World War III: A state of mind

A continuation of thoughts from World War III: Pillage and plunder. Earlier: World War III: A status update (2014), World War III: A picture (2012), and A Stateless War (2010)

“WHENEVER those states which have been acquired as stated have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you;

but when cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they, being on the one hand accustomed to obey and on the other hand not having the old prince, cannot agree in making one from amongst themselves, and they do not know how to govern themselves. For this reason they are very slow to take up arms, and a prince can gain them to himself and secure them much more easily.” – The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)

The new global empire is possible because recent history and overwhelming media coercion have rendered the majority of the world incapable of self-governance. The populations described in the first paragraph have almost all transitioned through the three recommended coercive structures and they are now the second type which Machiavelli identified as easily controlled from a remote centre. Outside of a very few, very isolated nations, there is no longer anything close to freedom or self-governance anywhere on earth and memories and belief in its possibility have all but been erased.

In the power, wealth and celebrity ponzi schemes that dictate our relations today, conflict is always between the top and the bottom. The only points of conflict between power centres occur when one is absorbing another and these events are not particularly important. The majority of those at the top usually remain there and those at the bottom almost always do. Nationalist rhetoric notwithstanding, it matters not at all whether the headquarters is in Beijing, London, Rome or Cusco if there is no self-governance. The ponzi scheme of power which once upheld the Great Men of Machiavellian city states is now scaled to uphold the first truly global empire, but the principles and players remain the same. The Great Men of oligarchies have always been upheld by a cohesive block of commoners with common goals and fears which can be easily manipulated by those in power.

Thought reform

The crack in the monopoly on education and media has created a surge of independent thought which may finally dissolve the club of cohesive democratic power which has kept Great Men in power for centuries. With no middle class there will be no oligarchy. – Me, Commoners and how they are coerced

In the west, laws supporting freedom of thought, expression and debate once contrasted with the communist constitutions which put ideology ahead of individual thought. Western media and Hollywood were all powerful, allowing the five eyes to use censorship by noise instead of Chinese style censorship by blocking. Freedom of the western corporate press also aided the empire in controlling the governance of foreign states by seductive coercion. Insisting on ‘press freedom’ throughout their empire ensured their influence was impossible to counter. China’s recent investment in media in Africa acknowledges that this is still the case in parts of the world.

Social media has in a few years drastically changed the amount of ideas and the sources which people can be exposed to. All of the anti-US governments in South America were early and heavy users of social media and the US is just catching up with getting their propaganda on social media as dominant as it was in the South American corporate press. Governments around the world are finding that neither their propaganda efforts nor censorship are enough to counter real grass roots movements or to stop ideas which may spread virally on their own. In addition to legislation countering free speech when it appears on social media under the guise of countering ‘trolling’, new forms of blocking which go beyond technology and reach the individual sources of thought are being implemented.

The concept of ‘terrorism’ has been used to justify thought reform globally. While ‘terrorism’ still nebulously relates to an act, the designation of ‘terrorist’ does not and rights can be stripped with no trial or notice based on such a designation. The designation of terrorist can be based simply on group affiliation and terrorism acts now include expression of forbidden thought.

In Canada, terrorism is defined as an act or omission committed “in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause” with the intention of intimidating the public “…with regard to its security, including its economic security, or compelling a person, a government or a domestic or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act.”

In the UK, terrorism refers to the use and threat of action “designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public” and “made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.”

In Australia terrorism is “an act or threat, intended to advance a political, ideological or religious cause by coercing or intimidating an Australian or foreign government or the public.”

Unlike the definitions in the US and EU, which include such qualifiers as ‘seriously intimidating’, ‘unduly compelling’ or ‘violation of the criminal laws’, both Canada and the UK have designated any attempt to influence the government, the public, or any section of the public for a political, religious or ideological purpose as terrorism. While you may not go to prison for attempting to persuade your neighbour to boycott Israeli products you can certainly be designated a terrorist, put on a watch list, lose your citizenship rights and possibly be arrested in any state which shares (or steals) intelligence from these governments. Neither do you have to be expressing ideas deemed dangerous to the corporate states, simply listening to them is enough. Criminalizing ideas allows states to declare war against segments of their own population and strip them of citizenship and rights of due process.

