A Time of Weak Emperors

Is a time when the powerless possess a strength their rulers cannot fathom.

One of the things I am constantly guarding against in myself is succumbing to despair.

I have been writing about the corruption of our political system, the degeneracy of our social morals, and the decline of our nations for a long time now. For at least ten years I have been engaged in these issues and discussing this decline on a daily basis, and I think most of us will acknowledge that things have gotten worse in that period. Even our moments of triumph, like Trump and Brexit in 2016, have been reversed by all manner of illegitimate means.

We have lived through a period where good has been toppled from thrones, and evil has taken its place. And we now live in unacknowledged tyrannies that pontificate about Democracy while they deny it in every way they can. We can’t turn on a television, walk down a street, get on a bus without being bombarded with a constant assault of lies and propaganda all designed to elevate the things we oppose and destroy and smear the things we value.

Our churches are empty. But mosques are being built at a furious pace.

Our borders are unprotected. But we are told we should risk nuclear war for Ukraine.

Our children are at ever greater risk from predators. They are at risk from those imported who see them as sexual slaves, and they are at risk from those in power who do so too.

Or even from their doctors. Our doctors abandoned the Nuremberg Code and the Hippocratic Oath and injected children with poisonous experiments they did not need. It’s hard to imagine any evil on such a scale involving so many innocent victims going unpunished, and yet unpunished it still goes.

Yes, it is easy to understand why some of us succumb to apathy and despair. I’ve felt its call.

What is the point of complaining? What have we stopped or prevented? Who has been punished for any of the evils inflicted on us, or any of the crimes they have committed?

When you live in a society where corruption is continually rewarded and justice seems impossible, despair is a rational response. Especially when you also see so many not even being aware that this is the case, refusing the evidence of their own experience and senses, and pretending that the recognition of madness is itself mad.

And all the time the crooks grow richer and the reduction of even your most basic and vital rights becomes an ever more accepted demand.

And yet I refuse to stop telling the truth, to my very small band of listeners, and I refuse to give in to despair. And there are millions of others just like me. There are millions of us who keep complaining when complaint seems useless, and keep refusing to share or live by lies when all that grants is alienation and censure.

If we lived by lies we would live more comfortably. There is no doubt of that. Compliance is rewarded just as defiance (even in so small a manner as words alone) is punished.

There are two interesting psychological questions about this. And they aren’t those that are normally raised (why do so many people comply and why do so few people resist). Any familiarity with the most famous psychological experiments of the 20th century (Solomon Asch and the Asher conformity experiments in the 1950s, Stanley Milgram’s ‘learning task’ authority tests in the 1960s, Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford University prison experiment, even John Calhoun’s terrifying 1970 Universe 25 utopia test on mice) answer these standard questions, as does study of military psy-ops or of any decent basic texts in advertising, PR and general psychology.

The questions that are less commonly asked are ones that come once almost total dominance has been achieved and resistance is deeply counter-productive for the life chances and status of those who resist, and they are these:

Why does the oppressor keep oppressing and why does the resistor keep resisting.

Because even if the internal processes by which some inevitably behave corruptly from a position of power and some display defiance while many do not are very well understood, there comes a point where perhaps even those enacting either side of this equation should know that their behavior is self defeating.

In other words, there comes a point where it is rational for the tyrant to stop applying pressure, just as there comes a point where it is rational for the dissident to stop fighting back. And yet the people at these extremes keep behaving the same way, while most people in the middle (the conformists) are pulled towards whichever direction is winning.

Man is a social animal, still equipped with the conditioning instincts of a pack, still investing a large degree of worth, value and meaning in purely social positioning. So the behavior of the middling conformist who neither takes a leading role in corruption or oppression nor ever dares to speak against it is the least inexplicable of all psychological types. The conformist is the human operating as a social animal always operates. He sits in a sort of Goldilocks position of psychological response to manipulated social phenomena-neither too hot nor too cold but just right for society (whether a good society or a bad one).

In a society of good morals he will be an averagely good person. In a society of sick or inverted morals he will be an averagely bad person. Both of these are extremely predictable.

But the extremes of the most corrupt and the most resistant to corruption at either end of the scales of conformity and rebellion should be less predictable than this middling personality, but really aren’t.

When we look at Globalist corruption and authority, for instance, it should strike us as curious that the very wealthiest and the most powerful aren’t either content to merely enjoy the fruits of their corruption or wise to the possibility that increasing the corruption eventually imperils their position.

