In These New Times

-O douleur!o douleur! Le temps mange la vie,

Et l’obscur Ennemi qui ronge nos coeur

Du sang que nous perdons croit et se fortifie

(Oh horror, oh horror! Time consumes our lives

And the obscure Enemy gnaws at our hearts

As ,on our blood that flows, he thrives)

Charles Baudelaire

The War on Humanity

Cailean Bochanan

1st March, 2009

In the ideological struggle between socialists and pro-capitalists,both held the  view that capitalism was a great motor force for the development of the productive forces,but the former, especially the Marxists, seeing it as, at a certain point, becoming a barrier to these forces. Both were at great pains to stress that their systems were preemninent in this aspect, since, in their minds, human advancement was dependent on  sufficiency and a democratic society would also be prosperous society. They were, I believe, both correct to stress this relationship and to realize that the credibility of their systems depended on their ability to create a plentiful supply of those things necessary for a civilized existence  These progressive views of history saw freedom from want and scarcity as the key to the development of the free individual, of the citizen as opposed to the slave.

The rosy view of the future espoused by both left and right has been undermined in the last thirty years as a wave of destruction has been unleashed in the world, destroying real economies, sinking entire nations and continents into near oblivion. Various theories of crisis have sought to explain these events as natural or inevitable economic events, due, for example, to falling profitability,restructuring, peak oil or unsustainability. We have the notion of creative destruction, the supposed emergence of new productive forces from the ashes of the old. But, as things turn very nasty indeed, it is a timely moment to turn away from these theories which all rest on the notion of automaticity, of stuff that happens, and look at human agency, at the directing, if hidden, hand behind these events.

These theories view social classes as being determined economically, within the realm of the market, through a spontaneous process. Thus we have an ascendent class of capital accumulators who grow rich on legitimate business or the exploitation of workers. Children of the market they are ultimately at the mercy of its whims. But are there none who stand above this process, whose power is more firmly entrenched within the state and who don’t go under when the market falls? Clearly, there are and if there is one thing we should all have learnt in the course of the “credit crunch” it is that, in the West at least, a core of financiers is untouchable no matter  what the market says. The reality of our society has been laid bare and our past errors are clear to see: it is not a “bourgeois society” or a democracy, it is an oligarchy. It is not the thrifty capitalist who is emblematic of our society but the robber baron whose property is theft. It was a great ideological slight of hand that concealed from us that this was always so, that  economy and politics, wealth and crime, were intertwined.

And so the rise of the West was founded on the emergence of oligarchy and its twin, empire. Oligarchy lurked behind the scenes throughout this history, directing affairs overtly or covertly. Now we stand face to face with them for the first time in all their arrogance and we must, as a matter of urgency, ask ourselves what it is that they aim to achieve and why, now that their financial machinations have been exposed, they are intent on staying at the healm, come hell or high water.

We have shown that a consensus existed that  prosperity is the precondition of progress. But now we must apply the converse: for the oligarchy to hold sway they must create scarcity, they must embark on the course of destruction. Only in this way can they block definitively the strivings of the the world’s peoples towards democracy, towards their fulfillment as human, social  beings. This course of destruction is what we have lived through these last thirty years and it is gaining frighteningly in intensity.

Peak food.

But this destruction is not just economic, it involves the destruction of people: everywhere around us we see evidence of this and alarm bells should be ringing as we hear more and more talk of food shortages  appearing suddenly out of nowhere.  Even more alarmingly, the one clear reason why we may be approaching famine brings scarce a word in the media: the pollinators are disappearing including the most important amongst these, the honeybee. There is research dating back decades which shows that exposure to EM radiation causes symptoms like those of CCD(Colony Collapse Disorder) but this also is  kept from our attention. The pollinator crisis, left to run its course, will lead to famine on a global scale as surely as night follows day.

Other assaults on our well being flit across our consciousness, often, without really registering . We have been injecting our children with mercury(thimerosal), exposing ourselves to higher and higher levels of dangerous EM radiation as through the mobile phone network, W-fi, Wii etc.. Iraq, Serbia, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan have been bombed extensively with depleted Uranium tipped weapons, the horrific consequences of which have been clear for some time. Yet our response is not proportionate to the danger to which we are being exposed. Perhaps we have just fallen to the powers of persuasion of the good doctor, Repacholi, and have failed to see the cloven hoof. Reckless projects like flouridisation and GM crops are being given the go ahead over the heads of millions of objectors. Public health is deteriorating rapidly and in proportion to the dispensing of new drugs and the suppression of alternative medicine. What motives could be behind all these lethal innovations? Conventional wisdom tells us profit and that is indisputable, but the elite seek not just money but power, their perpetuation as an elite, and that they can have not only at our expense but at the expense of our lives.

We come then to the question of evil, a question which has been largely written out of contemporary discourse, except within the context of bearded clerics and fictitious terrorist organisations. We inhabit a world of angels seemingly, angels of stunning ineptitude but, nonetheless, angels. See no evil is the motto of our times: we see no cloven hoof. In vain, did great writers like Shake-speare, Baudelaire, Stevenson( along with James Hogg, the Ettrick shepherd) and Sorley MacLean labour to alert us. Thus we find ourselves engaged in a struggle to survive, which we are in danger of losing, against an enemy who does the unthinkable whilst we can’t even think it. The enemy thinks and acts strategically whilst react only tactically to each thing as it arises: they are fighting a war whilst we skirmish with then occasionally. They are fighting a war on humanity.

Of course, I don’t refer to evil as an absolute, as a theological notion or as something arbitrary. I am trying to show the logic of this evil from the point of view of oligarchy, the logic which Shake-speare revealed in Macbeth of how power attained through crime can only be held through more and more crime. The logic of oligarchy that also demands that its perpetuation be based on the enslavement of the ever depleted ranks of humanity in a global gulag. This is not so much a conspiracy theory, but a theory of conspiracy: I’m trying to show why our deepest fears and suspicions may relate to an essential, missing piece, of reality.

There is a statue  in Glasgow of the Spanish republican heroine La Pasionaria. She stands with her hands aloft as if bearing her breast to be shot, an image which stands at odds with what we know of her and her famous cry:”no pasaran”. The solution to the enigma is that for reasons of political correctness the gun she was to hold defiantly to the skies was vetoed. Political correctness certainly seeks to disarm us in our struggles but it is not so much the gun that is lacking, but the truth about ourselves and our capacity for evil.