Author: Patrick Henningsen

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 6 (Dec 2021)

If the last two years taught us anything, it’s that humanity is now at its most critical inflection point. We stand at the precipice of a major turning in western civilisation – the culmination of a millennium of human development, seminal events, knowledge, and culture.

It is undeniable, yet not at all clear, the direction we are headed, or what the future holds, and who will be around to see it come to fruition. We are not seers or prophets and cannot peer into the future, but we can read the signposts of the past and present. 

We have a wealth of shared experience and a vast living memory – a collective consciousness updated and added to every day. If we search humanity’s archive, we find answers to many of these questions. Those answers have always been available, gleaned from understanding ourselves, our journey as a family, and the human race.

French novelist Alphonse Karr famously coined the saying, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” or, the more things change, the more they are the same.

Yes, we have been here before.

Let’s step back to the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – a time of upheavals and period of great turbulence on many human fronts – politically, spiritually, and technologically. The western world was in the midst of an existential crisis as secularisation brought with it two disruptive forces to the traditional order of knowledge and influence: the rise of the intellectual and mass media. 

It is perhaps no coincidence that the world finds itself in a very similar impasse approximately a century later, with many of the same conditions present today, only on a much more pervasive level.

The parallels between then and now are astonishing. This should not be viewed as ‘history repeating itself’ but rather as a more intense interlude of what had already come to pass – only this time events are unfolding at much greater speed, propelled by advances in communication technology on a global scale inconceivable to previous generations. Such changes were equally profound in 1900, as were the transformations that took place across society.

As the 20^th century approached, theology was supplanted by evolutionary science. An ascendant Darwinian authority presided over existential questions like “Who are we?” and “What is man’s purpose?” 

Undoubtedly, this was a tumultuous time, intellectually and spiritually, with acrimony leading to heated exchanges between clergy and scientists, even leading to violent confrontations. But, with its newfound status, it was inevitable the secular power of Darwinian science would colonise the political and social sciences before giving rise to the sordid science of curative breeding known as eugenics. 

Recent history leaves no doubt that if left unrestrained by morals and ethics, wanton destruction and incredible suffering are wrought in the name of science and progress. These forces of modernity materialise in today’s advances in genetic engineering that have brought us back to that point once again: humanity faces the dilemma of resisting game-changing advances of technology and innovation or surrendering to it and prostrating at the altar of science and progress.

We are an entire century into a fully secularised society in the West. Today’s tech gurus, vaccinologists, and public health officials now occupy positions of prestige and command the reverence once reserved for pontiffs, philosophers, and poet laureates. The divine mysteries have given way to the ‘divine’ algorithm, and timeless sublime prose to the transience of the latest epidemiological model – from Gandhi to Gates, Whitman to Whitty, in just a few generations. How else could a man like Dr Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old career gatekeeper for the transnational pharmaceutical cartel, still occupy the US government’s highest-paid job, and recently voted People Magazine’s “sexiest man alive”? Albert Camus once said, “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.” Indeed, if not for the wave of mass hysteria and fear that swept over the world in February 2020, few would even know of Dr Fauci, let alone revere him as a demigod. On one level, we may be deluded into believing that today’s gaudy exhibitionists are mere frivolities of pure media spectacle, but behind the facade of political celebrity is an unforgiving ideology called technocracy.

You will often hear the trope that “more people have been killed over religion than anything else.” If only it were true. The 20^th century serves as a potent reminder of the misleading nature of that statement, for no other century witnessed the sheer brutality and crimes against humanity on an industrial scale perpetrated in the name of various despotic interpretations of some variant of social Darwinism or political science, reaching levels of totalitarianism never seen before in human history. There are too many examples: WWI, WWII, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, and Iraq, to name only a few. In almost every instance, the preservation of secular dogma took precedence over the lives and souls of humans who were unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire of ‘progress’. Fascism, socialism, communism, neoliberal capitalism – each would justify collateral damage as a means to achieving the goal of transformation or the formulation of a new order.

In the 21^st century, the forces that inherited the mantle of power – the dynastic families and special interests – are preparing the next act in this worldly saga.

The Grand Narrative

So often it’s been said that in war, history is written by the victors, who impose what is known as the ‘living memory’ of a nation or people, chronicling a shared experience, generally of collective sacrifice undertaken for the greater good, and paying tribute to the martyrs along the way. These become the narratives that post-war orders and worldviews are built upon, a central pillar around which the reorganisation of society and economies occurs. Without marshalling the “narrative,” a ruling establishment cannot lead and steer society in its direction of choice. 

What happens in the absence of a bona fide world war? Can elites still construct an equally compelling living memory which the people can rally around? 

Grand narrative management is precisely what Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF) has been attempting from the onset of the ‘global pandemic’ crisis. In 2021, the WEF announced its “Great Narrative” initiative, although evidence for this project can be traced much further back through a number of their documents and website presentations.

To create the requisite living memory, Schwab and the WEF replaced the usual military war piece with the new war on microbes. “The pandemic has revealed the acute need to focus on the future and long-term health of our societies,” said the globalist luminary.

While the rhetoric sounds innocuous, everything we’ve witnessed over the last 24 months proves beyond any doubt that their hyper-centralised ‘public health’ planning has little to do with the health of the individual and more about how the individual can be more effectively managed to serve the collective, that in turn is to be administered by the new technocracy. The WEF is merely the latest avatar for this elitist ideology whose primary goal is always to meet the ruling oligarchy’s financial and consolidation goals and objectives. This was true 100 years ago as it is today.

Just as with the global financial crash in 2008, when elites privatised their profits and socialised their losses through gargantuan government bailouts, so too will elites seek to consolidate their baronial individual asset wealth portfolios and privileged asset classes while demanding infinite self-sacrifice for everyone else – all for the greater good, of course. It is also about managing expectations, as the WEF states:

“The Great Narrative Meeting [in November 2021] is a linchpin of the Great Narrative initiative, a collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.”

You might be asking: what is their endgame? Put simply, every new world order needs a financial reset, and in the WEF’s Great Reset, the plan is to intentionally overinflate and collapse the current fiat money system, reimagined and replaced by a new globalised economic system backed by a new superficial asset class under the guise of the “financialisation of nature.”

That plan gained a significant foothold in October 2021 when the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Stock Exchange announced the creation of a new asset class that will effectively monetise the natural world as well as the processes underpinning all life. All in the name of “sustainability.” The lifeblood of this system will be a new Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which will be fully programmable, meaning that the currency issuer can stipulate how the digital money is spent. 

This is the highest form of social engineering conceivable and can become the payment mechanism for Universal Basic Income, allowing the government issuer power over what you are allowed to purchase. It could limit your transactions to green spending and ‘carbon-neutral’ activities. It’s also a system designed to eliminate upward mobility unless you gain promotion through the political economy.

It could lead to the ultimate victory of the technocracy. However, its Achilles heel might be that it seeks to remake the world in such a short space of time, presumably so these masters of the universe can marvel at their ‘remarkable achievements’ in this lifetime – the ultimate act of hubris by these self-anointed stewards of the planet.

When the technocracy movement first emerged in the early 20^th century, contemporary thinkers raised the alarm that pseudo-intellectualism and the mechanised worldview augured an eventual collapse of western civilisation. The timeframe wasn’t clear, only that it was inevitable. In his historical literary work, The Decline of the West (1928), Oswald Spengler described the event horizon that eventually consumes all major cultures, and which generally have a limited lifespan of roughly one thousand years. He examined eight major civilisations as examples: the Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Indian, Greco-Roman, Mayan-Aztec, Arabian, and European-Western. He envisioned the West being consumed by its intellectual vortex:

Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery, the media, that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.

Now realise what is at stake. The unconstrained vision of Davos elites may become the final revolution within a larger civilisational cycle. The Covid-19 pseudo-pandemic would be one of the catalysing events in this process, followed by global cyberwar, and then finally ending in something more outrageous like a nuclear conflagration before ushering in a New World Order. 

Such a protracted multi-phased upheaval would mark the end of the main features of modern western civilisation: the post-Westphalian nation-state, the era of enlightenment and rational thought, self-governing democracy and republican forms of government. The world would move into what Zbigniew Brzezinski called a Technetronic Era. Compared to the 20^th century, this would more resemble a centralised command and control economy and a highly automated society. In terms of individual rights, it would look like a neo-feudal dark age. 

This cycle was discussed by American writers William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book The Fourth Turning (1997), which illustrated how the development of Anglo-American society is a feature of a much larger centuries-old cycle. Or, as Italian commentator Federico Dezzanidescribes it, “like a snake biting its own tail over the span of a century, Anglo-American societies are born, grow, mature and die, only to rise again and begin a new cycle.”

The Noble Lie

In the end, it all comes back to Malthus – Malthusianism – which is ultimately the ideological standard hoisted by the likes of Schwab, Bill Gates, Stanley Johnson, Prince Charles, and globalist outfits like the Trilateral Commission. These elites believe that the people must bear the brunt of this epic existential predicament of an overcrowded planet in a state of terminal decline due to man and his industrial exploits, which is said to be driving anthropogenic global warming to the point where Earth will be uninhabitable. To save humanity from itself, we must be forced to accept that there are too many of us, so we play their globalist game of musical chairs. We know what they mean, but they won’t state their intentions openly, not yet anyway. Only it’s not true.

In Plato’s Republic, in the dialogue of the myth of the metals (social castes), Socrates explains that to maintain order and social continuity, the ruling class must act under the aegis of “the noble lie.” This is based on the belief that from time to time, the ruling class must feed the general populace an ennobling fiction to maintain order and continuity. The noble lie is noble because it benefits the soul of the person who believes it. From an elite’s perspective, this is done for their own good and that they might feel better about their station in life.

If you think about our living memory, or what happened in the West over the last half-century, it’s been a continuum of such lies, although hardly noble: the assassination of JFK, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Saddam’s WMDs, 19 Arab hijackers on 9/11, spreading freedom and democracy in Afghanistan, overpopulation, climate chaos, Trump-Russian collusion, Covid-19, the Great Reset, and soon it will be the coming war on China. Each epic yarn spun with the help of a 24/7 mainstream and social media barrage of propaganda and misinformation. By brainwashing the population incessantly, the establishment creates the illusion of a ‘bottom-up consensus’, so much so that the people believe they’ve collectively arrived at a grassroots consensus.

Drifting out noble lies in the 21^st century has become a pretty efficient process with the consensus enforced by digital dragnet: dare oppose any noble liedeployed by the globalist caste for your own good to ‘reimagine’ and reorganise socio-economic systems, and you’re treated the same as a blasphemer in medieval times – silenced, excommunicated, banished from view, and no longer permitted to speak in the public commons. Deplatformed, depersoned, cancelled. 

At the same time, however, a very real great awakening is also taking hold with a rising level of political and conscious awareness much broader and wide-ranging than anything before in human history. This is a consequence of the same global panopticon wielded against the people by the elites. Such awareness is the prerequisite to ultimate liberation, or as philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff once said, “If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realise that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.”

Which brings us back to the philosophical and existential question: why are we here? What is the purpose of humans on this planet? Darwinian genetic science says we are here to promulgate our genes and advance the species. On a fundamental level, this is what makes us human. But the new green technocracy says this is no longer possible, and we must embrace a higher truth – a new altruism imbued in the Great Reset doctrine. 

