War on Woke

In the middle of the twentieth century the word ‘woke’ was synonymous with ‘getting it’; being aware of the ways of the world, especially in relation to black Americans being ‘woke’ to the prevalence of racial prejudice. This form appears to have first been inspired by Marcus Garvey when he exhorted “Wake up, Africa!” and went on to influence movements like Black Power. Typically, today, the word has been taken up by the usual white saviours – they just can’t leave things alone, can they?

To the woke, woke means: 'aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice'. How could anybody be against that? How? Well because the fields of racial and social justice are rotten through with theorists who cling to the doctrine of Critical Race Theory, a politically motivated attempt to make white westerners ashamed of their own existence. To the woke, anybody coming under the catch-all title of ‘anti-woke’ is a thuggish racist and extreme far-right bigot, and there they end their intellectual inquiry. Ain’t nobody woke don’t know dat.

The assumption that anybody who rejects the political reframing of our history, the replacement of actual events with confected accounts of the malign intent behind every single event, is an uneducated blackshirt would be risible, were it not soaked up so readily by the impressionable minds it is deliberately intended to influence. The young, the different, those who have no comprehension of or engagement with the realpolitik. Anybody confused with or at odds with the world can embrace this almost religious fervour, declare themselves woke and thus give themselves a moral boost without engaging in any of the problematic process of thinking it through

Once converted, these self-declared intellectual superiors are quite the worst at recognising the cognitive bias of their own thesis. They are immune to reason and paint over everything with a varnish of racial disinformation; lapping up every morsel of indignation, every sleight, every raised eyebrow, and in the process of digesting all this, churn out ever more atomised ways of perceiving injustice. And any attempt to counter their arguments is seen as ‘reactionary’ and backward. They see nothing wrong in their smug self-righteousness.

Whereas, what we see is the world we live in portrayed very differently on screen – the overwhelmingly mixed race couples in adverts, the white male as neanderthal throwback, the endless ranks of BAME commentators, listened to in reverence. Every aspect of our lives is now judged on ‘diversity’, which almost always means no safe space for white people, especially those with English as a first language. We are the white oppressor, and we must accept this without question.

Maybe this is all deliberate, to give us supposedly privileged white folk a taste of our own medicine; to make it impossible for us to rationally question the narrative. And whenever the more outspoken, the more intellectually rigorous among us dares to speak out, they are portrayed as rabble rousing, club wielding Nazis. So, not only are we to accept all the blame and make obeisance to the new black princes, we have no right to reply, or to point out how possibly noble objectives have been appropriated to cause harm.

Some of the more vociferous spokespeople for various black lives organisations seriously call for the total eradication of ‘the white race’ and expect no censure for doing so. Yet any protest is loudly shouted down and the regular cancelling of sports people, comedians, writers, scientists, politicians and anybody who dares to speak out with reason and fairness is testament to which side is really the oppressor. It seems to me that any neutral observer must see that the anti-woke reaction is an entirely rational response to a dogma which is out of control.

Fertile Ground

 It surely cannot be right, can it, that the solution to falling fertility rates in the west can only be solved by bringing in enormous numbers of uneducated young men and giving them a free living off the state? Similarly, how is an employment crisis among the indigenous young fixed by displacing them with largely illegal workers who toil under the radar in exploitative industries? And why is it that somebody who has led a healthy, long life and paid taxes for over fifty years is expected to live on a subsistence pension worth somewhat less than half the supposed ‘living wage’?

If your entire economic model is propped up by consumption of unnecessary goods by people who cannot afford them, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your economic model. Furthermore, the associated costs to society – fragmentation, violence, fear and actual existential threat – are many times more than your army of the undeserving will ever bring to the coffers. The whole damn thing is broken and no politician in the land has the balls to even recognise the issues out loud, let alone propose effective means to tackle them.

In the Britain I grew up in – admittedly a somewhat dull, grey place at times – we were thrifty and saved for those rainy days. We saved to put down a deposit on an affordable house in which to establish our dynasties. Communities largely stayed together, with multi-generational family gatherings the rule rather than the exception. We believed in fixing the roof while the sun was shining and deferring gratification until we felt it was deserved and would be appreciated. Spoiling children, except on high days and holidays, was something only frivolous people did.

But today’s young don’t save – what’s the point? They can’t afford to buy a house, possibly ever, so the nesting instinct is somewhat dulled. And sod waiting when the whole of media, social or otherwise, tells them they deserve everything right here, right now. Just do it, they are instructed, so out goes the traditional rusty old banger we saved for and in comes the brand spanking new lease-plan Merc. (Forget the crusty old burghers of the WEF; ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ could have been coined by this generation.)

They have been told their future depends on immigration when in fact that future is being lost to a form of uncontrolled immigration which will cost us all our futures. They have been told that diversity is strength when diversity will rob them of their identity and make them ashamed of being born white. Once that was the winning ticket in the lottery of life. Today it is a ticket to the train of shame and a lifetime of self-flagellation for their ‘privileged’ skin colour.