It’s not impossible for instance to be a wise dictator. One who understands that having pushed thus far, and achieved a particular level of control, further tyranny might spark rebellion. A wise dictator could still rationally assess a situation and decide that a risk is an unwarranted risk, purely out of self-interest. This is essentially what distinguished Franco from Mussolini or Hitler. Franco managed to be content with the dominance of his own nation. Tito too, from a Communist perspective, showed a certain degree of caution after victory that kept him in power and made his death the trigger for the collapse of all the careful balancing of ethnic interests that kept as unnatural a construct as Yugoslavia going.

But our current Globalist dictators show no caution at all in the pursuit of their aims (or the satisfaction of their vices), making the lack of acknowledgement of their tyranny all the more unusual. They aren’t really slowing down any of their plans for a techno-feudal society, despite a few minor Green Policy reversals here and there. Having got away with the four trillion US dollar wealth transfer of COVID one might think a pause would be in order. Having forced a dangerous medical experiment on three quarters of the human species some cautious delay might be strategically advantageous. But no. All the plans rattle on, at speed, regardless of the impact.

They show every sign of wishing to proceed exactly the same way with ‘the next Pandemic’ and every sign of being determined to use other false crises (like the climate change hoax) in an identical fashion.

There seems no bottom level of public distrust and hatred and no top level of obviousness to corruption and theft that makes a Globalist say ‘maybe we stop importing millions of savages for a little while’ or ‘maybe we stop diverting trillions of public spending quite so blatantly’ as a pragmatic measure to prevent rebellion. There’s either a complete disregard of the possibility of being toppled or a desperate urgency in achieving the complete techno-feudal system before a particular date (or event).

These people don’t draw back from the madness even when it would be in their purely selfish interest to do so.

Weak evil men are ultimately perhaps more dangerous than strong evil men. For the weak tyrant must prove himself strong, to himself as well as others, and the evil imagination can only imagine strength through the enactment of greater crimes. It is the psychology of the weak we must truly understand when talking about the powerful.

And conversely for those who still resist, verbally, physically, spiritually, in the smallest and the greatest measures, it is in their political powerlessness that we see their strength as individuals, their personal moral worth, and their individual qualities of will, determination, endurance and courage.

Neither the tyrant nor the meek conformist acquires any opportunities to test, prove and show these qualities in themselves because the weight of authority, and in the modern world the power of vast institutions, media manipulation, and corporate and banking resources too, are already under their direction and aligned with their aims.

If they had such qualities, they would not be on the side they are on in the first place, which puts us while living in a corrupt society in that curious position of constantly wondering why the most idiotic ideas prevail, why the weakest men triumph, and why the ideologies tested by time and found wanting or ruinous do better than those which are profound, sensible and genuinely successful in terms of making our lives better and richer (both economically and psychologically).

Corruption and greed in their purest forms, merely that of the individual willing to enact lies or commit tyranny or obey orders for personal financial profit, does not adequately explain either the full appeal of ‘the Dark Side’ nor does it explain why the proponents of it can’t be a little smarter, a little more measured and cautious, in the moves they make towards ruining everything.

Look for example at how Globalist policies have gone for the western world. There is no area of politics in which the Globalist could honestly say that his approach has improved things. The key Globalist obsessions are these:

1. Controlling all politics and eliminating all populist alternatives.

2. Radical progressive ideologies on gender, identity, sexuality and public morals.

3. Imposing their own values globally through trans-national bodies and perpetual war.

4. Climate change, net zero and radical energy and food policies supposedly justified by the notion of catastrophic man-made climate change.

There is not one of these aims that makes the West stronger. Now with every one of these main Globalist aims the tyrannical Globalist should be able to see that his policies have failed and are failing to the extent that, no matter how profitable they are to him in the short term, the long term likelihood is that their continued pursuit in the exact same fashion will result, eventually, in a rebellion significant enough to remove him from power OR a general collapse and destruction so severe as to ruin his life, just as much as ours.

Yes, of course, the corrupt system rewards corruption and the tyrannical Globalist can acquire great wealth and influence. But that does not explain pushing to repeat that kind of theft again and again as the risks of response grow and as the nature of the crimes committed becomes more and more obvious.

A smart hustler would not, for instance, having invented some means of cheating the casino, keep going back to the same casino to rip them off. At some point the casino they are fleecing goes bankrupt or the casino they are fleecing does something very severe to them in response.

Look at that first aim, controlling all politics. In pursuit of this aim in the West the ruling class have used Dominion machines to alter vote tallies. They have stolen elections through Dominion and through all the various other techniques of electoral fraud. They have constructed Chicago Machine networks which will perform electoral fraud, but will also change legislation to make fraud easier and endorse fraudulent results while making questioning these results the ‘crime’ rather than committing the fraud being the crime.

