Throughout the modern era’s magic bullet conspiracy, aka the dubious public health emergency named COVID-19, we have seen…a mysterious commune between the polarising ideals of left and right. As the puzzling voice of trade unions scuppers the early easing of lockdown, a strange chorus from friends and allies on the left begs to be spared the perils of rebooting the economy one moment too soon, and otherworldly communist ovations for political leaders.
Equally uncanny are the socialist programs running in stealth mode in conservative and republican strongholds. As authoritarians take over the means of production (or prohibit it entirely), migrate from a free market economy to a planned economy, a New Deal has been unveiled, and importantly, Western democracies are following China’s lead.
So, who’s in charge here?
Same as it ever was – the customary global hegemony calls the shots and nation states fall in line. World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations (UN) and World Bank. Vanguards of Capitalism, right?
Wrong. Those organisations were founded by socialists on socialist principles. As we shall explore. The same socialism that would ringfence our fast disappearing freedoms under the stockade of totalitarianism. That’s the general trade-off for state ownership of the means of production.
You would be correct to assume…the objective of this polemic is not to lampoon a capitalist system gone rogue. That’s old news and another essay. The objective here is to ruffle the feathers of capitalism’s reputed opponent – socialism, and to demonstrate the boundary line between the two adversaries is fictitious, when in fact, all political pathways lead to collectivism.
Importantly, the essay does not advocate for right, alt-right, neo-liberal, or whatever state-sponsored political descriptor you wish to throw at me. Neither is it an endorsement of any mainstream political stance. Rather, its purpose is to point out – the war is over, and the good guys not only didn’t win, they didn’t even take part. Because, the people’s representation at political party level, simply does not exist. It’s a full-spectrum myth, encompassing all political ideologies. Which by the way, are not your own. They are borrowed to you by someone else and designed to fast track their selfish and psychotic drives towards power. Which is of no consequence to you, the commoner, a political nobody, the non-political party class, the 99%.
What you are instead is the lucky beneficiary of empty gestures thrown from the political banqueting table, tantamount to popular suggestion and political innuendo. Designed to steer your consent, unknot and rebind your own supposed ideologies to theirs, habituating you to the illusion of choice, along the lines of – which party-politics you should follow, believe in, vote for, permit to continue plundering the earth’s precious resources in the name of, called: theirs and their friends special interests.
So, whether capitalist, communist, socialist, fascist, or whatever imaginary political differentiator is pulled from the illusionist’s hat that you personally want to subscribe to, it simply doesn’t matter…
…It doesn’t matter because…no matter who you vote for, the government always wins.
What’s more, when you strip it right down – there’s nothing in it. It’s all lukewarm air wheezing out of the punctured vacuum. No real points of differentiation between the cahoots and caboodle of political division. These guys are bought and paid for by industry, or the promises they made to the club that authorised their initiation. No matter which way you tell it, or whatever political descriptors you want to use, the proclaimed ideals of politicians are nothing more than hoo-ha’s and hullabaloo’s, and their commitments to the people are non-existent.
What they are instead, in no uncertain terms, are good old-fashioned authoritarians, doing what all bully-boy authoritarians do best, and that is…to subvert human nature and forcibly organise a cult around their centralised power structures.
The Fabians
So, in the spirit of ruffling some feathers our journey begins in the poetic and fertile lands of Ireland that has produced some of the World’s literary titans, including the social visionary, George Bernard Shaw, who said –
Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.
A man of his word, Shaw was a prominent member of the Fabian Society. A founding organisation of the British Labour Party, who have since enjoyed a lasting effect on British politics.
Inspired by Marxist ideals the Fabians, devised a gradualist approach to reforming democracies. Avoiding the fortissimo emblazoned on the bloody red banner of the their radical counterparts in communism. Preferring instead to manipulate the democratic process by stealthier and more resolute degrees, best illustrated in their logos, the turtle.
To understand the Fabians we can examine their iconic stained glass window, designed by Bernard Shaw and displayed at the Fabian established London School of Economics. It depicts the heroic Fabian leaders, (Bernard Shaw in green frock coat), violently forging a new world out of the old with giant hammers. While a cadre of Fabians kneel worshipfully before a column of oversized Fabian literature.
Note: the telling shield which depicts the ominous wolf in sheep’s clothing. Another totem of Fabianism, which ironically lacks the subtlety of their otherwise aphonic scheme.
The Fabians rubbed shoulders with the day’s intelligentsia, literati and high society at soirees, prevaricating down to earth working-class reform, such as selective breeding, scientific racism and sterilisation programs. Apotheosizing how the cult of their far superior brains would ameliorate their downtrodden compadres from the working class.
But beneath their appearance as valiant defenders of working men, the Fabians were a den of vipers, who harboured the most savage contempt for the poorest of the poor, who would be dragged from their wretchedness, whether they liked it or not.
According to their unique brand of reform – that glimmered upon the social sphere like the razor-sharp edges of a gingerbread man’s ferocious cutter – socialism is therefore not the compassionate redeemer of working men. But rather, the compulsory terms of their freedom. Designed to ensnare the brooding discontent of the times, from a social segment that were the gravest threat to the particular brand of elitism, which the Fabians belonged to.
