beyond the question of national independence to target the structures and impositions within that national framework which are the root source of global exploitation.

Although this reality is particularly clear with regard to Britain, the principle remains the same for other countries, even those with a history of being the victims, rather than the proponents, of imperialism.

The idea of loyalty to a nation has always been used to distract attention from the enemy above, the ruling clique whose self-interest usually eclipses any sense of solidarity with the people as a whole.

Today, as we know, the ruling political class everywhere has furthermore been directly “penetrated” by globalist networks [4] and thus represents the primary immediate enemy for all anti-globalists.

This remains true, of course, even when these politicians pose as nationalists and use the language of nationalism to gain support from the public!

There is much that is problematical about nationalism, such as its role in justifying the existence of a central state and the “national” uniformisation which was crushing organic autonomies and cultures long before globalisation.

Nationalist passions (whether British, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Palestinian or Israeli) [5] are also regularly exploited to gain consensus for bloody conflicts in which the losers are invariably the peoples concerned and the winners the usual global financial parasites.

“Nationalism” would clearly have to be of a particular kind in order to see off global control and contain within its thinking the understanding that although nationalism might appear today to be the antidote to global imperialism, it was historically a stepping stone in that direction and can still serve as a veil for concealed ruling-class adherence to globalist agendas.

Such is the criminocracy’s reach and domination that it is able to take over and redirect pretty much any political or philosophical movement that arises to challenge its rule.

This appears to be happening to perennialism, or Traditionalism – an understanding of the shared core of the world’s religions that also potentially provides us with a powerful source of morality to counter everything the vile globalists are trying to impose on us.

The alarm bell is sounded by Sufi Traditionalist Charles Upton in his 2022 book The Way Forward for Perennialism.

He warns: “As a parasite on Truth, evil forms its own inverted metaphysics, and inverted morality as well; it forges its own Counter-Tradition and Counter-Initiation with scraps and fragments of doctrines purloined from the Primordial Tradition, and from the various Divine Revelations that are its branches”. [6]

“The doctrine of the Transcendent Unity of Religions, true as it is, cannot be announced to a world ready to believe it, but not capable of understanding it, without giving aid and comfort to those who are working to homogenize the world’s faiths into a One-World Religion, and consequently destroy them, partly by means of a Satanic counterfeit of this very ‘meta-doctrine’.” [7]

Upton fears that the perennialist idea is being reduced to a kind of global pseudo-spirituality designed to prop up the planned one-world government.

Against this threat, he reminds us of his Traditionalist insistence that while a perennialist awareness of the transcendent unity of all major religions is important, it does not, itself, amount to a religion.

In order to find vertical depth, as well as horizontal range, one needs to follow the path of a particular tradition, he says.

Titus Burckhardt spelled out the somewhat limited possibilities on offer from the Traditionalist menu: “There is no spiritual path outside the following traditions or religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism; but Hinduism is closed for those who have not been born inside a Hindu caste, and Taoism is inaccessible”. [8]

In principle, I understand the significance of engaging seriously in one spiritual tradition, rather then merely indulging in a religious pick-and-mix, but in practice I come across a couple of problems.

The first, as with the question of nationalism, is on a particular and personal level.

Given my cultural background, the most obvious spiritual path for me to have taken would have been Christianity.

Today I can see the light in this faith shining out through sacred art, music and architecture, as well as through the words and actions of Christian friends.

But as a boy, I found neither spirituality nor inspiration in the flat and dreary religion I encountered via Methodist Sunday School and Church of England school assemblies.

I have subsequently felt the Christian church to have played a key historical role in stifling the human soul, in denying our belonging to nature and in blocking authentic spiritual understanding. [9]

The obvious contemporary corruption of Christian institutions by the global criminocracy (whether the Roman Catholic Church [10] or the Church of England [11]) hardly encourages me to revise this opinion.