Since there is no terrorist act not also committed regularly by the governments of the world, the only thing separating the terrorists from the corporate states is the phrase “for a political, religious or ideological purpose”. State actors commit all the same acts in pursuit of power, celebrity and wealth. Actions taken for personal gain or as a result of following orders are not criminalized, the same acts motivated by social participation and expression of independent thought are.

Laws once focused on actions and a wealthy adult who stole a loaf of bread was to be judged in the exact same manner as a starving child. Recently, the focus has turned to judging the individual and their motivations for an act, allowing extenuating circumstances such as youth, insanity and other personal factors to influence judgements. Now we have progressed to judging motivations without any associated actions. We have attained a state where thoughts alone can be criminal.

Laws have been passed calling all citizens defending themselves or their environment terrorists. The Canadian Minister of Public Safety targets “domestic extremism based on grievances – real or perceived – revolving around the promotion of various causes such as animal rights … environmentalism and anti-capitalism.” Self defence is terrorism. Citizen armies have been replaced by corporate security worldwide and international trade agreements ensure there is no longer any regional authority over regional resources. Refugees whose homes have been destroyed are jailed for migration from places where they are dying. The mass refugee movement caused by corporate plunder is advertised as ‘asylum seeking’ or ‘illegal immigration’. The people corporate terrorism is driving to desperation are those who will help militias designated as terrorists expand, fed by the drugs, weapons and human traffickers.

Terrorists against corporations act for a political, religious or ideological cause. Terrorists against the people act for power, celebrity and wealth. Self-governance includes stewardship and use of the environment and its products by the user group. Any control or ownership outside the user group is enemy occupation, not self-governance.

The motivations designated by corporate states as terrorist are all those leading to resistance from corporate plunder. Wherever we see the corporate hold on seductive coercion weakening and being diluted by other players we also see them increasingly reverting to old methods of hard coercion. The designation of terrorism has been used to allow methods so extreme they were very recently only found in the deep shadows, now openly brought forward to combat those whose thoughts have slipped out from under corporate control. Not only the torture and abuse of individuals but the mass extermination of entire populations through disease, starvation, environmental destruction and war have renewed acceptance among the most powerful.

From the passive aggression of ignoring perfectly foreseeable crises like the Ebola epidemic and starvation in the Sahel to militia wars where corporate powers supply all sides, environmental destruction which crushes all resistance and ongoing genocides such as Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya and Kachin or corporate attacks on the indigenous of Brazil all illustrate what is waiting when seductive coercion fails.

Things are never so bad they can’t get worse.

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.” – The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)

A war on self-governance

This is a war where the populace is kept sickly, ignorant, desperate and above all fearful to keep them from rising up against the military industrial complex. The tools used are drugs (legal and illegal), poor nutrition, environmental hazards, misinformation, blocked access to good information, poverty, stress, crime and, above all, war. The weapons against them will be information, solidarity, good health, great optimism, and mass participation in every aspect of government. – Me, A Stateless War, 2010

Self-governance requires debate and free expression for epistemic communities and others without the risk of being labeled a terrorist and having a bomb dropped on your head. For the first time, we have the communication infrastructure to enable societal auto-coercion and self-governance which can scale globally. The battle for hearts and minds is the only battle that matters and the only war that matters is the one between the oligarchs globally and the people oppressed by them. The most important weapon is global communication and the most important freedom is freedom of thought.

Self-governance is not only possible, it is in all of our societal history. While new structures and methods must certainly be developed to allow society to scale globally when necessary, the basic structure and memory is still there in our history and will still work. The thought reform efforts of the last many years were attempts to erase that memory, to reduce even the basic societal unit of families to trade relationships, to make a trade economy and rule by mafia seem not only logical but inevitable. While corporate control has fought to narrow and hold the public’s Overton window, others of us have fought to move and widen it. The new definitions of terrorism as attempts to influence the government or the public is a war against freedom of thought and auto-coercion by a population, a war against self-governance.