The irony is that collectively speaking, humanity might not survive this new ‘empty planet’ initiative. Elite technocrats will contend that only a planned society modelled after Huxley’s vision of a technocracy organised by functional castes and selective breeding in vitro can save the planet from the alleged existential menace of human consumption and climate change. 

Whose compelling future is this? Is this not the ‘scientific dictatorship’ that H.G. Wells foresaw, with a global government run by an elite committee of scientists and technocrats who hold the reins of power over every aspect of life and dictate how society is organised and run minute to minute? This is unconstrained totalitarianism. Under such a system, the individual will have no agency, no conscience, and eventually no soul. 

The last 250 years have been an extraordinary progression from monarchies to democratic nations, in which the state eventually assumed a god-like status. It set the stage for what is heading towards us now: the advent of globalist transhumanism and a one-world unified state.

Far from being its crowning victory, this crescendo of technocracy and the perversion of ‘progress’ exposes how materialism and the scientific priesthood cannot satisfactorily answer the fundamental questions we’ve asked since time immemorial, those eternal questions and divine mysteries pursued by monks, sages, and sannyasi. The forces of modernity cannot resolve this predicament, so people are left searching for something more grounded – where through the natural world they may also know the supernatural. Once again, people reach for religion and spirituality to find meaning and purpose, including (and not surprising as one may think) the younger generation.

We should be under no illusion about the challenges lying before us. But even beyond an awareness of what you face, you need to have a vision of a world you wish to live in. Elites have always been adept at occupying the minds of the people with propaganda, and the latest war or catastrophe, so we never settle long enough to formulate our vision of a compelling future. Instead, our vision is mired in a never-ending procession of reactive emotions, leaving us vulnerable to the power of suggestion – and a ‘compelling future’ is instead continually served up to us by our rulers. They create the problem (a noble lie) that elicits our reaction before they present us with a solution to which there is usually no alternative. 

Make no mistake: the great and the good in Davos are busy designing your ‘compelling future’, and if no other counter-narrative is offered, they will decide your future for you. It’s that simple.

Qui tacet consentit. Translated: your silence is your consent.

There is still much work to be done, but the work is never done. Throughout time, this has always been the case. The more things change, the more they are the same.

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Footnotes

1. Albert Camus (1963), quote from “Carnets: 1935-1942”

2. Wall Street’s New Asset Class Will Put Natural World ‘Up for Sale’, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wall-street-new-york-stock-exchange-natural-asset-company

3. Federico Dezzani, www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/covid-destruction-institutions-and-beyond

4. What is a Noble Lie?, https://kenyonreview.org/2007/02/what-is-a-noble-lie/

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 188 (Jul-Aug 2021)

We knew the world was changing in radical ways, but we never thought it would happen this fast. 

In 2015, I penned a feature article for this publication entitled “Oceania Forever: Rise of the Global Police State.”¹ After closely following the steady construction of a global control grid after 9/11, it was still difficult to see exactly where it was all going and why. Many of us knew the surveillance infrastructure would be permanent, and there was undoubtedly some speculation of an emerging supranational global government, but still no clear endgame in sight. 

All that changed in 2020, and many of my previous questions were answered. 

With the advent of the global pandemic, the global police state had finally received its marching orders.

Nearly a year later, in 2016, I wrote a follow-up piece in an attempt to visualise what an emerging technocracy might look and feel like – the shape of things to come, underpinned by the technocratic visions of arch globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski. That article, “Technetronic Enslavement: Life Inside the Matrix of Control,” was published in New Dawn 156 (May-June 2016). Since then, my suspicions have been validated and questions answered through the emergence of the globalists’ Great Reset agenda.

So here we are, a full eighteen months down the road of the Great Plague, and looking around we now see what life is like inside a New World Order.

No one expected it would come so fast and on such an international scale.

The shock and awe also signalled the beginning of what looks more and more like a post-democratic era – the ascendency of global fascism with cold technocratic features, orchestrated by an elite cabal of rapacious oligarchs, and remorseless bureaucrats taking their instructions from shadowy cliques of science advisors governing every conceivable aspect of our daily lives… right down to where we are allowed to travel, if we are allowed to work, what we can buy, whether our children can attend school, and even who we are allowed to meet. The level of control even extends to the mandating of masks and what experimental injections we are expected to receive in order to ‘win back our freedoms’ and return to normal life.

We’re told by our leaders that all of this is necessary and permanent, and that it’s for our safety, and the safety of the collective. The new regime is not just national, it’s global.

A New Order: Post-Covid Geopolitics

One thing became clear early on – nearly every government on the planet used the pandemic to tighten its grip on power and its domestic situation and quell any potential uprising or political opposition. Many countries have gone so far as to suspend parliament, delay elections, and impose a semi-permanent state of emergency. 

Countries more authoritarian, or with one-party systems, haven’t felt the same civil strife as many so-called democratic countries whose citizens might resist the removal of individual rights and freedoms. Still, even in those countries, the level of public compliance to public health policy edicts was almost shockingly seamless.

Certainly, in a country like China – the alleged epicentre of the pandemic – the government has managed its pandemic policies and lockdowns without too much pushback from the general population. Somewhat surprisingly, countries like the UK and others appeared to take cues from China early on, copying all of its symbolic policy moves, including the use of lockdowns to supposedly ‘stop the spread’ of the virus.

All of this comes with a very uneasy feeling. Only in preparation for war have we seen this level of rapid societal and economic reorganisation, the shuttering of institutions and services, and suspension of rights. This fact alone is worrying as countries invoked their fusion doctrines, resiliency measures, and international network routes are already prepared for an ongoing global upheaval.

One of the more disturbing features of the Western-centric narrative has been the scapegoating of China for the pandemic. Western politicians and media pundits accuse China, at the very least, of being responsible for a reckless ‘lab leak’ of an engineered coronavirus out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or at worst deliberately releasing a viral bioweapon that has killed three million people and devastated the global economy. Regardless of whether any of that is even remotely true, the reality is that a generation of Westerners are now conditioned to view China with suspicion, or worse, as the enemy.

A New Cold War and Return to Bipolarism

Are we being primed for a new Cold War, and if so, what would it look like?

In some ways, it would be much like the previous Cold War; a perpetual affair characterised by long-term, low-intensity conflict, both abroad (against the enemy) as well as at home (against domestic terrorism), carefully designed to hem in populations on both sides of a new global paradigm. 

Elites prefer a bipolar world rather than a multipolar one. For starters, a bipolar Cold War is much easier to physically control and administer. More crucially still is the management of intellectual and political life in a bipolar world order. During the US-led post-WWII liberal world order, political thought and philosophy were built up and maintained around a bipolar worldview and predictable power dynamics. It naturally lent itself to a fairly tight cadre of realist academics and intellectuals who fashioned the global political conversation along East vs West, and Capitalist vs Communist ideological discourse. This same intellectual syndicate, led at the time by international relations scholars like Samuel P. Huntington and Francis Fukuyama, declared “the end of history” following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Western liberal and free-market model had prevailed, they proclaimed, and for another few decades, the bipolarists performed a victory lap which ushered in an era led by a neoconservative and neoliberal unipolar phase of US and NATO-led domination of various global regions.

If a bipolar world order is to return, then it will likely be an Anglo-American led Western alliance vs a Chinese-Russian-led alliance. And like the previous Cold War, there will be a contested or disputed zone somewhere in between that serves as a convenient ‘away’ pitch for a protracted ideological, military and proxy conflict between these two great powers. One way to maintain a bipolar world order, and not allow it to develop into an uncontrollable, unpredictable multipolar world order, is to cripple the countries within the contested zones – in effect, weakening and even destroying emerging tiger economies and emerging markets. The object is not necessarily to bomb them into submission, although the West tried this over the last 30 years. Rather, it is to cripple them through economic sanctions or ‘green’ climate change regulations, preventing their development towards first world nation status. Economically weakening a country allows for the creation of a perpetual state of dependency on aid, resource extraction by foreign powers, leading to continuous political instability and a constant brain drain of its best and brightest who would usually form the vanguard of any future populist movement. This has been the neocolonial formula for managing target nations for much of the post-WWII epoch. 

In the context of present-day China, a variation of this Western strategy would aim to takeover or cripple the nations along China’s new Belt and Road Initiative. We’d see a return to Halford Mackinder’s “World Island” theory which saw the strategic imperative of controlling (or disrupting) a unified Eurasian landmass. This might also extend to the BRICS nations bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and also the newly codified “Axis of Resistance” comprising the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. While Belt and Road is global and primarily for the benefit of China and stakeholder nations along those trade and transport lines, its emergence serves as unwelcome competition to the predatory Western internationalist model. This could signal a return to Great Game grand strategy, pitting Western sea power against a Chinese-led operational control of the Eurasian landmass – the chief objective being the disruption of resource acquisition by China, and fracturing high-volume Belt and Road travel and commerce routes. In this new bipolar world order, many geopolitical routes and clusters might eventually become part of a “disputed zone,” not unlike the very one depicted in George Orwell’s geopolitical map in the classic dystopian novel 1984. 

This is not to say that an influential Eurasian geopolitical bloc based on traditional values and norms cannot emerge in the way that Russian political analyst and philosopher Alexander Dugin describes in his numerous treatises, such as The Fourth Political Theory, and Last War of the World-Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia, to name a few. But if the great powers are intent on preventing the unification of the World Island and forcing the world back into a bipolar paradigm, then it’s likely that Eurasia’s shatter-belt nations, the Middle East and Far East, could once again play a part in a cycle of instability and conflict. 

What better way to retain a firm grip on order at home and along the periphery of the contested zone than to declare perpetual war. For the elites ruling the Western bloc, a new cold (or warm) war also benefits them with raison d’état at home. Or, as Orwell famously said, “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

Over the last 40 years, China has been allowed to develop, but only to a point where it does not threaten the global political and cultural stronghold maintained by the Anglo-American control mesh of Five Eyes intelligence and NATO military alliances. From that viewpoint, economic and political gains are acceptable so long as they are confined to Asian wealth creation and prosperity. But the moment those gains are transformed into economic dependence of Western nations on Asian and Eurasian powers like China and Russia – the geopolitical alarm is tripped and the West’s rapid response mechanism springs into action. Western imperialists know that economic dependence would precede political subservience. 

Their fears may be well-founded, but the reaction can often be counterproductive and negatively impact countries and peoples caught in the middle. Certainly, this was a major source of friction throughout the Cold War (1947–1991), with instability from proxy wars of that period still enduring to the present day. Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project is a prime example. The United States and its allies made it a top priority to disrupt the joint Russian-German energy venture that will bring clean and affordable Russian gas to Europe. A series of regime change operations, proxy wars, false flag events, and all-out propaganda, was waged against Moscow to trigger economic sanctions and ultimately derail the pipeline. The thought of Germany becoming dependent on Russia and developing good bilateral relations is the stuff of horrors for the Anglo-American alliance which relies on constant East-West tension to keep NATO relevant and well-resourced as a military confab and extend its commercial interests through Europe and into the former Soviet states. 

Beyond this, one should be cognizant of the fact that any significant fossil fuel project will be viewed as a direct threat to the global elites’ Great Reset and UN Agenda 2030, and subsequent transition to a New World Order and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).

The Great Reset is very much a Western and European-led project. After WWII, traditional colonial powers became post-colonial powers and took on self-appointed custodial duties of planetary management, including ‘climate’ and environmental oversight of what they refer to as the ‘global commons’. By all accounts, this is Brzezinski’s great Technetronic era, only much more green in its rhetoric and governance, designed, we’re told, to save the planet by stopping anthropogenic (man-made) global warming, otherwise known as climate change.