The censorship push and the assault on free speech is part of the same process. There they have gone after people for dissident opinion, created hate speech legislation and online regulation and fascist cooperation between the State and news and social media companies to crush all alternative opinions and all populist or traditionally conservative thought. Now, they advocate for concepts like misinformation and disinformation as a justification for draconian responses, censorship and imprisonment, for any ideas that challenge them.

In the US and throughout the western world medical experts critical of COVID policies were silenced, fired from their jobs, and struck off-removed from practicing medicine. In both the US and the UK you can be arrested for silent prayer in the vicinity of an abortion clinic. In Canada you can have your professional qualifications withdrawn and an academic career ended if you refuse to use imaginary pronouns. In the US if you peacefully assembled to protest a stolen election you might have been one of those arrested, imprisoned and held without charge for years (some J6 prisoners did not even attend on J6). In Britain if you post an intemperate expression of disgust about mass immigration on social media or a commonplace awareness that not everyone entering the country illegally is a future brain surgeon you can be accused of provoking a riot and sent to prison. If you hold up a banner calling MPs and the police corrupt you can be sent to prison and driven to suicide.

Effectively murdered by the British State for an opinion.

And of course what prompts these tyrannical responses expands and expands. The World Health Organisation demands that all criticism of vaccines be treated this way. The Vice Chancellor of Germany demands that all social media platforms must follow his politics and his opinions because anything else is dangerous. He talks of supporting Trump or being Elon Musk as dangerous things that ‘defensive Democracy’ should not permit. That’s the German Vice-Chancellor. Senior German officials wants the AfD party banned. People shouldn’t be allowed to vote for something else. It’s long past the point where extremism meant literal calls to violence and terrorism. THOSE are fine if they come from favored groups.

Now extremism means any opposition to Globalist ideas, policies and hypocritical prejudices. And potentially anyone with an opinion they don’t like or anyone daring to question them can run afoul of their new laws and risk imprisonment by uttering an unwelcome truth or a too effective satire.

In the short term all this has allowed them to stay in power and keep enacting their policies when these policies don’t have any significant public support.

BUT it has also built the opposition to them. It has opened the eyes of millions to the extent of the corruption of our system. It has turned mild traditional patriots like me into furious and outraged opponents. It has made people realize MORE than they did before that their leaders, institutions and media are malign, self-serving liars. It hasn’t succeeded in quelling dissent and silencing criticism, at all.

It got what they wanted to do done (without them then ending up in prison themselves). And it made them lots of money in the short term.

But it drove the alternative media to be much more listened to, widespread and respected outside the ruling class than any mainstream media is. And it created and sustained and grew the popularity of the people it tried to destroy.

It wasn’t just this way with an assassin’s failed bullet. EVERYTHING foul, corrupt, genuinely illegal, unjust, tyrannical and immoral they have done to finish Trump and end MAGA has built BOTH bigger and stronger than they were before the injustice and the persecution and the hate.

Movements that offer hope for a different way and a different set of politics and a less corrupt elite in charge thrive on their attempted suppression. While at the same time having the corrupt power to try to eliminate political opponents unjustly, trying to outlaw them, ban them, fine them, or even kill them actually reveals how weak, dangerous and extreme YOU are.

People gradually realize that if you really were the moderates you would not be doing these things. Just as they realize that if you really were the majority representing the views most people share you would not need to do these things.

The strongest argument against the claimed political moderation, love of democracy, respect for freedom and benign liberalism of Globalists are their own actions in attempting to define any and all opposition to them as things which require banning, silencing, and prison sentences.

The wise Globalist would not now be trying to make more things illegal than before and police more thoughts and enact more tyranny. He’d be starting to worry about what happens when these measures build even more contempt and hatred, justifiably so, towards him. Unless of course he does actually plan to go to fully Stalinist levels and simply kill so many people so continuously that resistance cannot come.

The welcome reality of history though is both that all tyrannies fall and that more genuine tyrants end up facing a bleak end themselves than a happy one. For every tyrant who died in old age in bed there is another who was strung up from a lamppost or ripped apart by a mob. We aren’t of course at either extreme yet-the Globalists are not quite comparable with Stalin and the rebels aren’t anywhere near the point of fury of those who killed Ceausescu.

But a smart Globalist should have cottoned on by now that the more they themselves depart from democratic norms, the more extreme their urge to silence, ban, demonize and criminalize dissent and disagreement with them, the more public hatred of them and public support for populism will grow. As apathetic as many are, and as brainwashed and fooled as many were during COVID, populism grows and grows and the populations of the West are simply not as used to tyranny as the population of China is. When Trudeau spoke enviously about Chinese Communist tyranny letting rulers ‘get things done’ what he envied was two-fold.