It’s not just Christianity, either. There seems to have been no shortage of “sharia scholars” coming forward to approve Covid jabs in the name of Islam [12] and the United Nations is proud to be “blending Islamic finance and impact investing for the Sustainable Development Goals” [13] by creating a Global Islamic Finance and Impact Investing Platform. [14]

Upton seems well aware of all this and his answer is to go beyond corrupt current institutional forms to reconnect with the Tradition itself, as passed on over the centuries.

But even here, I have my doubts. For instance, while Christians trace their faith back, via the apostles and the oral tradition, to the words of Jesus Christ, the gospels we know were carefully selected to present a certain line.

Was the Christian faith not already being corrupted when it was shaped into a suitable official religion for the Roman Empire?

In general, are not all religions mere forms, intended to communicate greater truth, which can ultimately be hijacked for other purposes?

Is there not a risk, if we attach ourselves too closely to those human-manufactured forms, that we will lose sight of the sacred essence?

I see a clear parallel here with the way that we have to go beyond the corrupted forms of nation-states in order to reconnect with the essence of the impulse we have been taught to label “nationalism”.

There is a connection between the Traditionalist principle that “the religions are both intrinsically one and necessarily multiple” [15] and the notion of “nationalism” transformed into universal self-determination, on every level.

There is a difference, as well, in that the spiritual path sees our ultimate identity in the higher One, while that of political self-determination emphasises an empowerment from below – our freedom to be ourselves, as individuals and communities.

But there is no contradiction, only complementarity, and it is perhaps in combining these approaches that we can best protect both from corruption.

A rooted anti-globalism enlightened by an awareness of wider belonging would less easily fall into the trap of narrow chauvinism.

And a spirituality with universal scope, but aware of the importance of cultural, political and economic self-determination, could not readily be co-opted to serve an imperial-globalist agenda.

More than that, I would say that both impulses are rooted in a deep sense of what feels right – they correspond to the archetypal sense of justice that is innate to our species, the yearning to take The Withway to somewhere we can call home. [16]

Upton identifies a revival of this point of view among today’s younger generation – “Christians, Muslims, the religiously unaffiliated, and even agnostics” [17] – who are rejecting postmodern woke dogma in favour of ideas both old and true.

“A large and growing body of sophisticated philosophical speculation and social analysis is being generated to serve and express this turn toward Tradition”. [18]

This latter observation seems highly signficant to me, since it is not just the form of religion that has been corrupted by the empire of modernity, but also our ability to think.

I have written elsewhere that the nominalists of the Middle Ages led us into a philosophical dead end of imagining that “reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else”, as the Big Brother regime insists in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I explained: “Nominalism, or the via moderna as it was known for a while, represented a challenge to the certainties of the original oldthink – or via antiqua – which had been inherited from classical Greek philosophy and before that from a catena aurea or golden chain of thought stretching back into remotest antiquity”. [19]

The via moderna of the globalists’ postmodern woke dogma recognises no such thing as essential truth, the universal human spirit or our innate desire for freedom born of belonging.

We therefore need to turn back to the oldthink of the via antiqua, seize hold again of the catena aurea, so as to be able to understand and express the possibility and desirability of a new Golden Age corresponding to innate human needs and to the harmony of all things.

Free peoples, close to nature, living simply, peacefully, honestly and humbly; cherishing their own specific traditions and cultures and yet understanding the bigger picture of their belonging to greater human, natural and cosmic wholes – this is the world that I would like the children of tomorrow to inherit.

And it is also, of course, the complete opposite of the nightmare future being lined up for us by the past-erasing globalist beast.

[Audio version]

