I’ve had a cold, and as a cold Traditionalist, that means I’ve been sitting on the couch in my dressing gown, sipping herbal tea with honey in it. (The Zealots from The Church of New Colds would have me masking up and gaffer taping plastic sheets over my doors and windows, but they are odd people).
Naturally, it stands to reason that the first time I’ve been ill in years happens to be the same week the world decides to set itself on fire.
Or at least pretend to, but we’ll get to that.
Maduro has been kidnapped. Iran teeters on the edge of an old-fashioned colour revolution with a new Shah waiting in the wings, there’s talk of British troops on the ground in Ukraine and a US invasion of Greenland.
The New Year has dawned on a world bursting into chaos.
But is it genuine chaos? Or contrived chaos?
Regular readers know I would tend towards the latter. Fundamentally, I cannot reconcile the two worlds with which we are presented.
On the one hand, we have a set of nation-states wholly in concert on almost all the broader issues. They all work together to promote pandemics and climate catastrophes; they synchronise in passing near-identical legislation to tackle the same non-existent or heavily exaggerated problems.
They all have central banks “printing” fake money, they all have so-called “free-market” capitalism (in reality, a construct of state-protected monopolies that siphon public money into the private sector).
They all agree to pretend that Covid is a thing and the vaccines are safe and the climate is changing and the internet will be nothing but snuff films and child pornography if they don’t put a digital surveillance chip in everyone’s brain as soon as possible
Central bank digital currency, digital identity, genetically modified food…All of this is resolved supranational policy.
They tell the same lies to serve the same ends. They are all the same.
And yet, on the other hand, we’re told they cannot work out a single territorial or political conflict or disagreement in anything but the most crude, base or violent ways.
Nowhere is the clash of apparent cooperation vs reported conflict more apparent than nuclear war – or rather the lack thereof. India and Pakistan went to war (briefly). Both reportedly have nukes, neither used them. The US is seizing Russian tankers in the Caribbean and the UK is considering putting British troops on the ground in Ukraine.
Is anyone talking about Nuclear war? What happened to Mutually Assured Destruction? When did that stop being a consideration?
The only explanation I can think of is that there is an agreement – either tacit or explicit – that these conflicts will be allowed to go so far and no further.
And that makes them fake. Unquestionably, irrefutably, fake.
If you can agree not to have a nuclear war, you can agree not to have a war at all. Any war you end up having, logically speaking, is a war both sides want to happen.
I come back to this quote from Orwell a lot, because I’m not sure it’s possible to better express the thought:
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading.
George Orwell, 1984
I have a feeling there is a grander pattern embedded in this chaos that will emerge before the end of the year, something along postnational lines, arguing that statehood generates conflicts that globalism would solve.
I’m still coughing and spluttering between sentences, so I’m being quick. We’ll go into this in more detail when my brain is less crowded.
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