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Fictional villains often give us some of the deepest insights into the human condition. Writers are freed to venture outside the bounds of what they think is civil society and explore new modes of thinking that may or may not, in fact, be malevolent. In doing so they sometimes, purposefully or inadvertently, stumble across uncomfortable truths that the layperson would recoil from in horror.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

One of the greatest metaphors for our current way of life came in the creation of Bane’s monologue to Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises, after Bane captures and imprisons him in a place known only as ‘The Pit’.

There’s a reason why this prison is the worst hell on earth… Hope. Every man who has rotted here over the centuries has looked up to the light and imagined climbing to freedom. So easy… So simple… And like shipwrecked men turning to sea water from uncontrollable thirst, many have died trying. I learned here that there can be no true despair without hope. So, as I terrorize Gotham, I will feed its people hope to poison their souls. I will let them believe they can survive so that you can watch them clambering over each other to stay in the sun. You can watch me torture an entire city, and when you have truly understood the depth of your failure, we will fulfill Ra’s al Ghul’s destiny. We will destroy Gotham, and then, when it is done, and Gotham is…ashes… then you have my permission to die.

This one speech reveals the face of true evil, a thing that delights in the suffering and absolute demoralization of its victims. Here Bane is a representation of the Deep State, the true ruling force of our world, existing beyond all bounds of morality, law, and order. Batman is the free-thinking rebel, enjoying the same philosophical freedom as Bane but committed to a life of principles and justice. The people of Gotham represent the citizenry of Planet Earth over whom absolute dominion is being sought – the power of life and death itself.

Bane makes it clear that, before he will grant Bruce death, he intends on tormenting the people of Gotham with a lie – the hope that they can avoid the fate he has planned for them if they commit themselves to the twisted game he has laid before them.

The Only Way to Win Is Not to Play

In the real world, this game is playing out in the halls of every government in existence. It is a sick game, one that teases people with the promise of a utopian future, if only they would unconditionally surrender to the State’s present demands. In truth, like Bane, the State’s only goal is death.

It has never been any other way.

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve to death millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill millions of Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese people; they did not kill more than 500,000 members of the Indonesian Communist party, alleged party sympathizers, and others; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia, murdering one fourth of the country’s population; they did not kill as many as 200,000 Mayan peasants and others in Guatemala; they did not kill more than 500,000 Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus in Rwanda; they did not implement US and Allied trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children; they did not launch one aggressive US war after another. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous. – Robert Higgs

Those who would try to convince you of a need, utilitarian or otherwise, of a State don’t have a moral leg to stand on, nor a fiber of integrity in their body. With every breath they hubristically declare their own virtue and silence their critics by force and graft. If you are ever to enjoy any measure of true liberty you must reject, wholesale, the notion that any person or group can dare make, let alone enforce, so-called law.

No amount of ceremony or paperwork can sanctify the edicts, pronouncements or ‘laws’ of any State.

No amount of people who agree with its forceful actions against non-violent people can ever overturn universal morality and natural law. And, if either of those two concepts are unfamiliar to you, you just may be one of those demoralized people being manipulated like Gothamites.

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideas and policies, one perhaps of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method. – Carrol Quigley

You should not take Quigley’s words lightly. He was the chief historian of a secret society founded over a century ago by British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, and mentor to former US President and suspected pedophile Bill Clinton. Quigley makes the distinction between ‘America’ (i.e., the State) and the ‘American people.’ They are not the same, and ‘America’ is putting on an elaborate hoax to entrap the ‘American people.’

No matter what happened with Bane’s game; Gotham is destroyed. Similarly, whichever political party takes power, you remain under the boot of those who would see you dead in the pursuit of their agendas.

Resolve to Serve No More

The only recourse is rebellion. I speak not of revolution, which only seeks to violently replace the State with another of a different character. A rebel has no need for a master, and triumphs when he realizes just how dependent the State is on his ongoing subservience.

I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces. – Étienne de La Boétie

The State’s parasitic dependence on its host citizenry is its Achilles’ heel. Citizens are the geese laying golden eggs, and the State is careful not to destroy them all. Just enough to keep those that remain living in silent, obedient awe and terror. Control over the issuance of currency, and taxes, are its lifeblood. Fortunately for you, their greatest power is also yours. You need only to understand how to use it. In doing so you can topple empires without firing a single bullet.

Without tax revenues the State is forced to resort to inflation – the printing of currency – to fund its bloated bureaucracies and military. Then, in very short order, the value of treasuries and the currency itself will collapse. Without any means of paying for the obedience of its underlings and enforcers, you will see just how powerful they truly were. With politicians and bureaucrats exposed as nothing more than screeching harpies, the mobs of disaffected true believers will take care of the rest.