The solid block of common thought necessary to uphold Great Men in seats of power has a natural tendency to disperse and regroup like a true swarm. Coercive power has become more desperate to force this block back into formation as the swarm becomes louder and the points of influence multiply daily. The intelligence agencies of the world are not working for your governance, they are your governance. Corporate power has expended huge energy on identifying those butterflies that may become hurricanes and discrediting and silencing them before they can build. In the end, they will fail and a new structure will emerge. Whether this new structure is built in favour of corporations or people depends on who wins the war of coercion and thought reform.

Related:

Glossary

Binding Chaos
Autonomy, Diversity, Society
Releasing Chaos

World War III: Pillage and plunder

A continuation of thoughts from World War III: A status update (2014), World War III: A picture (2012), and A Stateless War (2010)

Another revolution of the same wheel

The word crisis is derived from a word meaning ‘turning point’. For all the crises we think the world has been through, there is very rarely a turn. Indeed, history can appear more like an inexorably straight path with predictable periodic bumps. The tools to effect a real change are available now, but real change would require a real direction and goals. Without these, this revolution will end as all the others eventually have, with new tyrants. – Me, World War III: A picture, 2012

It hasn’t been comparatively long since World War III: A status update, but we are already in need of another update. Not only is it now irrefutably clear that what has been billed for the last few years as a new multi-polar empire will be unabashedly a Chinese feudal empire instead, it looks almost as though it is a fait accompli and the death throes of the US empire-that-never-was may be far less than I anticipated.

China’s new puppet states suddenly include not just NAM and BRICS members but also any US allies that may have been expected to oppose their expansion, including all members of the five eyes themselves. Shell and BP trade LNG to China in exchange for nuclear plants where the UK takes the risk and China receives the energy and rail lines where safety is left to the extremely unsafe Chinese firms. China’s President demands an audience with the UK queen and she is brought forth like an aged Cleopatra, her unwillingness a trophy for the ability of the new empire to bend the old to its will. Even the US, which currently stands alone in denying the new order, has signed away far more sovereignty over their resources than most of their media will admit and their heavily IP dependent economy is very vulnerable to any changes China should choose to make to IP laws and trade agreements. The US military has changed its tone from aggression to a wish for joint exercises, a tolerance of China’s spy ships and a ‘review’ of their defence agreement with Japan.

When corporations rule the world there is no need for invasions, conquest is a simple matter of mergers, acquisitions and trade agreements. There is also no need for resistance as those who own the corporations benefit either way and will sign the deal most attractive to themselves. Those world leaders supposedly in conflict are always open to negotiate and change allegiances with each other and use their media tools to redirect the people’s hatred and fear. They meet and shake hands with each other while they are too afraid to meet or shake the hands of those we call ‘their people’.

The collapse of the former global resource mafia cartel has led to the global resource mafia gang war I outlined in 2012 and it does involve the entire world as predicted. The collapse of the former power and wealth ponzi schemes in some states have led to a decentralized governance by trade mafia which looks exactly like horizontal, egalitarian, libertarian / p2p trade economy is designed to look: survival of the strongest, most tyrannical and most violent, subjection of all who build society and care for the weak. The violence, destruction and senselessness of this gang war will ensure that what will now become a global feudal structure is welcomed as a respite. It will take little reminding of the horrors of the Islamic State, Boko Haram and all the other militias to convince people for a long time into the future that self-governance is impossible.

As the revolution(s) which brought us to a global resource cartel resulted in a far more insidious, all powerful and far reaching tyranny than the military empires it replaced, this latest revolution will convert us into a state of cattle-like product with far less free will than even the current power structure. Trade rivalries are giving way to a crushing global feudal structure which controls all resources with no rivals and tolerates no dissent.

A Dutchman, an American and an Englishman met in a castle

In 1928, the founders of Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil (now Exxon) and the future British Petroleum met and formed a secret oil cartel. By the end of the 1960s, they had been joined by four other US based companies and were known as the Seven Sisters. This powerful cartel not only controlled 85 percent of the world’s oil reserves but they dictated governance, controlled the economy and destroyed the economic and environmental life of much of the world. Along with the international banking cartel and other resource corporations they perpetuated the old trade empire and economic slavery of most of the world.