The British Eugenics Society
The Fabians were playmates with another scurrilous bunch of privileged gentlefolk who also missed the cultural zeitgeist – the British Eugenics Society – who, in their determination to better the race, became the high priests of population control.
One of the co-founders of the Fabian Society, Havelock Ellis, who was also president of the Eugenics Education Society, and later became the mentor (and lover) of Margaret Sanger. Herself the founder of Planned Parenthood, which Bill Gates Senior (another eugenicist) was company head. Later, Bill Junior, would renew his father’s life’s work by investing billions of dollars into population control programs, mostly in Africa. Running with the same motif of scientific racism as Havelock and co. While playing god at the roulette wheel: the vaccine to sustain populations, and the pill to cut them short.
Eugenics was the grotesque creation of Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton. Who adapted Darwin’s theory of natural selection to suit his own fantasy – that society’s fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong (the fellow inhabitants of Galton’s own gene pool) and fewer of the weak. Thus, encouraging those of greater intellectual ability to have more children while violently urging those of inferior stock – through programs like Planned Parenthood – to reproduce less often or not whatsoever. The aim was to increase the overall quality of the national herd, by multiplying the wheat and weeding out the chaff.
Another affable eugenicist (and fellow Fabian), was trade unionist and Labour MP Will Crooks, who said affectionately of the disabled working class – they were ‘like human vermin’ who would ‘crawl about doing absolutely nothing, except polluting and corrupting everything they touched’.
Sentiments that seem almost complimentary, compared to Bernard Shaw’s hideous contempt for what we called the ‘underclass’. Best characterised by his idea that, “the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man”. Going on to say, the working classes had ‘no business to be alive’. Advocating the use of a ‘lethal chamber’ to solve this great burden to a prosperous society.’ Shaw, a staunch proponent of genocide, refused to soften his views even after witnessing the full horror of the eugenics-inspired Nazi death camps. Which brings us to collectivism and its assault upon the individual…
Collectivism
The Fabians first election manifesto for the labour party envisaged a government run by a ‘body of experts’. Or as Edward Pease put it ‘qualified rulers’. According to G.D.H. Cole – ‘Bernard Shaw did not care a button about democracy and was apt to admire dictators, if only they would give the experts a free hand’. Bless his cotton socks, Shaw kept a picture of Stalin on his mantelpiece.
The Fabians therefore aligned with all other branches of politicised socialism that view democracy not as an end in itself but as a means to achieve socialism. Marx himself regarded democracy as the very opposite of socialism, which would be ‘transitioned to through ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat‘. In fact, a ruling party of elites is considered the ideal structure for all forms of collectivism, whether Fabian socialism, Marxist communism or Hitler’s fascism. Indeed, it has been said that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. So, why then does socialism hold such cachet with those on the left, when it carries many hallmarks of the most abhorrent right-wing ideology?
Put simply, it is the cautionary tale that socialism would bring about a fairer, more egalitarian society, without class distinctions. Protect its weakest members, redistribute wealth and nationalise industry gone rogue under capitalism. Amongst those on the left therefore, socialism is the prized serum to cure society of the capitalist plague.
While all of this looks well-proportioned on paper, it would be wise to ask the questions: (1), What price must be paid for these protections? And (2), What are the consequences of the state flourishing beyond its legal residence – as a limited government that fosters individual freedom – to a tightly disciplined, highly organised, centralist regime, otherwise known as a dictatorship, that controls the means of production and interferes with the social, spiritual and economic fabric, to exact its collectivist vision? Remembering, the modal for society under communism or socialism is compulsory.
To find the answer we can look to the one-party system of the Soviet Union. Where under the Bolsheviks, only the Communist Party was permitted and even though voting was permissible in workers councils, in practice all candidates were pre-selected by the Party and its secret police. The Bolsheviks were indeed a shrewd bunch who impaled human rights, and whitewashed culture through the most brutal social engineering programs of the 20th century towards a single state ideology. Freedom of speech was criminalised, and any form of dissent was punished, often by death. Independent political activities were prohibited, including participation in labour unions, independent churches or opposition political parties. Moreover, Lenin and Stalin used terror to exact civil-obedience and disappearances and mass murder was commonplace. In fact, once the Bolsheviks seized power in the October revolution (from the real revolutionaries), there followed one of the greatest bloodbaths in history to eliminate their opponents. With Lenin enthusiastically declaring ‘it is a great deal better to discuss with rifles, than with the thesis offered by the opposition’
On the eve of his dictatorship, Lenin promised “the proletarian state will begin to wither away immediately after its victory, because in a society without class antagonisms, the state is unnecessary and impossible”
Yet, unsurprisingly, once he seized power, Lenin did the very opposite. According to Eugene Lyons, a correspondent for United Press in revolutionary Russia, who began his career sympathetic to the Bolsheviks: Once the Bolsheviks attained power ‘most of the Tsarist practices the Leninists had condemned were revived, usually in more ominous forms, including: political prisoners convicted without trials or the formality of charges’. There followed ‘savage persecution of dissenting views, death penalties for more varieties of crime than in any other modern nation, state monopoly on press and the most repressive practices which the previous monarchy had outlived for a century or more’
Are you beginning to get the picture?