The State’s allies in the financial system are already powerless to seize your money, if that money is stored in incorruptible, private cryptographic ledgers like Monero (XMR), Pirate Chain (ARRR), or Dero (DERO). If you aren’t already using them, start. This is your first step towards a brighter future.

The Time is Now

Nothing I write here is new, nor should any of it shock anyone properly educated in human history. We are living through yet another mass murder and economic genocide, with all States now marching in lockstep toward the complete annihilation of civil society. Those who point this out are deplatformed, have their livelihoods taken away, and shut out of society. The perpetrators take no pause, nor show any signs of remorse for their destructive acts.

Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want the government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes, I am an Anarchist. – William Graham Sumner

There never was any chance of bending this system of domination towards virtuous ends. The State has always been the incarnation of pure violence, indeed many philosophers and legal scholars define it as such. You must resolve to not feed this monster with the fruits of your labor, and evade every attempt it makes to seize your money and property by force. The Bundy family demonstrated just how possible this is.

But this does not go far enough.

The Bundy’s still gave credence to the State’s legal system, its courts, and prosecutors. They are part of this hoax as well, for the same law societies are playing all sides of any courtroom farce, and they do it for the exact same reason – to extract as much of your property as they can for themselves. There is no independent judiciary, and both prosecutor and defense are playing for the same team.

The State isn’t broken, it’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do. And for that reason, it must be left behind to die. Stop letting yourself be tortured by sociopaths. Withdraw your support now, your life depends on it, and there is no Batman coming to save you.

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“Want to be rich? Start a good business.
Want to be really  rich? Become a socialist.”
— Unknown.

There is no shortage of empirical data that socialism fails every time it has been tried, and leaves the largest body count in it’s wake. Dr. Kristian Niemtietz’s “Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies” documents the three distinct stages socialism goes through

1. The Honeymoon Phase
2. The What Aboutery Phase
3. And finally, when all that’s left is a smoking crater and a pile of bodies, “the not real socialism phase”

Niemietz documents each occurrence of socialism in the 20th century in his book to show that central planning and redistribution simply do not work.

Then there’s the Black Book of Communism, which tallies up the body count of the socialist regimes of the 20th century (over 100 million souls).

So it’s curious, why are our intellectual, cultural and sundry political and economic elites decrying capitalism and promulgating socialism as a cure for societies perceived ills?

The answer, I think, is because socialism isn’t actually meant to succeed economically. It’s successful if it keeps the population under control, and the elites in charge.

A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

We have a clue, albeit an allegorical one, in a literary reference from the 1888 novel “A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder” by Canadian James De Mille.

This is an adventure story in the genre of “Lost Horizons” or Jules Verne, where a group of passengers on a trans-Atlantic voyage recover “a strange manuscript in a copper cylinder”. The contents contain the tale of Adam More, a British sailor presumed lost at sea in a whaling expedition decades earlier.

His account is fantastical: he and his companion were separated from their ship after going ashore somewhere southwards of Desolation Island. They continued drifting south, past a string of volcanic islands and end up, as the narrators reading his account surmise, somewhere on the Antarctic continent. There they encounter a truly bizarre civilization.

After traversing the outer-fringes of this unknown land, populated by savages, who turn out to be the vanguard of an advanced civilization located further within the continent’s interior, Adam More (his companion unfortunately didn’t make it, having been ritually cannibilized by the natives) finds himself taken in and cared for by the Kosekin. An affable race of kind, cultured people but who are strangely averse to sunlight, and, as Adam learns more about these people, are possessed by an inexplicably deep rooted inversion of More’s traditional British values:

The Kosekin revere poverty, and they disdain wealth.

Their “highest” social class are those that live in extreme, subsistence poverty. In fact those savages they passed on the outskirts of the land were considered their highest, elite class.

They recoil from requited love. When two people discover they love each other, they separate as fast as possible in order to bestow the blessing of loss on one another.

Above all, they value death. The entire civilization is, in fact, a death cult.

Soon, Adam More meets his love interest amongst the society, Almah, another foreign born woman who holds some sort of ceremonial hostage role amongst the Kosekin. Almah shares the same values as More and is as perplexed as he by the curious inversion of this society. Together they mournfully face the realization of their impending fate (I’ll leave it to the reader to delve in if interested).

The bigger picture of Strange Manuscript for our purposes here, is that the so-called “lowest” rung of society, are what we would call “the wealthy” in our own. They endure terrible hardship for the benefit of the larger populace: palaces, servants, unimaginable riches. These unfortunates soak up the prosperity from all above them, so that all higher classes can bask in the glory of poverty and squalor.