Why, being berated daily for ancestors who did no wrong but are blamed for all the ills on Earth, would you want to bring children into the world? What incentive is there for somebody who can never afford a secure place to live to start a family? Instead of a naturally reproducing, productive and thriving home-grown society we are plunging headlong into a world where every city will be like Johannesburg. Those who can afford it will live inside heavily armed fortresses. Those who can’t afford it will have to fight for survival on the streets.

Somebody must have gamed all this. Think tanks must, surely, have posited the notion that all is not well. Somewhere there must be people who can both recognise the danger and act to counter it. Yet all we see, every day, is more and more blame being heaped upon the indigenous. Whether it is race, class, gender, foreign wars, wealth distribution, taxation, housing, justice… you name it, Whitey is to blame, and Whitey must pay.

If there is ever to be a future as good as the past once promised – and I very much doubt this is possible – we really do need to turn the clock back. For all the politicians’ pledges of jam tomorrow we are back in a time of great need. There will be hunger and homelessness ahead and yet still our western governments cling to the damaging doctrine of ever more immigration from the third world. For years we have been telling them ‘import the third world, get the third world’, but now we need tell them no longer. If they open their eyes and unblock their ears, they will see it and hear it everywhere they look.

News of the World

The last half  century has been pretty much downhill for democracy. As a child I was regularly made aware that we were living in a ‘free country’ with little notion of what that meant, having never known any other. English born we knew we were part of a great tradition of fighting against despotism and tyranny and throwing off first our own yokes and then those of the oppressed people of Europe. Twice. We had the vote, it was the swinging sixties and nothing was going to stop us; we were backing Britain, the greatest nation on what we knew of Earth.

The seventies brought their own tribulations, but a sense of indignation at the power-drunk unions drove us to exercise our democratic rights to vote against such over-arching control. And by the end of that troublesome decade the optimism had returned, at least for those of us who were educated, agile and mobile. Sure the mill towns and pit towns were in decline and the stench of de-industrialisation hung in the northern city air, but we were encouraged by the future that beckoned.

Closing our dark, satanic mills would benefit us all, we were told; let the free market reign and move all that toil and sweat and smoke and lung disease elsewhere. This way we could buy our precious ‘consumer goods’ for increasingly low prices and enjoy the leisure time freed up for us by clever politicians and clever business leaders. Relax, buy property, invest, let the money make money. In time, nobody would need to graft because the good times were just around the corner. The global economy was a force of nature, and a force for good, we were told. And so what if you didn’t, or couldn’t work? The system had the capacity to provide

But there was something wrong, something indecent about importing brown people to drive the buses and staff the corner shops, while the industrious little yellow people from far away made our toys and TVs and our takeaways. We stopped making things and instead let others make them in distant, sunny lands, which is where our money also went. There was no longer a feeling of proud nationhood, of belonging, but instead a note of desperation began to creep in as we moved into the new century increasingly detached from how our country worked.

Because globalisation, just like any other system, might work if it was part of a mix, if it was controlled and ordered by those who depend on it. Except it is not controlled at all and it is ordered, or rather ordained, by people who think they know far better than we how our lives should be lived. This is how we live now, unsure of who controls what, who owns what and from whom we should take direction. The globalists are not in control but are instead the acolytes of forces they have unleashed over which nobody has true dominion.

But it is fine, they say, the rule of law will ensure fairness. Oh, really? Did you see what P&O just did? In a move which has astonished and rightly enraged even free-marketeers, they have torn up contracts and made staff redundant. Redundant? Only by redefining that very word can you sack somebody and immediately replace them with cheap agency staff in those allegedly ‘redundant’ roles. You would think there would be some international law being broken here – I mean the Human Rights lot object even to people being misgendered these days – but the lawyers appear eerily silent. P&O did it simply because they can.

The influencers, the clever finance people, the globalists have created a storm they think they can weather, but for how long? Opening the Pandora’s box of blameless money, of guilt-free exploitation of resources and people, is an act that simply cannot go without consequences. The world of imaginary wealth, where somebody can almost literally think themselves rich, has to end somewhere. When all the little people propping up the pyramid have no option but to leave, where does that leave the globalists?

What happened to all this?

Some say restorative justice is the way; let perpetrator and victim meet and talk it out. But others, will settle for nothing less than revenge. The stolen, squandered wealth may not be able to be restored, but this doesn’t mean that reparation is impossible. Let the oligarchs, the mandarins, the money-grubbing industrialists and the exploiters of the workers tremble in fear for the rest of their days. Because when people without any power get angry – and they are as mad as hell right now – they have no other recourse than to violence. It’s coming; you just know it is.

Only Fools and Politics

In a time when nothing you hear is necessarily true, when all of what you see is suspect and eye-witness accounts depend so much on the ideology of the witness, how do you tell fact from fiction. (I just accidentally typed ‘fuction’; I think it’s a better word.) I mean, did you ever read a newspaper article which was wholly accurate? Or to be more specific, have you ever read a news item written about something on which you are something of an authority and realised that the writer hasn’t the first clue about the subject?