Dangerous Delusions of Malthusianism

This phase of the New World Order, meant to save humanity from the supposed scourge of CO², conceals a rather disturbing continuance of an older agenda: population management, rooted in 19^th century Malthusian theory, and buttressed by a radical offshoot of Darwinism – a social engineering movement known as eugenics.² 

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was an aspiring social engineer who thought the global population would increase geometrically while food production increased arithmetically. What this meant was that humans would be unable to produce enough food to sustain themselves. Fortunately, Malthus was way off on his calculations, but his legacy endures. Historically, wherever you find ‘overpopulation’ discussions, you find eugenicists directing the conversation from the shadows through lavish funding by foundations and civil society organisations, or under the increasingly dubious guise of ‘public health’.

Two leading Malthusian proponents of recent decades are William Gates Sr, father of Bill Gates, and Stanley Johnson, father of current British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. 

As head of the world’s largest private abortion chain organisation, Planned Parenthood, and arguably the driving force behind Bill Gates’ obsession with vaccines, Gates Sr imparted on his son the elite responsibility of planetary management of the masses. Beginning in 2020, Bill Gates Jr has been leading the World Health Organization (WHO), the pharmaceutical industry, and an unprecedented intergovernmental effort, to vaccinate the world’s population with the experimental Covid-19 gene-based jab. When asked about safety concerns, Gates dismissed critics saying that the world did not have time to do proper safety testing and that any collateral damage must be priced-in for the “greater good.” Interestingly, before the pandemic, many of Gates’ media appearances focused on global population management.³ 

Stanley Johnson seems to be an even more staunch population reductionist and authored the novel The Virus (1982) about a pandemic threatening to wipe out Europe. He wrote other books obsessing about overpopulation, including the Population Problem (1970), Life Without Birth (1970), and World Population and the United Nations (1987). In one interview, Johnson opined that he would like to reduce the population of Britain substantially, flatly stating, “Britain’s population should be 10-15 million people. That would do us splendidly. It’s a nonsense that we are confronted with 70 million people. But we have been shunted aside by the rise of liberal correctness.”⁴ To call him a committed Malthusian would be an understatement. It would be useful to know how much of the father’s radical worldview is responsible for son Boris’ enthusiasm for adhering to the UN and World Economic Forum (WEF) Great Reset agenda, adorned with shiny new straplines like “Build Back Better.”

Woke Technocracy of Build Back Better

Invariably, eugenics leads directly to another branch of the elite technocracy movement – transhumanism. During this global pandemic crisis, the ascendancy of Big Tech, Big Pharma and BioTech industries has created an extremely soft-landing pad for transhumanist ideas and the fetishization of an endless array of ‘smart’ technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. These advances are certainly in development, but adoption is a slow and tedious process. Technocrats are taking advantage of Covid to gain a velocity unattainable outside of a staged crisis like a global pandemic. 

Social engineering, specifically a system of ‘social credit’ scoring, is now ready for implementation in the West. Elite technocrats look enviously at the Chinese social credit system in which citizen behaviour is assigned a score logged on a central database where officials can restrict privileges like air travel, buying property, or taking out a loan.⁵ This is not unlike Oceania’s citizen scoring system depicted in Orwell’s 1984. The idea may already have gained a foothold in the West through the new ‘Vaccine Passport’ system being aggressively pushed by governments and corporate elites. 

If allowed to proceed, this biopower tracking regime spells an end to previous universally held liberties like the individual right to bodily autonomy and freedom of movement. The imposition of such a system is a hard break from the post-enlightenment era of constitutional republican and democratic governments, giving way to the tyrannical proclivities of an increasingly powerful ruling class, draping itself under the veil of the common good to do the collective will – which can be fashioned through the relentless application of weaponised propaganda and applied behavioural psychology. The collective will or greater good can be whatever the state deems it to be, through the same process of manufacturing consent as outlined in Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s seminal text of the same title.⁶ The weapons of information warfare used to prosecute wars on foreign soil are now fully deployed against the citizens of Western countries. In this way, Orwell’s dystopian fiction is the playbook for what authorities have done in practice from the beginning of the Covid crisis.

In this context, we can view Klaus Schwab’s Build Back Better (BBB) clarion call for a Great Reset as a re-consolidation of the Western Hemisphere and its satellite properties in the developing world – and in direct conflict with China’s Belt and Road. BBB is pure woke technocracy and seeks to put a cap on any development which is not ‘green’. 

However, BBB goes much deeper than many people realise. At this year’s [2021] G7 Summit in Cornwall, England, British PM Boris Johnson raised a few conservative eyebrows when he declared that BBB would mean, “Build back greener, build back fairer, build back more… gender neutral.”

While this brand of woke identity politics was known to be present in the WEF material, it was still shocking to hear such progressive post-modernist proselytising coming from a Tory PM. This could also be viewed as an attack on the family itself – the fundamental pillar of any community, state or nation. In this regard, the Western-led drive towards a woke reset is an affront to the nation-state and prelude to an amorphous borderless globalist order. Of course, there will be borders, but perhaps only as exclusion zones – and accessible if a global subject is carrying the correct track and trace digital ID or Vaccine Passport.

What’s important to understand is that this kind of world order was not possible before. Only with new advances in digital technology, data sharing, satellite and surveillance networks, could such an insidious web be implemented.

Embryonic Global Government?

As they often say, a global crisis requires a global response.

The Covid crisis has accelerated the mechanisms required to obliterate the DNA of most sovereign countries through the digital systems used to administrate a new global governance regime. This has been achieved in the following ways – the closure of borders, the normalisation of Covid testing and digital IDs, the demonisation of physical cash and adoption of a cashless society, the final goal being the intentional collapse of the real economy leading to Central Bank-issued digital currency.

Under a future uniform technocracy, there’s no longer any need for democratic forms of government – only symbolic leadership elections of pseudo-populist figureheads who provide the public with stylistic or nuanced differences in appearance (age, gender, colour or ethnicity) and rhetoric, but no substantial deviation from technocratic prescriptions. Should an ‘elected’ leader pursue any genuine populist or traditionalist policies, they would be summarily removed by the real power centre – the high committee of technocrats. 

This system will be formally adopted first in the advanced Western regions and then in the developing world. The EU Parliament is the beta test for such a system, with MEPs elected in their respective member states, sent to Brussels, but they have no actual power to propose new laws. Rather, an unelected European Commission (EU civil service) ultimately drafts and proposes legislation, which MEPs are allowed to rubber stamp. Despite the undemocratic nature of the EU, there seems little or no protesting from member states. Under this system, change is not a grassroots or bottom-up political effort but a top-down exercise micro-managed by ‘experts’. To date, this is the closest model of embryonic global government, and they’ve had 30 years to fine-tune it before expanding to other global regions. By definition, it is a functioning technocracy.

Green World Order

The Great Reset transition to a Green New Deal and the “financialisation of nature,” paving the way towards automated 4IR, has been exposed in detail by several cutting-edge independent researchers.⁷ These plans are being hatched at the United Nations and Wall Street level (led by BlackRock), with the new multi-trillion dollar green bond markets, carbon credit trading, and other collateralised green futures and instruments, sold to the public by way of celebrities like Greta Thunberg. 

Government policies like lockdowns have accelerated this new green economy, not on its own merits but by wrecking the existing economy and squeezing out what are now deemed nonessential businesses and services, and anything that falls foul of the post-pandemic New Normal. This constriction will continue, and governments will print up even more money for corporate bailouts and to pay the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed and underemployed not to work. This is a price worth paying for the globalists because the inevitable inflationary cycles that are now set in motion will only negatively affect the lower and middle classes by robbing them of their savings and purchasing power. The elite and mobile globalist class will not feel the negative economic impact, and in fact have seen record gains for those in the favoured digital and ‘essential’ industries. Thanks to generous government ‘stimulus’ money over the last year, the net worth of the billionaire class grew by a quarter to well over $10 trillion and counting.⁸

As the culling of the real economy continues, that number could easily double by this time next year. These are the new robber barons of the early 21^st century, the superclass who will have the liquidity and capital to buy up the remaining assets tied to the old economy and invest in and own the ground level of the new green economy. Like the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Carnegies of the last industrial revolution and oil boom, today’s tech lords are set to dominate this New World Order for at least the next 100 years.

For these global oligarchs, things have never been so good. The New Normal helped solidify their position and wipe out prospective competitors for a generation or more. Schwab and the high priests of technocracy are excited about the destruction brought by lockdowns.

“Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never. Nothing will ever return to the ‘broken’ sense of normalcy that prevailed prior to the crisis because the coronavirus pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory,” opined the WEF leader in his Great Reset manifesto.

For many, this is a return of feudalism, but on a new global scale. Schwab admits, “We must prepare for a more angry world.”

The WEF technocrats call for a ‘fair’ Great Reset, run under the new banner of ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and always in the woke spirit of ‘equity’ and utopian-sounding global citizenship. The reality is that the top of this new ‘sustainable’ pyramid will be a hardened corporatist fascist layer dominated by top transnational corporations and government bureaucracies, while the bottom majority will have a collectivist, communitarian system imposed upon them. In the words of the Great Reset proponents, “In the future, you will rent everything” and “you will own nothing and be happy.” That is the future which technocrats are planning for.

Fascism & Conformity

After a year and a half, we are left asking ourselves how such an extreme brand of tyranny has been allowed to promulgate so quickly, and with relative ease. The answer to this question may lie in a study of 20^th-century fascism.

The mechanism of control is not necessarily down to flamboyant totalitarian leaders as one might presume. It’s much more subtle and deeper. According to the social psychologist Erich Fromm (1900–1980), the mechanism is found in peoples’ need to exhibit conformity as they harmonise with what he describes as the “authoritarian conscience.”⁹ The authoritarian conscience in its extreme form, he said, is not about following the commands of a charismatic, authoritarian figure. Morality is determined by conformism. “Virtue is to be adjusted and to be like the rest. Vice, to be different.”

The Covid crisis, with its tightly-wound government and corporate partnership prosecuting the pandemic, has elevated the virtue of conformity with religious zeal. This is now fully internalised by traumatised members of the public.

When a person goes against the group, it no longer brings fear of aloneness but also feelings of guilt. Once internalised, it has a powerful hold on people. According to Fromm: “Conscience is a more effective regulator of conduct than fear of external authorities; for, while one can run away from the latter, one cannot escape from oneself nor, therefore from the internalised authority which has become part of oneself.”¹⁰

This explains the power of self-policing behaviour. With individual rights and liberties stripped by the state, the individual is subsumed by the hive. 

Hundred Years War?

When US President George W. Bush famously remarked in 2001, “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” many thought they’d be digging in for a very long haul. Thus far, the global war on terror has spanned some 20 years.

The stage is now set for a series of new wars.

We are presently engulfed in a new war against another invisible enemy – a biological war against a virus. Or so we’re told. Whether or not SARS-CoV-2 is the bio-threat the government, media and pharma cartels insist that it is, we can be sure that a real war has been waged on our rights and freedoms. We can predict the prospect of a new global war on bio-terror, and an international bioweapons ‘arms race’ which will drive the new cottage bio-terrorism industry.