He envied both the totalitarian system itself, AND the submission of the Chinese to such a system as the natural order of things.

The Chinese have never had anything approaching freedom or democracy. We have. Which is precisely why our leaders have to try and be more deceptive and duplicitous about their tyranny than Chinese communists are. But its not working.

The gap between the rhetoric of being the moderates ‘fortifying’ elections or ‘defending’ Democracy and the reality of their actions being ones which are increasing tyranny and suppressing free speech is simply too obvious and too glaring.

Similarly in more pragmatic terms the gap between the claims of the things which in the short term enrich the corrupt and what these same policies do to everyone else is also becoming too large to disguise anymore.

You cannot effectively pretend that you are the sensible and moderate and successful ones on the economy when you have delivered the 2008 crash, when you have delivered insane levels of debt, when you have spent trillions but nobody has seen their nation or their own life improve, or when inflation is running at 25% and when Russia’s economy is being upgraded whilst yours declines.

Not only is the Free World no longer Free, its not even working. Globalism enriches a very small number while impoverishing everyone else and actually reverses the gains of genuine free market capitalism (because it has replaced that with corporatism and with State-Corporate alliance fascism). When the Stock Market is high now its not an indicator of general economic health and the resulting confidence that flows from that. It’s an indicator that share prices too raise with inflation, or that the final bubble burst has been temporarily averted by making the bubble bigger again with some measure like the injection of more imaginary money in the dying fiat system.

Globalists themselves know a debt day reckoning will come and current levels of government spending if continued WILL burst the cap off the debt super-volcano, and basic economics knows that too…which is why even some Globalists (tech billionaires following Musk’s lead) are shifting towards Trump rather than Kamala.

Both politically in terms of ‘who is being democratic’ and economically in terms of ‘who is being sensible’ there is no long-term sustainability in Globalism. In fact, the current Woke Tyranny is really at the tail end (the final, most corrupt form) of 50 years of Globalism getting it wrong.

The most insane Globalists think they can reboot the system they broke as a techno-feudal society with a social credit system and a digital currency that magically wipes away all their accumulated debt. They think they can steer to ruin while enriching themselves and build a bunker or reset the system just when they need to in a way that saves them and their wealth. But a few of the smarter ones like Musk realize that radical reboot attempt will ruin everything. Both freedom and a working economy are not household appliances you can switch on and off again without consequence. A Musk realizes this despite being a technophile and a transhumanist, whilst a Gates doesn’t realize it because he’s a technophile and a transhumanist.

Why does the Globalist persist in policies that are clearly ruinous? What good does siphoning off a few trillion do when you’re building a disaster that will wipe out those trillions anyway? Do they really think for instance that they can Net Zero the foundations of the entire economy, on the basis of a hysterical lie, and that this will really end with them controlling all energy and all food production? It’s more likely to be a western version of Soviet collectivisation and Lysenkoism, an utter disaster for everyone….even them.

The answer is more than an ethical one. It is not just about being good or evil, corrupt or honorable. It is that these are weak emperors, not genuinely strong thinkers. They have to keep grasping more because it is all that they know how to do. They can’t stop themselves because they didn’t get where they are by ever stopping or ever controlling their rapacious instincts. Society has not punished them. Their nations have declined but they have prospered. Therefore they will always prosper doing the same thing. Therefore there will never be a punishment. Therefore they can reset at the last minute and escape the consequences.

It takes both more ethics and a broader capacity of comprehension than they have ever displayed or had to display for a weak emperor to admit that they are wrong or to see the strength in an opposing argument. They just keep flailing away (ban, silence, lie, imprison, steal) in an attempt to crush opposition that builds more opposition. And they don’t have any kind of big picture consciousness (morally or pragmatically) that would let them see that they are as likely to be destroyed by what they are doing as the rest of us are.

The last Emperors of Rome were such weak men still possessed of power. One of them (Valentinian III) had the last truly successful Roman general, Aetius, murdered. He was jealous and fearful that Aetius would replace him, and so sealed Rome’s death with a petty move concentrated solely on himself. A little later, having denied the dying Empire it’s last great general, he was murdered in turn by his own bodyguards.

In some ways we can think of Trump as an American Aetius who has not yet (thankfully, and hopefully never will be) been murdered. But more than that. America is Aetius. England is Aetius. Canada is Aetius. Australia is Aetius. Germany is Aetius.

The Globalist would kill the thing from which his authority derives, the western world itself, not knowing that his success dooms himself and not caring that only his failure would preserve the rest of us.

Why does he persist? Because he lacks the imagination and the strength to be anything else. Why do we resist? Well, our nature abhors a tyranny just as his demands one.