After various mergers, the old seven sisters are now British Petroleum, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell and today they control just 10 percent. According to the Financial Times, the new Seven Sisters are Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the National Iranian Oil Company, Venezuela’s PDVSA, Brazil’s Petrobras, and Malaysia’s Petronas. The move by many oil-producing states to nationalization of resources was an attempt to combat the pillage by imperial multinationals. Unfortunately, the trade economy was left intact and decentralized resource mafia remained mafia.

Those states attempting nationalization were embargoed like Iran, corrupted like Nigeria and forced to create polar security states opposing the force of the multi-nationals. The residents of these states were left with the choice of living with corruption, militarization and bad governance within their own government or protesting their governance and leaving themselves open to occupation by the multinationals. A state under siege can justify and be allowed far greater atrocities than would ever be tolerated in a free state. If the people refused either dictatorship, they found themselves in a civil war like Sudan or with the militia and human rights horrors found in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern provinces, under de facto rule by drugged boys with guns feeding off forced labour of children. The more localized the control over resources, the less expertise is available and hand dug mines in Burkina Faso and Indonesia collapse on children working with no protection or medical or environmental expertise.

The price of security is enslavement. Resources are stolen in the name of free trade, ideas are locked in imperial vaults and ‘theft’ from your own commons is criminalized. Nigeria and Brazil swap food self sufficiency for oil and biofuel money, Paraguay and Mali sell their water to corporations from states with more than plenty, Niger poisons its land to power France, and pollution, climate change, drugs and guns devastate entire populations. The multinationals run a protection racket which, when removed, leaves the people open to a shadow trade economy mafia supplied and fed by the global governments. International laws and trade agreements are used to assert legal power over people who never consented to the laws or treaties, and representative governance is used to pretend the consent of the governing is the same as the consent of the governed. Peace in a trade economy is a crushing mafia cartel.

The resource war currently raging all over the world will only get worse as the populations of Africa and India continue to soar and the already huge populations of China and India attain middle class and demand more water, meat, fuel and other luxuries. Global water use has quadrupled in the last century and seven countries, the United States, United Arab Emirates, India, United Kingdom, Egypt, China and Israel, own 60 percent of the water acquired by corporations globally. What is far worse is the precious water resources that exist, from the Guarani aquifer in South America to the Great Lakes of North America, from the Lake Chad Basin in Africa to the Aral Sea region in Central Asia, are being pillaged and polluted by corporations of other industries such as fracking, agriculture and manufacturing. Agriculture accounts for 70% of total water usage world-wide and food production is also being moved to countries which can be locked out when a water shortage appears. The borders which prevent migration by those who need food and water do not prevent pollution and resource theft by the borderless multinationals.

Water and the environment are multi-state shared resources being destroyed by a coercive structure that does not recognize commons property and uses fixed borders to lock out the repercussions of fluid pollution and pillage. The pressure caused by this destruction will and is becoming too great for those physical borders and military violence to contain. Instead of collaborating on solutions to all of the quite solvable crisis before us, the mafia in power have made the decision to let millions, if not billions, die and have invested in military and border security instead.

A current study on population growth projections finds an 80% probability that world population, now 7.2 billion, will increase to between 9.6 and 12.3 billion by 2100. Growth will occur primarily from nations which have suffered from trade pillaging, including aboriginal populations in the Americas. In the wealthy states, as well as the rapidly growing economies such as China, Brazil and India, an ‘epidemic of aging’ is projected instead.

The biggest industries of the shadow trade mafia are all genocidal. The weapons for populations to destroy each other with greater ease and the drugs to increase the violence and incapacitate effective resistance have been supplemented with the rapid growth of the human trafficking industry. People are bought and sold as products for militias, prostitution, marriage, slavery, organ trafficking and even ritual killings. People are tortured for ransom and charged for their passage as refugees. The shadow human trafficking industry is now vying with the arms industry as the top criminal industry in the world, and with the Australian government’s recent sale of refugees to Cambodia it has become openly a government activity as it always has been secretly.

There is also a global gender imbalance which has been caused by the femicidal actions of populations in China and India, the current and projected largest populations in the world, as well as other places. Since China and India are also two of the wealthiest economies, they can afford to spread their severe imbalance to other nations. More than ever in history, women are a global commodity.