After the biowar, we can already see the rumblings of a new global cyberwar – complete with endless false flag cyberattacks causing untold chaos and unnecessarily stoking up even more geopolitical tension and animosity between the great powers. Note also that Klaus Schwab cryptically warned the world in 2020 that a cyberwar is coming.

Finally, after the biowar and cyberwar, there remains the final geopolitical spectre, the sum of all fears – thermonuclear war. This could take on a very different tone than the mutually assured destruction (MAD) model that ballasted the US vs USSR Cold War of the 20^th century. Today’s world is one of low yield ‘tactical nukes’ which could spark a number of scenarios with unforeseen reactions and outcomes. An asymmetric tactical nuclear war would be more chaotic and likely converge conventional military conflict and continuous cyberwar and bio-threats. Under these circumstances – real or imagined – locking down whole countries and regions as ‘exclusion zones’ could become routine. 

If the Fourth Industrial Revolution comes to fruition and the AI-run machines challenge the pre-eminence of humans on this planet, this conflict could last for one hundred years.

Overcoming the Illusion

These are scenarios based on the foreshadowing that has been broadcast by elites. Some of this, as undesirable as it sounds, could be possible.

In the end, Great Games and grand strategies are about power – who holds it and who wields it well enough to frighten opponents but still achieve strategic objectives.

In many different ways, the architects of this chaos have declared war on humanity.

Whether humanity prevails depends on if we remain human, and that depends on how well we see through the illusion.

We are here now. This is life inside the New World Order.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 188.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. Oceania Forever: Rise of the Global Police State by Patrick Henningsen, New Dawn 153 (Nov-Dec 2015).

2. Roles of science in eugenics, https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/
encyclopedia/535eee157095aa0000000256

3. Bill Gates on Africa’s population boom, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MMifQvuN08

4. Zac Goldsmith: climate change pushes other issues off the agenda, www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jun/06/climate-change-other-issues-goldsmith

5. The complicated truth about China’s social credit system, www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained

6. An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy, www.openculture.com/2017/03/an-animated-introduction-to-noam-chomskys-
manufacturing-consent.html

7. For example, the work of Cory Morningstar on www.theartof
annihilation.com

8. Billionaire Wealth Hits $10 Trillion For First Time Ever Thanks To Government Stimulus, www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwilliams1/2020/10/06/billionaire-wealth-hits-10-trillion-for-first-time-ever-thanks-to-
government-stimulous/

9. Conformism, www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/conformism

10. Ibid.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 161 (Mar-Apr 2017)

Make no mistake about it: for decades, the government-media complex has been waging information warfare against the public and on behalf of powerful transnational corporate interests. 

The latest fake news crisis is just another campaign in the information war. By throwing a variety of websites into one big basket and labelling everything with the derogatory term ‘fake news’, the political class and mainstream media are attempting to discredit alternative sources of information to regain some of the audience traffic they have lost over the last 15 years. They want to turn back the clock to a time when the establishment enjoyed a complete monopoly over news and information, and if there’s one thing that history proves time and time again – absolute power corrupts absolutely. 

Here are a few examples of some of the greatest fake news scandals of all-time – brought to you by the mainstream media…

In the winter of 1898, a terrible incident befell America when one of its flagship naval vessels, the USS Maine, sunk following an unexplained explosion in Havana harbour, Cuba. Afterwards some leading US newspapers took advantage of the confusion and emotive nature of the story. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and its racy sister publication, the Evening Journal, as well as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, blamed the incident on Spanish saboteurs. Shortly afterwards, the US entered the Spanish-American War in order to capture Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. 

The practice of over-reporting and embellishing a story to stir public outrage became known as yellow journalism – a badge proudly worn by Hearst at the time. Hearst was ahead of his time in believing media outlets should insert themselves into events in order to affect political outcomes on behalf of the government. One year earlier, in 1897, Hearst’s New York World opined the doctrine of “journalism of action” which meant a newspaper should inject itself into public life in order to “fitly render any public service within its power.”¹ Are things really much different today?

On 4 August 1964, a joint US Navy patrol ran into bad weather off the coast of Vietnam, causing problems with US radar and sonar. This happened at a time of heightened tensions in the region with US national security on red alert. Amid the confusion, some US agent or official – either in the CIA, the NSA or the Pentagon national security structure – circulated a false report that US Navy vessels and planes were under attack from North Vietnamese patrol attack boats in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. The next day, US President Lyndon B. Johnson appeared on national television to announce his intent to retaliate against North Vietnamese targets, stating: “Repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with positive reply. The reply is being given as I speak to you tonight.”² The infamous event came to be known as the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’. Despite the fact of obvious discrepancies in the government’s account of events, the mainstream media accepted the government’s fake story without question. With the media providing public relations backing, Washington took the next step and declared war on Vietnam, albeit on false pretences. This was the beginning a 10 year-long bloody conflict which saw 55,000 US servicemen killed, 250,000 injured and maimed, along with over 1 million Vietnamese killed.

In March 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, US and UK government officials managed to convince their respective mainstream media cadres that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was concealing massive stockpiles of chemical weapons which came to be known as “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Despite repeated assurances by UN weapons inspectors and on-the-ground US weapons experts that these WMDs were nowhere to be found, both US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had made up their minds Saddam was hiding vast stores of deadly munitions, and therefore a US-led invasion was a fait accompli. With no proof or actual evidence, the press went along with it all because they were “very confident” about the “intelligence.” The White House dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations where he regurgitated a made-up story about Saddam Hussein’s deadly mobile anthrax labs, aka “The Winnebagos of Death.”³ Yes, it sounded completely crazy to millions of intelligent, normal people at the time, and yet it was good enough for the mainstream media circa 2002-2003. Aside from CNN, ABC, and NBC’s complete allegiance to the government’s fraudulent war effort, America’s alleged ‘papers of record’, The New York Times and The Washington Post, helped by republishing government-issued fictional accounts. One ‘journalist’ in particular, Judith Miller from The New York Times, managed to dupe the public by citing ‘sources’ like disgraced Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi, who fed the US intelligence community false information about Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of WMDs. The Times later admitted that many of Miller’s stories were false. Still, the damage was already done. The result of this government-media campaign of actual fake news was 1 million dead Iraqis, thousands of dead US servicemen, tens of thousands wounded and maimed, along with trillions of US taxpayer funds spent – an open bill which continues to this day.

In 2011, after working behind the scenes helping to organise, arm and equip militant Jihadi fighters and rebel operatives in Libya, the Obama Administration led by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton desperately needed an excuse to ground the Libyan Air Force in order that NATO-backed Jihadi fighters on the ground could successfully overthrow the government of Colonel Muammar Qadhafi. The most direct route to achieve air superiority would be to implement a No Fly Zone over Libya. But with the public relations scars still fresh from the Iraq debacle, Barack Obama and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy knew that a No Fly Zone needed broad international support and therefore had to be authorised by the United Nations. In order to get the global public behind the campaign, a series of fake news stories were concocted by the US State Department and the mainstream media. The first one was the popular talking point that Qadhafi was using military fighter jets to “gun down peaceful protesters in the streets.” Despite no proof or evidence this actually happened, the media ran with it anyway. It became the keystone of the No Fly Zone campaign. Another outlandish tale had Qadhafi issuing Viagra to his troops so they could go out and commit “mass rape” against the women of Libya. This invented story was originally disseminated by Qatari government media outlet Al Jazeera,⁴ and specifically designed to help generate liberal/Left sympathy for a ‘humanitarian intervention’ by NATO. The key emissary to deliver this fake news to the public and give it credibility was none other than Obama’s former US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice.⁵ As a result of these and other unfounded ‘human rights’ abuses trumpeted by the mainstream media, on 17 March 2011 UN Resolution 1973 was passed by the UN Security Council and the No Fly Zone was immediately transformed into a US-led mass-bombing campaign of Libya by NATO. It is estimated that 30,000 Libyans were killed through ‘rebel’ ground fighting, artillery and relentless NATO bombing which toppled the Libyan government, turning the country into a permanent failed state and terrorist haven. Looking back, it’s hard to believe so few questioned the made-up stories, but like Iraq and so many other wars, the media played their role in propelling the fake news. 

In the heat of the 2016 US presidential election, a near repeat of the Iraq WMD scam unfolded, only this time the Obama Administration and the same ‘intelligence community’ generated an official conspiracy theory that Russia had somehow hacked into the US election systems, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails. Backed by the Obama White House, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the mainstream media pressed ahead on blaming Russia – not just for DNC leaks but also for hacking into US election systems in Arizona – despite the fact there was no evidence other than innuendo and pure speculation. The media’s coverage on this issue was deceptive from the onset. In a leading news release entitled “Russian hackers targeted Arizona election system,”⁶ we can see how after the cock-sure headline the first paragraph would sound definitive: “Hackers targeted voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona, and the FBI alerted Arizona officials in June that Russians were behind the assault on the election system in that state.” Later in the article you can see the media walking back the charge to cover themselves for future inquiry: “It turned out that the hackers had not compromised the state system or even any county system. They had, however, stolen the username and password of a single election official in Gila County.” Here we see how the media and the ruling party use emotive headlines to sell an idea, even though there is nothing in the story at all. The ‘Russian Hack’ story was then expanded by the White House and the Democratic Party to claim that Russia actually intervened in the presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump, thus helping him defeat the odds-on favourite Hillary Clinton. To date, no actual evidence has been produced by the US government to back-up this incredible conspiracy theory. Interestingly, just as in 2003 with Iraq, the establishment enlisted the help of some of the same media operatives to advance the mainstream’s fake news story. This story has unnecessarily set back US-Russian relations to the Cold War era. In December 2016, a month after the election, Judith Miller (now with FOX News) suddenly appeared on the scene to give support to the White House and CIA’s shaky ‘Russian Hack’ narrative. “As Sen. McCain said, it’s pretty clear that the Russians did something,” said Miller. “And it’s pretty clear – according to 17 US intelligence agencies – what they did helped Donald Trump.”⁷ Another case of mainstream media déjà vu. 

These are a few examples demonstrating what can, and will go wrong when the press blindly accepts the government narrative as gospel, allowing the mainstream media to push out and validate government-approved fake news to an unsuspecting public. 

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 161.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1.‘New Pulitzer Biography: An Opportunity Missed’ by W. Joseph Campbell, https://mediamythalert.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/new-pulitzer-biography-an-opportunity-missed/

2. ‘The Truth About Tonkin’ by Lt Commander Pat Paterson, Naval History Magazine, Feb 2008, www.usni.org/magazines/naval
history/2008-02/truth-about-tonkin

3. ‘Winnebagos of Death’ by William Rivers Pitt, http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/58516:winnebagos-of-death

4. ‘Rape used “as a weapon” in Libya’, Al Jazeera, 28 Mar 2011

5. ‘Gaddafi “supplies troops with Viagra to encourage mass rape”, claims diplomat’ by Ewen MacAskill, 20 Apr 2011, The Guardian

6. ‘Russian hackers targeted Arizona election system’ by Ellen Nakashima, 29 Aug 2016, The Washington Post

7. ‘Fox contributor Judy Miller calls investigation of Russian hacking Obama’s “tar baby” gift to Trump’ by David Ferguson, 11 Dec 2016, www.rawstory.com

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 177 (Nov-Dec 2019)

Power is a peculiar thing. In different ways, we’ve become accustomed to co-existing with it and will even forgo some liberties as part of a Faustian trade-off for various modern conveniences. When that power is virtually invisible, it is beyond scrutiny; and when it’s transnational, it takes on a whole new dimension. We are now fast approaching a point in history where opaque structures of power pose a direct threat to our hard-fought-for constitutional and democratic institutions. 