[1] https://winteroak.org.uk/2023/09/20/a-spiritual-warrior-against-the-empire-of-greed/
[2] https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/04/15/charles-empire-the-royal-reset-riddle/
[3] Paul Cudenec, Converging Against the Criminocrats: Essays and Talks for the New International Resistance (2023)
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/convergingagainstthe-criminocratsweb-1.pdf
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOuLQDRCexs
[5] https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/10/14/a-crime-against-humanity-the-great-reset-of-1914-1918/
https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/03/09/the-great-reset-phase-2-war/
[6] Charles Upton, The Way Forward for Perennialism: After the Antinomianism of Frithjof Schuon (Philmont, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2022), p. 35.
[7] Upton, p. 104.
[8] Titus Burckhardt, Mirror of the Intellect (1987), p. 251, cit. Upton pp. 175-76.
[9] Paul Cudenec, The Stifled Soul of Humankind (Sussex: Winter Oak, 2014).
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/the-stifled-soul-of-humankind-w.pdf
[10] https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/05/30/francis-a-pope-of-the-poor-a-pope-for-the-environment-or-a-pope-of-the-global-elite/
[11] https://winteroak.org.uk/2023/07/12/the-church-of-england-enslaving-gods-children/
[12] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/18/muslims-wary-covid-vaccine-religious-reason
[13] https://www.undp.org/policy-centre/istanbul/news/blending-islamic-finance-and-impact-investing-sustainable-development-goals
[14] https://gifiip.org/
[15] Upton, p. 11.
[16] Paul Cudenec, The Withway: calling us home (2022).
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/the-withway-paul-cudenec.pdf
[17] Upton, p. 199.
[18] Upton, p. 199.
[19] Paul Cudenec, Nature, Essence and Anarchy (Sussex: Winter Oak, 2016), p. 23.
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/nature-essence-anarchy-w-1.pdf

"The Slow Art of Whole-of-Government 'Warfare'" by Alastair Crooke

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Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The Slow Art of Whole-of-Government 'Warfare'

Alastair Crooke

    April 17, 2023

Simple survival may become more pressing than addressing Macron’s speculative musings about the EU becoming a Third Force, Alastair Crooke writes.

The Washington Post tells us that President Macron’s China jaunt has created an European ‘uproar’. So it seems. Though on the face of it, his geo-strategic recommendation that Europe should keep equidistant from both the U.S. behemoth and the China colossus, is scarcely so very radical. Yet, whatever Macron’s underlying motivations, his comments seem to have touched raw nerves. He is accused of something approaching ‘betrayal’. The betrayal of America curiously – rather than a betrayal of ordinary Europeans.

Perhaps the irritation reflects our habitual love of comfort, normalcy, and a desire to ‘not rock the boat’. This normalcy bias keeps people frozen in a state of status quo, as if some inner voice intrudes to say: ‘things will be somehow ok. This will pass, and things will again be as they were. “Everything must change, for everything to remain the same”, in the famous quotation pronounced by Tancredi, Prince Fabrizio Salina’s beloved nephew in The Leopard.

On the other hand, Malcom Kyeyune, writing from Sweden, detects a more profound shift under way – an agony writhing within European Atlanticism:

“The war fever that swept Europe in the summer of 2022 made discussion impossible. Ritual denunciations of “Putinists” and even supposed Russian spies became commonplace on social media, and chest-thumping about the immense power of the West and NATO became obligatory. Again, there was a huge pressure not to notice things:

“The only acceptable position was maximalist: Suggesting that a peace deal would likely involve coming to some sort of compromise marked you out as a “Putin loyalist” and “Russian agent.”

“But once again, the fever is starting to break. Few still post about Ukraine on social media; people by and large prefer to pretend it isn’t happening. The chest-thumping has gone away, replaced with a sullen, bitter silence. People aren’t quite ready to admit that the sanctions were a failure and that the West overplayed its hand, but many know these things are true, and that the economic and political consequences of these failures are only really beginning to be felt.”

Is Macron picking up on these ‘vibes’? That is to say, the self-deception, by which we feel the illogicality of going about our daily lives with ‘darkening clouds’ looming ever closer, yet never questioning why Europe is being de-industrialised; why its industry is relocating to the U.S. or China; or why Europeans have to import Liquid Natural Gas at three or four times its going price.

Are Europeans then beginning to notice things again? Are they asking ‘how come’ the economic paradigm has been so drastically eclipsed, or ‘how come’ the fall into mad fervour for incipient wars with China and Russia?