The injustice and desperation experienced by those watching their families die, their homes destroyed and their resources stolen result in a natural resistance which is harnessed by rival gangs in the resource war. Any rebel movement of any skill begins to spread influence not by threats with guns but by hoarding and distribution of essential resources, creating need by hoarding then building loyalty and dependence with distribution. As long as there is a trade economy there will be rule by mafia, whether the mafia is local, national or global. There are alternatives to the trade economy and more could be developed if anyone were inclined to do so.

United States: The empire that never really was

As the world knows, the United States was once part of the British empire. As control of trade and currency replaced and supplemented military occupation, the five eyes and their associates continued to act as one, sharing policy and goals. While the United States acted as the imperial military, Canada quietly acted as the imperial resource corporation and the UK and others helped continue one cohesive empire with the illusion of sovereign national states. The transfer of the seat of control from the UK to the US made no real difference to the co-operative alliances.

The primary result of transferring control of empire from the UK to the US was it enabled a very different method of empirical control. The US constitution promoted what was billed as an extreme lack of governance in the name of ‘freedom’. This was not a real lack of governance as both the institutionalized violence and the new ownership laws enabled the mafia to take control and crush all who would build or maintain the previously existing societies. Freedom and legal protection for all who were strong enough to steal from the commons and the insistence that all were equally able to care for themselves very predictably resulted in governance by mafia. Privatization of state functions extended even to intelligence and military and soon formalized into a corporate structure free to do exactly as they wished worldwide as a free roaming mafia with no effective state ties. As Blackwater founder and current mercenary to Chinese corporations Erik Prince points out, the US was founded by militias.

Canada was formerly a resource corporation known as the Hudson’s Bay Company. There is very little difference between that former corporation and a state in which every Prime Minister for many decades was financially dependent on or actually related to the principals of Power Corporation. Canada’s laws have aided the more than 75% of the world’s resource corporations registered there to avoid legal responsibility for their human rights and environmental disasters worldwide. The governments of the five eyes have never had any claim to being nations despite their violent national rhetoric. All were set up as a resource mafia cartel to control the rival gangs.

The corporate freedoms which stripped society, governance and the commons from the people and dissociated people from their interdependent nations have also neatly packaged all control of these regions into saleable entities. These countries now have very little legal recourse against their corporate free agents being collected tidily in China’s basket, and their legal protection is less every day.

The so-called US empire may historically be seen as part of the collapse of the British empire or the transition between the British and Chinese empires, between a militarized trade empire and a global corporate feudal empire.

It is hard to imagine anything worse than the US empire with its mass assassinations by robot and cultural decay, but a worse alternative would probably include mass citizen trials and thousands of pigs floating in the drinking water. Unlike the US, China does not pretend to value individual rights or freedom above the state and is open about methods of thought reform. Neither does the Chinese ruling party dissemble about their status as the new empire or their lack of admiration for the intelligence and competence of other nations.
 Unlike the US, China has concentrated on building infrastructure globally instead of military bases, but the quality of that infrastructure has too often shown corruption and a lack of concern for human life.

The binary thinking and Good Guys vs Bad Guys narrative that has been the defining theme of corporate propaganda has many thinking that any state opposing the US empire must be a saviour. China does not oppose the US. The light rivalries between the governments of the world never put them on opposite sides. The enemy of your enemy is very much the same as them and they are both working against you. The new feudal structure also has many continuing the fantasy of a multi-polar empire, but a glance at trade agreements and foreign investment is enough to show clearly that the multi-polar feudal lords have all pledged allegiance to China. It does not matter at all where the headquarters of the empire is in any case, those holding power are all allies and none of them are going to save their natural enemies, all of those below them.

The trade economy ponzi scheme has reached its natural conclusion in the new global empire. The people most likely to overthrow Chinese or global corporate rule are not the US military or any other rival state, but the Chinese people and the people of the world. In order for this to occur, the people of the world would have to accept that no messiah will save them and see the root principles of the ponzi schemes of power and wealth that enabled the empire. Most of all, for any revolution to result in actual change, there must be a new path built with new principles.

To be continued ….

Related:

Binding Chaos
Autonomy, Diversity, Society
Releasing Chaos