Former US National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst turned whistleblower Edward Snowden offered the general public their first real glimpse of this new reality, back in 2013, when he leaked the largest single classified document dump in history. He revealed what could only be described as a vast international conspiracy, in which multiple Western intelligence agencies work hand-in-hand collecting and analysing the personal data of their citizens, completely side-skirting any domestic laws guarding our right to privacy and due process. This ‘conspiracy’ plays a pivotal role in backing-up various allied deep states around the world. 

The operational core of this digital syndicate is known as the Five Eyes alliance. Code named FVEY, it represents an international signals intelligence (SIGINT) and communications intelligence (COMINT) gathering agreement between the United States, United Kingdom (UK), Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Five Eyes alliance agencies include, but are not limited to, the US’s NSA and CIA, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). 

This cooperative intelligence-sharing arrangement traces its historical roots to the UKUSA Agreement of 1946, as generally agreed in the 1941 Atlantic Treaty signed between the Allied powers during World War Two. 

After its official status was announced in 1955, the Five Eyes was expanded to the Nine Eyes, which includes the original five members along with four additional partnering governments who are granted “third party status.” These include spying agencies from Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway. 

The Nine Eyes would later expand to a Fourteen Eyes agreement which includes the Nine Eyes plus Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. Not surprisingly, the Fourteen Eyes more or less corresponds with the core European members in the NATO military alliance. The Fourteen Eyes may also be extended up to 17 Eyes when considering other regular third party contributors like Japan, Singapore, and Israel. 

In the late 1960s, the Five Eyes launched the ECHELON program, powered by a global array of US-run satellites and SIGINT bases located in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Initially, the Five Eyes arrangement was ideally suited for the Cold War where the primary task was gathering intelligence from the former Soviet bloc countries and their allies. Later, as the internet expanded, the sheer volume of digital content and communications meant that the Five Eyes had to readjust its core competency – from an organisation mainly preoccupied with spying on governments, institutions, and persons of interest, to an organisation whose primary task was to spy on absolutely everyone. With this new raison d’être in mind, the Five Eyes cooperative framework became ideal for allowing spy agencies to bypass domestic laws that might prohibit them from conducting surveillance or hacking their country’s own citizens. Overcoming legal or technical barriers became fairly straightforward, especially in the wake of the attacks of 9/11. The USA Patriot Act meant that intelligence and law enforcement agencies could invoke national security and require telecoms companies and internet service providers (ISPs) to allow fibre optic splitters to be installed at key nodes in the telecommunications infrastructure, allowing spooks to divert massive data flows to be captured and run through the various Five Eyes data analysis centres. 

The digital revolution gave the Five Eyes syndicate the ability to amalgamate and combine what was previously separate disciplines of intelligence – like SIGINT, COMINT, geospatial and human intelligence – now all rolled into one comprehensive data collection system. Once they reached this stage, getting it to perform was simply a case of tweaking the software. When Snowden’s story broke in 2013, one of the key components of the NSA’s mass surveillance operation was a software interface called XKEYSCORE. The Intercept describes the tool as follows: 

The sheer quantity of communications that XKEYSCORE processes, filters and queries is stunning. Around the world, when a person gets online to do anything – write an email, post to a social network, browse the web or play a video game – there’s a decent chance that the internet traffic her device sends and receives is getting collected and processed by one of XKEYSCORE’s hundreds of servers scattered across the globe.

Whereas previous iterations of the NSA’s global information dragnet hauled in large quantities of data and required a combination of computer and human intelligence to sift through it all, XKEYSCORE “extracts and tags metadata and content from the raw data so that analysts can easily search it,” allowing for a much more refined and efficient data capture operation. In essence, what used to be done by the entire ECHELON system and scores of human analysts could now be achieved with a few strokes of the keyboard.

Spectre is Real

Michael McKinley of the Australian National University, in an article describing the full scope of the NSA’s digital arsenal, mentions “[t]he known codewords for them over recent times: Blarney, Echelon, Dancingoasis, PRISM, Tempora, XKEYSCORE [sic], Muscular, Pinwale, EgotisticalGiraffe, Stormbrew, Fairview, Oakstar, Mainway, Rampart-T, and Nucleon. Between them, they aim to attack computers using certain types of legal privacy software, and overall to harvest, store, and analyse whatever internet traffic can be hoovered up.”

Imagine if the NSA connected all of these data trawling nodes with an artificial intelligence backbone that analysed and parsed out teraflops of information in real-time. It would make the agency omnipotent. This very same dystopian scene was brought to life on the big screen in the 2015 James Bond film Spectre starring Daniel Craig. In the film, a latter-day Blofeld, played by actor Christoph Waltz, devised a new unofficial international ruling committee, S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), comprised of the world’s top organised crime figures. Through his network’s infiltration of the very top levels of Western intelligence, Blofeld receives unrestricted, real-time access to all surveillance data collected by the “Nine Eyes” countries. This backdoor key gives Blofeld the power to steer global political events, move markets, and when necessary, blackmail any individual or institution into compliance. 

Aside from its striking parallel to the West’s current global surveillance dragnet, Spectre raises important questions obscured by the film’s ostentatious plot. Even without Blofeld, the current Nine Eyes intergovernmental network retains all of the capabilities that any nefarious villain would ever want, to wield power or ward off any potential challengers. If operations are conducted outside public view, then the potential for abuse is virtually boundless. 

Five Eyes: A Fraternal Order

The fraternal nature of SPECTRE was alluded to by the antagonist’s cinematic forefather, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, depicted in the 1963 Bond film Thunderball. “SPECTRE is a dedicated fraternity whose strength lies in the absolute integrity of its members,” said Bond’s nemesis.

Blofeld wasn’t wrong. In essence, the Five Eyes intelligence network is precisely that – a type of Anglo-fraternal organisation that wields a noticeable advantage over its rivals. Such unfettered cooperation between advanced nations like the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, means that the technical continuity of this geopolitical alliance remains more or less unmatched. Leveraging the resources of five countries spread around the globe affords the coalition a substantive advantage over just about any other global competitor. No other bloc can match its scope and scale, geographically and technologically. 

It is also fundamentally neo-colonial in nature. The fact that this network comprises current and former British colonial possessions speaks to the Anglo-centric or Atlanticist worldview on which its mission is based. That Atlanticist agenda is best described as something akin to a Bilderberg Committee agenda – a set of political and industrial objectives and goals informally agreed upon by some of Western society’s most powerful luminaries and technocrats who meet at the beginning of summer at the annual Bilderberg Meeting. 

Interestingly, this fraternal brotherhood only seems to extend to certain allies. While German spy agencies like the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) cooperate with their US counterparts as a “third party” government through the Fourteen Eyes agreement, Washington spooks still feel the need to constantly spy on Berlin. The 2013 Snowden leaks revealed that Germany is a major target of US espionage run out of the NSA’s own European Cryptologic Center (ECC), known affectionately as the “Dagger Complex,” located in Griesheim, in the German state of Hesse. 

According to “secret” NSA documents viewed by the German publication DER SPIEGEL, the American bunker accounts for the agency’s “largest analysis and productivity in Europe.” The documents also note that the NSA uses its infamous XKEYSCORE software to trawl up its main areas of interest from inside the German government, namely foreign policy, economic stability, new technologies, advanced weaponry, arms exports, and international trade. 

To add insult to injury, WikiLeaks revealed in 2015 that the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been wiretapped for years by US spies.

When interviewed on the matter, former NSA and CIA head Michael Hayden was quite flippant, openly admitting, “We steal secrets. We’re number one in it…. But, he adds, this is not malicious or industrial espionage…. We steal stuff to make you safe, not to make you rich.”

Hayden lamented the German disclosure but admitted the US government had grossly underestimated German values on issues pertaining to privacy, stating: 

Perhaps we underestimated the depth of feelings that the German people – and again, not just the chancellor, but the German people, felt about this question of privacy, given their historical circumstances compared to our historical circumstances. At the Munich Security Conference it was clear to me that Germans regard privacy the way we Americans might regard freedom of speech or religion. 

In similar fashion, both the European Union and the United Nations are also said to be under US surveillance. Like with Germany, NSA espionage objectives on the EU include foreign policy goals, the economy, international trade, and “energy security.” The targeting of the UN adds a whole other international dimension to these operations. A 2013 report filed by The Guardian newspaper paints a rather disturbing picture: “[L]ong before [former United Nations Secretary-General] Ban’s limousine had even passed through the White House gates for the meeting, the US government knew what the secretary general was going to talk about, courtesy of the world’s biggest eavesdropping organisation, the National Security Agency.” 

Australia: Casualty in a Cold War

On the surface, having the NSA conduct surveillance operations on key allies like Germany may not make much sense. Why would America risk compromising an important relationship with a pivotal partner and fellow NATO member? To help answer that question, we need to go back 50 years and look at what happened in Australia circa 1970. 

In the groundbreaking documentary film Allies (1983), a number of top former US and Australian politicians and intelligence officials went on camera to recount one of the most tumultuous periods in the country’s history during the Cold War, marked by the establishment of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). 

The film disclosed a series of shocking admissions rarely heard before in public, but which lifted the veil on the hidden hierarchy latent within the Five Eyes order. Revelations included an admission by Victor Marchetti, former executive assistant to the deputy director of the CIA (1955-1969), who stated: “Intelligence organisations in many countries have a loyalty that is not necessarily to the duly constituted government, they have a loyalty to what they consider the establishment.” Some officials testified that their loyalty was not to their elected leaders but the CIA. 

Such testimony provides some of the most unequivocal evidence to date about the existence of an unelected shadow government or Deep State, directed by America’s Central Intelligence Agency. For the Americans, managing this autonomous power structure first meant securing its geostrategic interests in host countries as well as its strategic facilities like the NSA’s Pine Gap listening base located in central Australia. Securing these assets became a national security issue – Washington could not risk any newly elected government interfering with US intelligence operations.

In the film, Dr John Burton, Secretary of the Australian government Department of External Affairs (1947-1950), described the Five Eyes thinking as follows: 

…the need for an intelligence organisation was to ensure that governments elected (for example) on a social welfare platform would not argue that they had a mandate to recognise China, to change the agreement with the United States, or other things which the Labor Party had intended before the Petrov Commission. They’ve always argued that the intelligence operation, or the intelligence services, operating as an informal group – are the protection of democracy against itself.

While the notorious Petrov Affair (1954) helped sideline Australia’s Labor party for many years afterwards, the real trigger for a US-backed coup came in 1972 when Gough Whitlam led Labor to victory for the first time in 23 years. The Whitlam government called into question Australia’s supporting roles in various military conflicts taking place in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam and Indonesia, and challenged the top-secret nature of US bases operating in Australia. Details of a CIA plot to depose Whitlam were revealed by NSA contractor Christopher Boyce, who was convicted of espionage and sentenced to federal prison in the US. Boyce’s story was later made into a cinematic classic, The Falcon and the Snowman.

Whitlam would soon be removed from office in 1975 after being “dismissed” by the country’s Governor-General, with much of the evidence pointing to a US/British regime-change operation. This marked a noticeable shift to the right in Australian politics and an unflinching “special relationship” with subsequent US Administrations. 