Our media world is full to the gunwales with reporters, wannabe reporters, commentators and so-called ‘influencers’ who care not one jot about accuracy, just so long as they can get their name out there. The report that the US government is (and who can say if this is true or not?) briefing TikTok ‘stars’ on the situation in Ukraine is just one more step along the way to the Orwellian singularity in which the truth is whatever people say it is.

The propaganda wars waged between east and west is just an upscale version of the information wars that have been pressed by governments and oppositions on their populations for many years. The future is bright, the future is shiny. “Jam tomorrow!” cries the party of government. “Lies, all lies!” say the opposition. And then, they swap places, leaving the scripts in place for their opposite numbers.

Given the unknowability of the future, this pantomime is a safe charade, for who can say that had the current opposition been in charge things would have been different? And a catastrophic decision made today is in no way an impediment to ennoblement tomorrow. In this rarefied world our actors in leadership find themselves sucked up by the undertow and swept along into the maelstrom of misinformation. I genuinely believe that those ‘in the know’ are simply in the thrall of different ‘facts’.

How else can you explain how the deafening roar of the usurped electorate goes unheard against the quiet whisper of the Mandelsons, the poison drip of the Grieves, the persistent murmur of the Westminster echo chambers? “British jobs for British workers!” pipes the election clarion, yet in government this becomes permission to open up the floodgates to all who wish to gorge on our largesse. And it matters not which party because as you look from Labour to Tory, from Tory to Labour, you could be forgiven for imagining they are all from the same porcine species.

It is little wonder, then, that so many have turned away from the news, regarding papers, podcasts, panel discussions and the like as mere entertainment. The truth matters little when the prospect of one commentator ‘owning’ another is so much more amusing. Even words like ‘owning’ have become the stuff of headline writers, hyperbole to sell a dreary exchange which results in no outcome of note.

In fact, the news has become little more than a sitcom. An episodic series of pratfalls, mishaps and misadventures in which Del Boy learns nothing, Rodney is still a plonker and Trigger hasn’t a clue what just happened. The news has no real effect on us any more, it is just the wallpaper, the background to our dreary lives, scrawled with the pattern of the day, and it only exists to give us a moment’s vicarious glee at the misfortune of others. When nothing is real it doesn’t matter how daft the plot, and if one punchline fails to land don’t worry, there’s one born every minute.

Nothing?

You will own nothing and you will be happy? This World Economic Forum ‘threat’ sounds at first take alarming but think about it for a moment. Were it actually possible it sounds like quite a good idea. No, really; everybody has a place to live, in which they are happy. The heat stays on, there is plenty of food and the roof gets fixed when it needs to be fixed. And although it doesn’t belong to them, neither do the headaches associated with ownership. And they will be happy. What’s not to like?

I’m assuming that in return we all put in a fair day’s work at which travail we are suited and content, thus being occupied in work which we if not enjoy at least endure reasonably well. And presumably, if we are going to be happy, maybe the more mundane duties are filled by the young and fit, but not arduously so. Bin men and ditch diggers maybe only have to put in half the hours of labour that a solicitor or an accountant need perform. And those of an artistic bent are free to indulge their passion for as many waking hours as they feel the urge.

In order to be happy, of course, one has to feel that life is worthwhile, so presumably universal, cradle-to-grave healthcare is free to all, as is unlimited opportunity to indulge in suitable leisure activities. Also, I would expect, life-enhancing ventures such as travel and sport, music and theatre… and picnics, I guess? But even as I write this I am wondering about how horribly uniform we would have to become for any of this to function.

A contentedness with our lot is something vouchsafed to relatively few of us, and a feeling that others are getting more than they deserve seems to be woven into the very thread of our DNA. Those with children will take more out of the system than those with none, or will we all be compelled to breed to a certain minimum? And there will always be slackers, of course. How do we incentivise everybody to give equally of their time and talents?

And also, in order to provide for all this, your local leisure centre is going to have to be utilitarian – more council gym than David Lloyd.  Your theatres more school hall than West End. Your restaurants more Wimpy than Ivy. Your cars more Trabant than Tesla, perhaps. The holiday resorts would necessarily be more Benidorm than the Algarve, but it would be free, see? And you will be happy. Now I come to think of it, it sounds terrible. In fact it sounds a lot like Communism in its strictest forms.

Klaus Schwab’s grand dream is just that. And yes, he has influence and yes, he has acolytes and yes indeed he may even, as Common Purpose and other left-thinking organisations have, inserted his ‘young leaders’ into governing institutions. But they have been doing this sort of thing for a great many years. The royal courts, and religion before that, all have sought to impose their grand vision on mankind and few have resulted in glorious redemption. And it’s all because of you.

Come over to the dark side, Luke...

Yes, you, you ungrateful animals who would bite the hand that feeds you. Of course, if having a belief in a grand conspiracy to enslave us all is important to your life view, who am I to deny you? Some people need a bit of doom to cling to, even in the best of times, so why not indulge in some exciting domination fantasy while times are grim? But as things stand I’m not holding my breath for Schwabby and his Dr Evil chums. Humanity is a work in progress and I don’t fear a new world order… I’d just like to see the old one sorted first.