Eventually Adam More and Almah are granted an audience to meet the top rulers of this society, and the truth emerges: like More, they too love life, fear death, and they think prosperity and riches are vastly superior to poverty. Imagine that.

Only these rulers knew the truth, but they had at their feet an entire society who was so indoctrinated with their perversely inverted zeitgeist that they had no challengers to their power and wealth, they ruled absolute, and controlled all the wealth in the land.

I haven’t been able to find much biographical material on De Mille beyond his entry in Woke-epedia so I don’t know that he wrote his novel as a parable of world socialism. But I first read this when I was a teenager who didn’t pay a lot of attention to history or geopolitics and even then remember thinking to myself “this sounds like a metaphor for the USSR”. That was around the time Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Communist Party. Brezhnev loved luxury sports cars and he collected BMWs. He liked to race them through the streets near his dacha (that’s Russian for “villa”) in the Crimea.

Hypernormalization: The Secret Sauce of Global Communism

It could be that fascism, that other totalitarian ideology which is well outside today’s Overton Window had in its secret sauce, identitarianism and nationalism. As long as you had “the other” to blame for your problems you could convince the population to accept brutal suppression of their individual rights.

Socialism, however unsuccessful, is quizzically normalized today. Politicians can even run for office proudly proclaiming their socialist ideologies and somehow it doesn’t make them untouchable and get them lumped in with their authoritarian brethren. It’s fashionable to be socialist again. It will never be acceptable, let alone hip, to be a fascist. (One down, one to go)

The secret sauce to make socialism palatable is what British documentarian Adam Curtis called “Hypernormalization”. To bastardize Voltaire’s famous quote, hypernormalization is the art of making the masses believe absurdities, so that their rulers can commit atrocities.

To be clear, Curtis believes that hypernormalization is a “fake world” created by corporations and maintained by politicians. I think the fake world was created by those in power, the State establishment, with complicity by certain factions within the corporate world and pretty well the entire mainstream media. It doesn’t really matter, it’s a chicken / egg scenario. What’s important to understand is that there is a an established cadre of those who wield power that straddles the State, the military, the media and corporatocracy. 

All the absurdities we are expected to believe today, from the idea that the Kremlin is behind any outcome that hasn’t gone according to plan, to the world will literally end if we don’t reengineer society into a top-down control structure, within (pick one) 12 years, 10 years, 1 year or (perhaps the most telling one) “before the next election”.

This is what we’re up against. If humanity doesn’t transition off fossil fuels (before the next election) the earth will heat to unsafe levels and there will be climate catastrophe. https://t.co/stutip23IY

— Elizabeth May (@ElizabethMay) August 9, 2019

Anybody who tries to debate these narratives, to present counterfactuals or alternative theories is fallaciously dismissed as one manner or another of “denialist”, “*phobic”, “hateful” or the catch all “racist”.

Relentlessly hammering home these absurdities softens up the public’s mind to accept increasingly hysterical climate alarmism, social justice extremism, and scapegoating of capitalism. The solution then presented, frequently delivered by multi-millionaire celebrities and/or multi-millionaire political aspirants, is socialism.

These hypernormal themes are narratives, they are not news. Yet they are incessantly repeated by corporate media and Hollywood, with guaranteed delivery of approved messaging by Silicon Valley tech giants, who also provide for concomitant attenuation of non-conforming data. It’s an effective simpatico for coordinating widespread indoctrination so that eventually we will wind up with a population clinging fervently to a completely inverted system of values:

Capitalism is evil, and Socialism is great.

Then, we become as the Kosekin. We are not there yet, but we see messaging designed to float trial balloons and soften us up for this two tier society. The majority underclass will have to forgo certain extravagances, and in this incarnation, it’s not to emancipate the proletariat, but to somehow centrally manage the climate of an entire planet.

The elites who recently convened at a conference on global warming via super-yachts and 114 private jets (for 300 attendees) grapple with these issues. Who knows what kind of sacrifices everybody else will have to make. Even air travel and cars may have to come off the table at some point.

For example, quite suddenly lately, we’ve been hearing that meat consumption will have to come down, that’s the word from on high. The best way to feed the masses in an eco-friendly way will be to steer them toward maggots and soy patties. My guess is those items will be absent from the menu at future Davos events. (Although that Twitter thread I just linked to is very illuminating about who will benefit from convincing the population to move from meat to maggots).

The way things are going now, the masses will be fine with all of this. Socialism is poised to be the overall control structure for 21st century, and it will bear an uncanny resemblance to the society depicted in A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder: a nihilistic anti-human death cult that abhors prosperity and leaves a small cadre of elites at the pinnacle of society to languish in opulence.

If you want to stay informed on how to survive socialism in the 21st century, make sure you’re on the GC mailing list , follow me on Mastodon (or if you’re woke, on Twitter).