It must be pointed out, the Bolsheviks are not alone, when, as a principle based on experience, politicians are an odious bunch ill-disposed to a free and empowered citizenry. Instead they firmly maintain: the public sphere needs to be governed with an iron hand. Because left alone, the unbridled ideals of common people would bring about chaos and compromise the very bedrock of society, whose foundation stone is the state and whose substructure is formed by politicians, like barnacles enjoying the free ride.
Authoritarians are, above all, in-it for themselves, their own partisan views, or the club they belong to. In their small and terrified minds, the public sphere must be arraigned with the sacrament of state consensus, towards collectivism. Otherwise known as socialism. There is simply no place for diversity in this arrangement. Individualism must be purged from the social fabric, because all citizens must pull their weight as cogs in the machinery. Under socialism therefore, individualism is sacrificed at the political altar, so the collective may suffer their gruelling mass.
Does any of this sound familiar to our current predicament towards a hidden collectivism?
Best illustrated through the mandatory wearing of face masks, which have been proven not to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2. With refuseniks branded narcissists or psychopaths for disobeying petty diktats enforced by groupthink and under threat of a fine, through dubious legislative powers, called Statutory Instruments, which are, in the Fabian tradition, laws enacted undemocratically by small, conniving groups of ‘qualified rulers’, bearing more hallmarks of Leninism than Conservatism.
Now let’s step into the jackboots of the political class to better understand their own motivations…
As a threadbare minority forcibly ruling over a majority, politicians are fully aware of their tenuous position. Especially the potential for insurgency amongst non-confirming social groups. Because if those citizens ever got round to lifting their blinkers, they would soon enough realise the gravity of their situation, and take it upon themselves to violently transform society, in a manner unfavourable to the state. That would resolutely bring about the end of the political-age as we know it. Accordingly, politicians’ resort to arcane methods of manipulation, counterinsurgency and divide and rule, in order to eliminate the power of the people. Do not be under any false assumptions, politicians are not looking to dilute their market share, they are looking for full market capitalisation. Otherwise known as collectivism.
Which leads us to…the enduring state of emergency – the modern era’s political weapon which armours the state’s tenuous position and robs the people of their power. From 9/11, through climate change to the pandemic, the harvest of each event suspends democracy and compounds collectivism. The rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany, for example, happened once the people surrendered their rights for protections against a common threat. As in the case of the burning down of the Reichstag. A practice that has been refined over 70-years, culminating in COVID-19, the most politicized disease in history.
The key to understanding the power of emergencies in transforming individualism towards collectivism, is knowing the influence they have on the public sphere, called: mass hypnosis. Wherein, under the emergency modal, citizens quickly forget the fundamental legal basis of government, and that is to protect individual freedom from individuals or groups who would attempt to limit that freedom. The US constitution, for example, is founded on the principle of a minimal government for and by the people. Because the founding fathers knew too well the ambitious nature of the state towards centralisation would only result in tyranny, if the necessary checks and balances were removed. Causing the state to become the very predator it was mandated to protect the people’s liberty from.
We must also acknowledge – the state has always been a predator. Whether marauding despot, kings or thieves unashamedly plundering, or legitimate authoritarian hiding behind the law. Not much has changed throughout history, with the exception of the methods used by the state to stalk more power. These have indeed become more sophisticated. Because with legitimacy, power becomes authority, skulking behind the virtues of democracy. Which in times of emergencies (or universal deceit), can be used to advance society towards collectivism. As in the case of the Russian Revolution – that transferred power from the illegitimacy of the Tsar, to the legitimacy of the Bolsheviks. Comparable to our current predicament, where the British government has forcibly enlisted each and every one of us. Thus, organising a cult around their centralised power structure, in the Bolshevik tradition, that means giving up our ill-conceived freedoms for protection against the pandemic.
This collectivism is achieved through the public’s inherent desire for a reputedly fairer and safer society and it is based on science. Or more precisely, the political establishment’s obsession with studying human nature as a specimen in a glass jar. Weaponizing the best research in sociology, psychology and behaviourism, from the likes of Freud. That makes government masters at operating our levers, especially those that drive us towards fear and groupthink, using the shock doctrine of emergency, that paints a pretty picture of salvation, waiting in the collectivist wings, once our consent is granted.
This is the gradualist approach to manipulating society: from the closure of non-essential shops, to the lockdown, to mandatory facemasks on public transport, to mandatory facemasks in all public spaces, to whatever hideous new regulation lurks behind the previous one. Until the cannon smoke settles on the battlefield and we can clearly see Fabian devilry at work, as the public is taken through the labyrinth of monumental change, by a ‘body of experts. In this instance, SAGE, Imperial College and the WHO. As we shall explore in Part II.
Dustin Broadbery is an anarchist based in London, interested in social theory and particularly how a mutual society could bring about great advancements in the social fabric. Reach him on Twitter: twitter: https://twitter.com/TheCogent1
Source: The Cogent
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