This story demonstrates the lengths that the US-led Five Eyes syndicate is willing to go to secure its assets in foreign countries. In the case of Australia, this meant US intervention to derail any government that might threaten US foreign policy and its global intelligence operations. From this vignette, one could draw a parallel to Washington’s ill-treatment of Germany – another ally that also hosts numerous US military bases and intelligence-gathering facilities, and which functions as an anchor for US operations in Europe in much the same way Australia does for the Asia-Pacific region. 

The China Syndrome

In the 21^st century, mere national monopolies are no longer sufficient for Silicon Valley moguls and their shepherds in the intelligence community. Firms like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter command near-global monopolies in their respective markets. This means that as long as those Western firms permeate and dominate the planetary information space, Five Eyes operatives only require a backdoor into a handful of these firms to surveil and control almost every aspect of public (and even private) life. 

Controlling technology markets has become a matter of paramount concern for the Five Eyes. That includes keeping out any foreign product which could cause a wrinkle in their control matrix. As expected, this situation feeds neatly into a ready-made geopolitical drama, especially if the Trojan Horse in question arrives in the form of a Chinese firm. 

As Britain expedites the roll-out of its controversial high-frequency 5G network, new security concerns have surfaced at the heart of the Five Eyes as politicians and spooks debate the possibility a foreign actor could compromise the alliance from within. 

Western technocrats have rushed to finalise preparations to create a grid of “smart cities” and smart infrastructure including fleets of self-driving cars on “smart highways,” as well as a host of public services – all linked as part of the “internet of things.” To make this project work, the UK has to partner with the only company who can deliver enough advanced equipment on time and on budget – Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. 

In theory, Five Eyes fears may be warranted. With 5G set to provide the new framework for real-time spying and data monitoring, Western spy chiefs and politicians are afraid of becoming too reliant on potential geopolitical and commercial rival China. Practically speaking, Huawei’s hardware is fairly standardised and compatible with other components used to configure the UK’s new 5G network, and to date, there is no proof of any latent Chinese spyware in any of the components in question. UK spy chiefs are already lining up in defence of the realm, with former MI6 head Richard Dearlove chiming in: “…we must conclude the engagement of Huawei presents a potential security risk to the UK. The key question that follows is can that risk be sufficiently mitigated to render it negligible?”

A number of tertiary arguments against Huawei are being employed by Western officials including charges that China steals Western intellectual property, or that Chinese firms are inherently ‘anti-competitive’ because of state subsidies given to many enterprises. Reading between the lines, more of a worry for the Five Eyes (or a privatised Spectre syndicate) is the fact that a whole range of other Huawei products could employ a different proprietary Chinese encryption protocol that would give not only Chinese officials and intelligence workers a privacy edge, but the public mass-consumer too – keeping the NSA from intercepting a user’s communications, or at least making it much more difficult. Thus, keeping Chinese products out of Western surveillance zones could be a major priority for Five Eyes technocrats. 

Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump escalated the technology war with China by signing an executive order that prohibits US companies from installing any “foreign-made” telecoms equipment which the US deems a national security threat, meaning that Huawei requires a special license issued at the discretion of Washington. Huawei Chairman Liang Hua responded at an industry press conference during the China-Germany-USA Media Forum, saying that the US placing Huawei on its entity list has had “no substantial impact” on Huawei’s business and that all of the company’s flagship products are shipping as normal.

In the short-term, the Trump Administration is more likely to deploy economic warfare by drastically increasing tariffs on Chinese products. In this war, the winning edge might be with the state-managed economy where Chinese planners typically plot the course ahead looking at 20 to 30-year windows, as opposed to US firms that prioritise mere quarterly gains and shareholder dividends. 

Liang Hua remarked that in only two or three years, Huawei will have developed a complete technological and commercial “ecosystem” for its range of products, making it more difficult for the Five Eyes syndicate to maintain their digital hegemony by trying to shut Huawei out of international markets. Naturally, this poses a direct threat to the West’s global digital media and communications mafia, and its overlapping fraternal network of government agencies, corporations and ‘white-collar’ organised criminal syndicates. 

The War on Encryption 

Aside from concerns about statecraft, most independent-minded citizens might be alarmed by the unbridled Orwellian power of such a global operation. On this point, there is little advice one can offer other than to stay off social media or go ‘off-grid’ (offline) as much as possible to avoid leaving a detailed digital footprint that can be used to build a profile on you. 

For those who depend on the internet for their day-to-day existence, going off-grid is not really a practical option, but there are tools available that can help make surveillance difficult for 5, 9, and 14 Eyes member governments. Besides using a reliable encrypted chat or messaging service, if you are not already using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), then now may be a good time to start. VPN encrypts all of your internet traffic and scrambles your IP address, making it difficult for anyone monitoring you online to pinpoint your identity, device, and physical location. One key requirement is trying to use a service based outside the Fourteen Eyes countries. This means you may not be immediately exposed should your service provider’s host country ask for back door access to your internet records. If you are using a service within the Fourteen, then be sure to choose a company that has a ‘no logs’ policy. In other words, should a US or UK agency like the NSA or GCHQ make a formal request from a service provider to hand over all your internet search data, then there will be nothing they can hand over. Likewise, you can use a number of encrypted instant messaging services like Telegram, or encrypted email services like Proton Mail, and also consider using an internet browser that doesn’t keep data on your surfing like Brave, or a search engine like Duck Duck Go which doesn’t save data on all of your search activity.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to Five Eyes hegemony are digital services that use end-to-end encryption. This means only the sender and receiver can view the content, concealing communications from the prying eyes of Western spy agencies. Needless to say, insatiable state authoritarians are not happy about this and have laid down a harrowing ultimatum to tech companies, demanding write-in backdoor access protocols supposedly for “law enforcement.” If firms do not comply, government officials threaten they should be ready for brute force intrusions by agents of the state. Knowing they do not have the public on their side, governments have resorted to intimidation and scare tactics in order to swing public opinion in their favour. 

While served as Home Secretary in 2015, former UK Prime Minister Theresa May authored a rather opprobrious piece of legislation entitled the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), which outlines where the British police state is heading in terms of privacy and encryption. The bill requires that any “communications service provider” (ISPs, social media platforms, VOIP, email providers and messaging service) must comply with a secret warrant signed by the Home Secretary which names any persons or organisations the government wishes to spy on. 

One watchdog organisation who has followed the IPA is the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). According to researchers, the draconian decree, also known as the ‘Snooper’s Charter’, requires tech companies to insert special malware onto their systems so the spooks can use their platforms to “interfere with any other system.” The secret warrant explicitly allows those companies to violate any other laws in complying with the warrant. Essentially, the warrant enables said tech firms to violate the law in the process of complying with the government’s secret snooper’s warrant. This would also include the Home Secretary ordering firms like Facebook, Samsung or Apple to quietly remove their ‘secure communication’ features from products without notifying the public about it. 

In terms of its legality (or lack thereof), the devil is in the absence of detail. Danny O’Brien from EFF noted how the UK government has been very careful not to pin itself down with any specifics, explaining, “Sure enough, the word ‘encryption’ does not appear in the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA). That’s because it is written so broadly it doesn’t need to.”

EFF describes the severity of the IPA in terms of riding roughshod over basic civil rights and protections:

“The Investigatory Powers Bill, one of the first laws to explicitly permit such techniques for law enforcement and intelligence work, contains very little in the way of oversight, and grants the British government an almost blank check for deploying malware against individual users as well as the heart of the internet’s infrastructure. It also demands that private companies and individuals assist in the deployment of this spyware, no matter where they operate in the world, and requires that this assistance be kept permanently secret from customers, partners, and the general public.

IPA provisions might also include the government forcing a chain of coffee shops to use the company’s free WiFi service to deploy British spy agency malware against its customers. 

The state’s intrusion goes even further with the IPA laying the parameters for the UK government to demand tech companies supply them with new product designs… in advance of commercial release. This is a shocking act of overreach by the British state – one that exceeds even the most invasive state intervention in a country like China. 

One has to ask: given the chance, would the UK government eventually pursue a complete ban on encryption? 

While there is considerable push-back from tech companies and public advocacy groups, there’s surprisingly little rebellion from most mainline politicians, partly because they are not being pressured from their constituents on this issue. What anti-privacy initiatives like the IPA clearly demonstrate is that Britain is the one clearly setting the dark tone and aggressive pace for the Five Eyes cohort. The agenda clearly seeks a renewed license to put tech firms in a corner by deploying emotive language and invoking evermore dramatic conspiracy claims. In her article written for the Telegraph, current UK Home Secretary Priti Patel even went so far as to equate Facebook’s noncompliance with aiding and abetting “child abusers, drug traffickers and terrorists plotting attacks.” 

Of course, Patel’s comments shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed the issue of privacy over the years, particularly in the post-9/11 era where politicians and national security state operatives routinely gaslight the public to justify every intrusion or roll-back of privacy rights by citing the most extreme and infrequent instances of ‘terrorism’. For the 21^st century technocracy and police state, that’s been the gift that just keeps giving, but by the same token the public have become increasingly wary of such dramatic government claims due to the fact that very rarely, if ever, has government wiretapping or backdoor spying actually thwarted a terrorist attack in what is popularly referred to in national security rhetoric and Hollywood propaganda lore as ‘the ticking bomb’ scenario. 

According to a report by security experts Sophos, at a recent Five Eyes security summit officials left no doubt as to their intentions, stating: “Tech companies should include mechanisms in the design of their encrypted products and services whereby governments, acting with appropriate legal authority, can obtain access to data in a readable and usable format.”

Five Eyes member Australia took the matter even further, threatening to “break in” if tech companies do not facilitate the access requirements of the state. This new policy initiative was expressed unabashedly in a memo issued by the Australian Dept of Home Affairs on behalf of the Five Eyes alliance:

The Governments of the Five Eyes encourage information and communications technology service providers to voluntarily establish lawful access solutions to their products and services that they create or operate in our countries…. Should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access to information necessary to aid the protection of the citizens of our countries, we may pursue technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions.

A closer look at the memo reveals that Australia’s authoritarian designs are not restricted to stopping terrorists and paedophiles but appear to target any entities they feel are “sowing discord” (including any popular dissenting opinion and analysis), that supposedly threatens our vaunted “democratic institutions.” This may also include any foreign media (as depicted in the heavily promoted ‘Russian disinformation’ narrative), independent media, and free-thinking individuals on social media. The language could not be more arbitrary: 

We are determined to ensure that the technologies that have been developed to enhance prosperity and freedom are not exploited by those who seek to promote terrorism and violent extremism; prey upon and exploit our children; or spread disinformation and discord to undermine our democratic institutions.

This, alongside Britain’s notorious ‘Snooper’s Charter’, demonstrates how Five Eyes partners are working in concert by gradually laying down an alliance-wide legal framework that will legitimise what would normally be unwarranted activity by state agencies. This is done by suspending any constitutional provisions or rights – all in the name of protecting national security, or even the national interest as the state defines it. 