Macron’s equidistant prescription is entirely aspirational. He gives it no substance; he gives no explanation of how strategic autonomy would be achieved, nor does he address the issue of ‘the empty stable’. There is no point in shutting the stable door now after the autonomy horse’ has long fled; It ‘fled’ with the war fever of 2022. We are therefore, where we are. Can the autonomy horse still be led home? That seems improbable.

So much of the ‘uproar’ no doubt reflects the warding-off of uncomfortable admissions, as things begin to be noticed again. Macron at least has opened the issue (however sensitive it may be); He is an outlier for the moment, but is not alone.

EU Council chief, Michel, in an interview, said: “Some European leaders wouldn’t say things the same way that Emmanuel Macron did”, adding: “I think quite a few really think like Macron.” And SPD chair in the Bundestag, Rolf Mützenich, said “Macron is right” and “we must be careful not to become party to a major conflict between the U.S. and China.”

There are multiple revolutions afoot everywhere across the globe. And Macron asks where does the EU fit in, which is fine. But he doesn’t give the answer. To be fair, though, at this point, maybe there isn’t one, for now.

Equidistant from the U.S.? Does Macron mean equidistant from specifically the Neo-con strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony through aggressive projections of military and sanctions power? If so, this needs to be made explicit.

For America, too, is undergoing a quiet revolution, and the Macron prescription could need nuancing in the case that the Ukraine war marks the final collapse of the Neo-cons’ short-lived ‘American Century’. There has been a noticeable tone of desperation to western MSM reportage this past week. Ever since the Intelligence leaks, it’s been doom, gloom and panic. The leaks have made uncomfortable truths unmissable (even to those who preferred not to notice) – that the vast ‘optics’ construct that is the Ukraine project is slowly coming undone.

The ‘Saving Ukraine for Democracy’ project was supposed to underwrite the legitimacy of the U.S.-led World Order. In reality, Ukraine has become the “harbinger of terminal crisis”, Kyeyune suggests.

The political path likely to be followed in America however, is far from straight-forward. It is possible though that today’s ‘Other Project’, the ‘western class war’ inversion ‘project’ may similarly collapse in the crisis (in this case) of U.S. societal schism. The Woke ‘project’ is an unlikely one – a strange neo-Marxist construct, in which an ‘oppressed class’ actually is composed of élite affirmative-action intellectuals (who lay claim to the mantle of being redeemed oppressors), whilst Americans, working in industry and in the low-paid service industry, are conversely denigrated as racist supremacist, anti-diversity, white oppressors.

China, too, is undergoing transformation: It is preparing for the war which the American ‘uniparty’ China hawks increasingly clamour. Meanwhile, its ‘political warfare’ strategy is to use geo-political mediation, underpinned by a powerful economy, as the non-intrusive means by which to pursue the Chinese operational art. This project already has re-shaped the Middle East –and its geo-strategic appeal is spanning the globe.

President Putin’s slow, long-term practice of political warfare (as opposed to China’s operational ‘art’) is clearly conceived with an understanding that the slowly-building disillusionment in the West with woke-liberalism – requires time in the chrysalis. In the Russian perspective, this Sun Tzu approach (overcoming the western paradigm, without militarily fighting it) calls for the ‘economy of military application’ within an all-of-system, holistic political ‘war’.

Russia’s is perhaps then, the more complex and more revolutionary: Embracing reform and efficiencies in all areas (cultural, economic, and political) of Russian society too.

China disavows the explicit aim to force a change of behaviour on the West, but for Russia its security is contingent on the U.S. fundamentally changing its military posture in Europe and Asia. This objective requires both patience and employing allcomplementary means at Russia’s command, (i.e. effectively ‘weaponising’ non-military tools such as financial ‘warfare’ and energy) to overcome the enemy – yet staying at some threshold, just short of all-out war.

The West, by contrast, conceptually separates the military from the political means, which perhaps explains why western analysts misconceive Russian ‘switching’ between military procedures to diplomatic or financial pressures as reflecting some deficiency or stumble in the Russian military machine. It is not. Sometimes the violins play; other times the cellos. And sometimes it is the moment for the big bass drums to sound; It is up to the conductor.