Many leading VPNs and messaging services can protect your data with 256-bit encryption, now used in most modern encryption algorithms and protocols. For the moment, this technology offers fairly robust protection from the prying eyes of the intelligence services, but advances in computing power may eventually put many of these protections at grave risk. New advances in quantum computing threaten to usher in a new event horizon whereby the next generation of computers could conceivably crack today’s industry-standard 256-bit encryption key in a relatively short period of time – in mere minutes, or even seconds. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have shown how a quantum processor can crack a seemingly impenetrable 2,048-bit RSA encryption in only eight hours. Exactly how far off we are to this quantum revolution is anyone’s guess but when it arrives it could tip the scales of privacy away from the consumer and in favour of those organisations who control this new technology, namely Silicon Valley monopolists and the intergovernmental Five Eyes complex. On the flip side, advances in quantum decryption may also coincide with new methods of encryption that could slow down quantum crackers enough to make decryption impractical. 

It’s incredible to think that these technological battles waged in binary virtual space may end up defining our relationship with the state in the physical world. 

Things are moving extremely fast right now. Such a dystopic state of affairs must be resisted on every level. Our future depends on it. 

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 177.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. UKUSA Agreement Release (1940-1956),www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/ukusa/

2. A Look at the Inner Workings of NSA’s XKEYSCORE, www.theintercept.com/2015/07/02/look-under-hood-xkeyscore/

3. The unsettling reality if Five Eyes is the guardian against Huawei (Part 2), www.johnmenadue.com/michael-mckinley-the-unsettling-reality-if-five-eyes-is-the-guardian-against-huawei-part-2-a-survey-audit-concerning-prudence-integrity-law-and-ethics/

4. US Intelligence Watches Germany Closely, www.spiegel.de/
international/world/germany-is-a-both-a-partner-to-and-a-target-of-nsa-
surveillance-a-916029.html

5. NSA tapped German Chancellery for decades, WikiLeaks claims, www.
theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/08/nsa-tapped-german-chancellery-
decades-wikileaks-claims-merkel 

6. Shame on US, www.spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-interview-with-former-nsa-director-michael-hayden-a-960389-2.html

7. Portrait of the NSA: no detail too small in quest for total surveillance,
www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/02/nsa-portrait-total-surveillance

8. Huwaei, 5G and the Five Eyes, www.henryjacksonsociety.org/shop-hjs/defending-our-data-huawei-5g-and-the-5-eyes/

9. US blacklists Huawei, places it on entity list, www.economictimes.
indiatimes.com/news/international/business/us-blacklists-huawei-places-it-on-entity-list/articleshow/69353632.cms

10. Twitter, https://twitter.com/HuXijin_GT/status/1176465008974123008

11. Five Eyes Unlimited: What A Global Anti-Encryption Regime Could Look Like, www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/five-eyes-unlimited

12. UK Investigatory Powers Bill, www.eff.org/issues/uk-investigatory-powers-bill

13. Facebook’s encryption could stop our police doing their job properly –
and I won’t allow that to happen, www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/07/30/facebooks-encryption-could-stop-police-job-properly-wont-allow/

14. What’s the Evidence Mass Surveillance Works? Not Much, www.pro
publica.org/article/whats-the-evidence-mass-surveillance-works-not-much 

15. Five Eyes nations demand access to encrypted messaging,www.naked
security.sophos.com/2019/08/01/five-eyes-nations-demand-access-to-
encrypted-messaging/

16. Five Country Ministerial 2018, www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-port
folios/national-security/security-coordination/five-country-ministerial-2018

17. MIT Technology Review, www.technologyreview.com/s/613596/how-a-quantum-computer-could-break-2048-bit-rsa-encryption-in-8-hours/

18. Why Quantum Computers Might Not Break Cryptography, www.quanta
magazine.org/why-quantum-computers-might-not-break-cryptography-20170515

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 180 (May-June 2020)

I can remember them saying that ‘everything changed after 9/11’. It did, but certainly not for the better. I think we can all agree on that.  I remember how everyone surrendered their rights and key aspects of democracy, all in the name of ‘keeping us safe’.

Back then, world-changing decisions were made in reaction to an exaggerated threat, with sweeping ‘emergency measures’ and laws enacted. Usually, nothing good follows from a government that is making decisions and formulating permanent policy, suspending constitutions and rights – imposing all of this on a population operating from a position of fear. That much we did learn. Some of us did anyway. 

In January, like a leviathan sprung forth from the titans Oceanus and Ceto in ancient Greece, the global coronavirus pandemic was born. Like 9/11, it was a disruptive event, but this time on a scale unimaginable. Whether or not one believes this was naturally-occurring or a biologically-engineered pathogen (there is every reason to believe it could be), it is beyond argument that this ‘crisis’ is and will be used to advance a multi-pronged globalist agenda, likely to feature more wars between the great powers. 

Modern man is now entering realms of dystopia only imagined before by the likes of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, with more than a hint of Philip K. Dick. What makes all of this difficult for so many is that the sudden transition has been almost instantaneous, leaving people in a near callow state of bewilderment, wondering what just happened to their old life. 

No matter which way this situation goes, it’s almost certain life will never be the same. 

COVID CRISIS

By now we should be familiar with the story: a novel coronavirus, scientifically known as SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, has made its way across the planet, infecting millions of people and registering over 100,000 deaths (as of the time of writing) across 180 countries. The victims of this outbreak are overwhelming elderly persons over the age of 70 and those in palliative care, most of who have severe and chronic underlying medical conditions. 

Make no mistake about it – this is a disruptive event on a scale the modern world has never seen before. The shock and awe began from the moment the story broke from the Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei Province. Global audiences were inundated with images of Chinese authorities putting hundreds of people into biological suits, hosing down the outside of buildings, before quarantining themselves in their apartments. Then began a state-sanctioned medieval-style program that western media and politicians enthusiastically dubbed a “lockdown,” a term aptly borrowed from the prison industrial complex. 

Wuhan was an unforgettable spectacle which really impacted the western psyche, such that when the coronavirus made it to European and North American shores, the public was already conditioned to expect a Chinese-style response from their own governments. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what they got and, in fact, it was what they demanded. 

On 12 March, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called an emergency press conference where he took to the podium, flanked by his two leading science advisors, Sir Patrick Vallace and Chris Whitty, who proceeded to explain the government plan of action which was centred around the commonly known epidemiological concept of “herd immunity.” Their strategy was a familiar one because it has been the orthodoxy in modern epidemiology – allow a virus to go through approximately 60-80% of the population in order to achieve herd immunity, naturally extinguishing the virus in a single season. But Johnson made the fatal error of grossly overestimating the death rate at 1% of the total infected, an estimate that would have left the country with some 52 million infected and 500,000 fatalities. Of course, in hindsight, these numbers were pure fiction, but at the time everyone was so enveloped in fear that they believed the ‘experts’. Nonetheless, the herd immunity approach was more or less identical to the ‘no lockdown’ approach taken by European countries Sweden and Iceland, as well as Belarus, Mexico, and Japan. This would entail standard random sample testing nationally and for those exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms. The elderly and vulnerable people would be told to self-isolate for a period of time while studies were conducted. 

‘Plan A’ didn’t last long. On 24 March, Johnson appeared on national TV, this time without his science team, to announce a nationwide lockdown – an effective shutdown of society and most of the country’s economy. The UK was now following fellow NATO member states France, Italy, Spain and others, which had already imposed draconian national lockdowns, including strict new ‘social distancing’ guidelines preventing people from being together. 

It appeared that Johnson’s sudden 180º degree turn was prompted in part by an alarmist report generated by one of the government ‘expert’ teams at Imperial College London, led by controversial computer modeler Neil Ferguson who was previously responsible for the 2001 ‘Foot and Mouth’ crisis, a debacle which ended in the unnecessary culling of some six million livestock in Britain. This time, Ferguson and his team worked their modelling magic to come up with an estimated half a million coronavirus deaths if the government did not implement “very intense social distancing and other interventions now in place.” While the figure was completely fictional, the media seized on it, as did government officials, which fuelled fear and panic across Britain’s government-media complex. Frightened and unsure, the public accepted the authoritarian measures, but the government never gave an end date to the quarantine; it was left open-ended at the discretion of the government’s scientific coterie.

Once that bubble of fear had been sufficiently inflated, a medieval-style lockdown was a fait accompli in numerous countries including Australia and New Zealand. The impact of a full national quarantine is yet unknown, but it’s already becoming clear that it will be nothing short of cataclysmic for those countries who agreed to the voluntary self-destruction of their economies and the indefinite suspension of democracy. 

It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and Imperial College tried conjuring a global panic over a flu virus. Back in 2005, the “range of deaths,” the UN warned of bird flu virus H5N1, “could be anything between five and 150 million.” Officials even drafted in Imperial’s most reliable doomsayer, Neil Ferguson, to help come up with another completely fictional death toll of 200 million people. His high school level math equation was breathtaking in its over-simplicity: 

“Around 40 million people died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof. Ferguson. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”

That doomsday prediction led to the culling of tens of millions of birds in Southeast Asia, but the pandemic never really materialised. In the end, human fatalities numbered in the hundreds worldwide. It was a non event. 

Similar unremarkable numbers followed the global hype over the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Thanks to the work of investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US was caught over-inflating the number of cases – a fraudulent move that had grave implications for government policy and stoking unfounded public fear. 

With COVID-19, the globalist medical industrial complex, led by WHO, hoped to repeat the previous public relations campaigns by hyping the novel coronavirus as the next Spanish Flu. This time they were given an extraordinary opportunity thanks to China which put on an incredible media performance and ‘show of strength’ in the month of January by ‘locking down’ Wuhan – inspiring western and other leaders to try the same big government approach. However, the results would turn out economically disastrous for western ‘lockdown’ countries. 

Economic Collapse

All of this is certain to trigger a protracted global recession marked by at least 12 months of negative growth, with economic and social displacement the likes of which the world has never seen before. The decision by countries like the UK, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US to voluntarily implode their economies and place most of their populations under house arrest will have a lasting impact not only on national economies but also the global economy for years to come. In terms of scale, the damage caused to markets and industry has already surpassed the 2008 financial crisis by orders of magnitude, and there’s no end in sight. 

To ‘fight the coronavirus’ governments have imploded their real economies and replaced them with nationalised pools of finance earmarked for each section of the economy. This emergency transformation is the same as a wartime mobilisation of an economy, with a heavy focus on the medical and pharmaceutical industrial complex, the military, and selected corporate partners hand-picked by the state. This hard fusion of state and corporate interests is classic corporatism or fascism. In this brutal and constrained environment, these are some of the only institutions strong enough to remain viable. 

The net effect of immediately putting millions of workers onto government welfare rolls and pushing hundreds of thousands of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) into bankruptcy will be the largest consolidation and transfer of wealth in modern history. Those with enough capital to ride out the crisis will be able to buy-up companies, and even whole industries, for literally pennies on the dollar. Monopolies like Amazon, Google and telecoms giants will consolidate and solidify their market shares as competitors gradually die off and are swallowed-up in receivership. Formerly independent contractors will now be reliant on government assistance, as will any business qualifying for government ‘relief’ grants and loans. Large corporations will now have governments covering the cost of their payrolls for the duration of the crisis. 

There is no semblance of any discernible sound economic model to describe what is now happening with government printing up record amounts of money to cover the enormous cost of the shutdown. For a wealthy country like the US, the Federal Reserve Bank will simply go into overdrive, creating trillions of dollars to be released through various ‘stimulus plans’ and bailouts. The New York Fed is now pumping trillions of new dollars into banks, with the Fed also issuing ‘bridge’ loans directly to businesses. This never happened before in history. The US is also buying up unprecedented amounts of corporate stock in order to keep Wall Street afloat. With these levels of quantitative easing, there are risks of hyperinflation and other systemic problems. This may be coupled with higher food prices due to supply shortages, and stagnant wages due to a glut in the labour market after the government’s domestic scorched earth economic policies. The end result of all these bailouts (if they ever end) will be exactly as with any war in history: a rapid wholesale transfer of power, control and ownership into centralised government and the central banking cartel.

For individuals and families, this means your savings are wiped-out, your property collapses in value, and your future prospects are dim, at least in the short to midterm, and you will have no choice but to load up on personal and family debt to survive. 

Before this crisis, we saw the largest wealth gap in modern history since the Gilded Age (1870–1900), with the richest 1% now owning more than half of the world’s wealth. After the first phase of this crisis, that gap may double or even triple. With SMEs wiped out, the only jobs available will be with the government or with a handful of mega-corporations. 

As is often the case after any war, developed and developing countries are likely to become dependent on credit lines from either the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or from the United States itself which will have plenty of dollars and US Treasury bonds for sale or loan at near zero percent interest rates. Plenty of funny money to go around, mostly for the elites.

The shutting down of the world’s airlines – along with biosecurity and financial stagnation hitting certain sections of global trade – will severely injure the dominant system of globalisation. This will no doubt encourage already existing regional trading blocs, like ASEAN in Southeast Asia, and the African Union, leveraging their interests to create more regionalised and resilient trading networks. As physical trade and relations are codified regionally, globalisation will increase in the online digital sphere and with international e-commerce, online learning and social networking. 

Now, with massive economic recession, marked by record levels of mass unemployment and debt, the balkanisation of formerly open globalisation routes, combined with a new global veil over scarcity of resources, all under a broad cloak of biological insecurity – the soil is fertile for more dismantling of democracy and a rise in fascist regimes, particularly in the West. The trend was already moving in this direction before the crisis, but now it will only accelerate. 

Historically speaking, the scene is now set for another world war in which the winner sets the agenda for a ‘new world order’ going into the 21^st century. 

Full Spectrum Dominance:
World War Footing

Just as in 1914 and the onset of World War I, the year 2020 will be a major pivot point for the early 21^st century and should be seen as a tangible prelude to a new world war. There are a number of reasons why this is likely. 

It is true that you can implement more change in two years of war than you can in twenty years of peace. In the case of the corona crisis, that two years was reduced to two months. Presently, events are being framed by western powers as the “global fight against an invisible enemy,” but the corona crisis has created a number of new paradigms some of which are classic precursors for war. The first and most obvious is the fact that virtually overnight, the western countries, especially NATO member states the United States, United Kingdom and France, have effectively mobilised all aspects of their country’s economy and restructured society to reflect both a wartime economy and a state of martial law. The western bloc countries are now prepared to bunker down for a long war if need be. 

The threat of a biological agent presents some serious problems for a globally-embedded military as America’s. Already the US had to cancel major NATO drills in Europe, and pull some of its naval fleet into dock because of the coronavirus and fears of infecting large numbers of military personnel. Other countries may have similar issues. In this sense, the disease has severely slowed fighting across the world – one of the more unexpected, albeit welcome, tertiary benefits of the crisis. 

The western powers first obvious choice for instigating either a hot or cold war is China, along with its allies. When US President Donald Trump refers to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus,” he is signalling to his base and to the war hawks in the Republican Party that the White House is preparing a confrontation. Anti-Chinese rhetoric and media propaganda has increased substantially in the US since the onset of the corona crisis, with many Americans, particularly the right-wing, now blaming the Chinese for releasing this pestilence into the world. 

After a few more months of economic destruction, social malaise and an increasing death toll in the US, the new ranks of unemployed will be demanding a scapegoat for their terrible suffering, at which time a war with China could become more viable for Washington. This could take the form of an on-off, hot-cold war which lasts for 30 or 40 years, and pulls in other major powers using proxy battlegrounds in third party countries. 

For the US empire, one primary objective in confronting China would be to disrupt and possibly derail Beijing’s historic infrastructure and economic development known as the Belt and Road Initiative, designed to link Europe with Asia along various routes over land and sea. If successful, the global centre of gravity would shift away from the US and back towards Eurasia. In the event of a global depression post-corona, the US is geopolitically well-placed to weather the storm as it commands the control of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. China’s Belt and Road would effectively upend Washington’s plans for Fortress America lording it over all global markets during this new tumultuous epoch. 

In some ways, the crisis has disrupted the emergence of a new multipolar world, but the imperative for multipolarism may also be propelled by the economic balkanisation and the fact that the US will continue withdrawing its military assets from stalwart outposts like the Middle East. Any US withdrawal from the world stage will be filled by other emerging powers like Russia, India, Turkey and possibly Japan. Many of these emerging powers require resources and materials, so the scramble to establish trading routes in Africa will be a post-corona feature. 

The corona crisis also provides a convenient cover for the aggressive roll-out of 5G networks around the world. These look to be the backbone of a new global surveillance state able to track and record everything in real-time. Along with millions of masts in towns and cities, the network will also feature an array of new satellites with the potential to flood our atmosphere and communities with even more untested high-frequency radiation. 

One World Health &
Medical Martial Law

The current ‘state of war’ extends internationally with blanket travel restrictions already in place. There looks to be a rapid drive to institute a streamlined global system of mandatory digital tracking and tracing, implemented under the auspices of ‘global health’ and spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO). They are joined by participating governments and the transnational corporations that will roll out these new ‘health surveillance’ systems. 

The real question that remains unanswered is what will happen once all the ‘lockdown’ measures are relaxed, and international air travel opens up again? There are already noises coming from governments and organisations about requiring citizens to pass some form of ‘immunity test’ for COVID-19 to be granted freedom of movement within society by carrying an ‘immunity passport’ or digital certificate stored on a microchip or smartphone. This dovetails with the rapid drive for a cashless society as a result of the corona scare. Due to corona contagion fears, paper money and coins are being stigmatised as ‘dirty’ with many retail outlets refusing to accept cash. Once this system is adopted domestically, it follows that these same restrictions will be extended to international travellers. Needless to say, this has grave implications for personal liberty and privacy. At present, this juggernaut seems difficult to stop. 

If allowed, this new bio regime will become the de facto governance for the world’s population. Microsoft founder Bill Gates (net worth $97.8 billion) has called for a national vaccine tracking system in the US, funded in part by an estimated $100 million he and his wife Melinda’s Gates Foundation have donated to fight the coronavirus to discover ‘a fix’ as quickly as possible. Gates is already heavily invested in vaccine research, development and production and, with his wife, they are a primary driver in the proliferation of vaccines globally. Gates says he will front the investment for seven new vaccine factories around the globe, and as he told Daily Show host Trevor Noah during an interview on 2 April, “until we get the world vaccinated.” 

Clearly, he has a vision for vaccinating every person on the planet, presumably for the coronavirus, or until the next big ‘outbreak’. “The only thing that really lets us go back completely to normal and feel good about sitting in stadiums with lots of other people is to create a vaccine and not just take care of our country but take that vaccine out to the global population,” said Gates.

From oligarchs like Gates, the transnational pharmaceutical corporations, and the government officials in their pocket, the warning is clear: you will not be permitted to resume ‘normal life’ until you accept the latest vaccine. And do not expect the list of newly required vaccinations to end with the novel coronavirus. Once this first precedent is set, countries dependent on international travel and trade will be forced to adopt the regulatory framework of this new ‘one world health’ security complex. The trail is then blazed for a constant stream of vaccine requirements to ‘fight’ various and sundry outbreaks and ‘biothreats’, be they real, exaggerated or completely fabricated. This could be another disruptive force going forward.

Combine this with naked authoritarian statements made by other self-appointed corona tsars like Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of WHO, who recently remarked that members of families may need to be removed from their homes by force. “Most of the transmission actually happening in many countries now, is happening in the household at family level…. In some sense, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units. Now, we need to go and look at families to find those people who may be sick and remove them, and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner,” said Ryan. 

The obvious danger here is that this new state-corporate regime will discriminate against and marginalise citizens based on their immunity records, requiring them to take a new vaccine to receive rights and privileges. This would be a complete abrogation of personal liberty and human rights, effectively turning the clock back hundreds of years – all based on what many leading doctors and epidemiologists agree is no more of a significant public health threat, in terms of infections and fatalities, than seasonal influenza. 

A COVID Green New Deal?

One of the clear main political beneficiaries of a COVID-19 global shutdown has been the climate change lobby. 

By forcibly shutting down millions of businesses and pulling tens of millions of cars off the road and grounding world commercial airlines, the crisis has delivered young Greta Thunberg the evidence she and her supporters need to demonstrate the virtues of a net zero carbon world in a real-life simulation. 

This will also accelerate the adoption of a so-called ‘Green New Deal’ internationally, which may have less to do with saving the environment or ‘changing the climate’, and more to do with the creation of new global financial bubble based on the commodification and financialisation of Earth’s ecosphere. This is essentially a new ‘green-backed’ and fully tradeable monetary credit, bond and derivatives market. 

Greta didn’t appear out of nowhere in 2018. She and her handlers have been tasked with a mission, and now in just three weeks they are very close to realising large pieces of their agenda, which also dovetails with UN Agenda 2030 sustainability goals. 

Who’s Winning:
Globalism or Nationalism?

Another unexpected byproduct of this crisis has been a number of European Union member states kicking Brussels to the curb, either for not reacting fast enough to help, or simply for not releasing enough funds for struggling public institutions and businesses. As a result, countries like Italy and Poland are exerting their nationalist power over Brussels’ relatively weak and ineffectual response to requested assistance from members states. 

At the same time, this new global control grid lends itself towards the implementation of a world government structure to be used to fund an international regime that regulates and adjudicates problems, as well as manage future ‘outbreaks’. In late March, former British PM and Chancellor, Gordon Brown, called for world leaders to create a provisional global government body in order to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and manage the global economic collapse. 

Whatever geopolitical and social engineering agendas were already in motion before the crisis, you can be sure that the coronavirus has accelerated many of them. 

In terms of power-grabs, this is the embodiment of “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Oh, and don’t forget –it’s really all about saving lives. 

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FOOTNOTES

1. Professor who predicted 500,000 Britons could die from coronavirus and prompted Boris Johnson to order lockdown accused of having ‘patchy record of modelling pandemics’, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8164121/Professor-predicted-500-000-Britons-die-coronavirus-accused-having-patchy-record.html

2. Return of the oppressed, https://aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap-leads

3. Is an ‘immunity certificate’ the way to get out of coronavirus lockdown?, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/03/health/immunity-passport-coronavirus-lockdown-intl/index.html

4. The first steps after lockdown ends: How will Spain return to normal life?, https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-04-05/the-first-steps-after-lockdown-ends-how-will-spain-return-to-normal-life.html

5. Bill Gates Calls For National Tracking System For Coronavirus During Reddit AMA, www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/03/18/bill-gates-calls-for-national-tracking-system-for-coronavirus-during-reddit-ama/

6. Bill Gates on Fighting Coronavirus – The Daily Social Distancing Show (YouTube), www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyFT8qXcOrM

7. The coronavirus is washing over the U.S. These factors will determine how bad it gets in each community, www.statnews.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-how-bad-it-gets-different-communities/

8. Gordon Brown calls for global government to tackle coronavirus, www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/26/gordon-brown-calls-for-global-government-to-tackle-coronavirus

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