Julian Macfarlane has commented that Russia has started a veritable ‘revolution’, with China now joining in. To make his point, Macfarlane adapts Thomas Jefferson’s “we hold these truths to be self-evident …” speech and glosses it to say “… that all States are equally entitled to sovereignty, undivided security and full respect”. He contextualises this in terms of a Jefferson focus on the tyranny of the British Crown, whereas Putin formulates his multi-polar order doctrine, as versus U.S. hegemonic ‘Rules’ tyranny.

Xi Jinping says it straight: “All countries, irrespective of size, strength and wealth, are equal. The right of the people to independently chose their development paths should be respected, interference in the affairs of other countries opposed – and international fairness and justice maintained. Only the wearer of the shoes knows if they fit or not”.

It is a doctrine winning support across the globe. The EU would be unwise to discount its appeal.

So, back to Macron and the equidistant concept for European Union ‘strategic autonomy’: It is hard to see what space might comprise a median ground between homogenous, ‘Rules Hegemony’ and the Sino-Russian declaration of heterogenic ‘National Rights’. It will have to be one or the other (with perhaps a little ‘betweenness’ just possible, should the U.S. drop its “with us; or against us” dogma).

Equally, Macron warns the EU against the extra-territorial reach of the U.S. dollar (and therefore of sanctions and Third Country sanctions).

Yet, the EU cannot escape the U.S. dollar. The Euro is its’ derivative.

Europe has little autonomous defence manufacturing infrastructure. NATO is the political, as well as the military, framework in which the EU operates. How does it escape from a NATO framework that is so closely meshed in with the EU political one?

The EU is deeply divided on its future path: Macron wants more strategic autonomy for Europe (and Charles Michel says this is supported by not a few member-states), whereas Poland, the Baltic States and certain others want more America and moreNATO and a continuing war to destroy Russia. Poland has proved to be a vociferous critic of Western Europe’s perceived softness toward the Kremlin.

Indeed, the war in Ukraine has ushered in a kind of geopolitical shift in Europe, Ishaan Tharoor writes, moving “NATO’s centre of gravity” – as Chels Michta, a U.S. military intelligence officer, recently put it – away from its traditional anchors in France and Germany, and eastward to countries such as Poland, its Baltic neighbours and other former Soviet Republics. In Central and Eastern Europe, wrote Le Monde columnist Sylvie Kauffmann, “the weight of history is stronger … than in the West, the traumas are fresher and the return of tragedy is felt more keenly”.

The EU is deeply divided on structure as well: Warsaw, nervous about a general election due this autumn, is encouraging anti-German paranoia. Its propaganda suggests that Polish opposition politicians are secret agents in a German plot to take control of the EU, and to force degenerate western permissiveness on heterosexual Catholic Poland – a ‘bastion of western Christian civilisation’ – unlike Brussels, which is viewed as a as a “Germanised” conspiracy to overrule the right of independent nations to make their own laws.

Jarosaw Kaczyski, leader of the PiS party, plays with an alternative future for Europe. This would be a Europe des patries, almost on de Gaulle’s model: an alliance of fully sovereign nation states, within NATO but independent of Brussels, which would include post-Brexit Britain, rather than just the EU’s present members. (No EU Third ‘Empire’ there).

In a major speech, the Polish Prime Minister has emphasised that now is the moment to shake up the status quo further West and dissuade those in Brussels who would “create a super-state government by a narrow elite. In Europe nothing can safeguard the nations, their culture, their social, economic, political and military security better than nation states”, Morawiecki said. “Other systems are illusory or utopian”.

Elections are due this autumn in Poland, and polls suggest that the outcome will be close.

It seems that Macron has opened a veritable can of worms. Possibly, this was his intent; or maybe he just didn’t care – his objective being primarily domestic: i.e. to shape a new image in the context of a changing, and turbulent, French electoral landscape.

But in any event, the EU is caught in the midst of a maelstrom of geopolitical change at a moment when it faces the possibility of a banking crisis, high inflation and economic contraction. Simple survival may become more pressing than addressing Macron’s speculative musings about the EU becoming a Third Force.