by Paul Cudenec
I didn’t see the Covid moment coming, of course. Who could have imagined, even at the start of 2020, that we were heading into a Brave New World of lockdowns and curfews, of travel bans, vaccine passports and police-state restrictions on every aspect of our lives?
But for many years I had understood that our society risked heading in a totalitarian direction and that, far from being the opposite of contemporary “liberalism”, as we are always told, fascism was in fact a mode into which this hypocritical system could switch at any given time, when it felt the need.
This is why, when I decided to create a pdf collection of my recent online essays (here), I chose to begin with Organic radicalism: bringing down the fascist machine, published on the Winter Oak website three years ago today, on July 10, 2018.
Here we see how the dominant complex paints a false picture of historical fascism not just to smear its own current opponents, but also to hide its own close relationship with that very same monstrosity.
The same theme features in Liberalism: the two-faced tyranny of wealth, which appeared on the Organic Radicals website on the cusp of the Covid crisis (March 11, 2020) and in which I conclude: “Liberalism has for many centuries been a convenient disguise for the rule of money, the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small but very dominant elite”.
In the meantime, I had mused on the false idea of quantity as overall increase (Multiplication is division, June 5, 2019), inveighed against the life-denying contemporary mindset (Smash vitaphobia! December 28, 2019) and reminded readers that, however grim the society which we find ourselves enduring, Another world exists within us (January 13, 2020).
By March 29, 2020, my direct response to the Covid clampdown was under way, with a short piece in Winter Oak’s Acorn bulletin entitled We don’t want your fascist future!
Reclaiming the revolutionary wisdom of the past (April 22, 2020) is a contribution to the Organic Radicals site which takes as its starting point a study of the Situationist thinker Guy Debord.
I argue that a critique of current society which does not challenge the whole reality of that society – a technocratic industrial capitalist reality – will always be built on sand.
If we are ever to successfully resist and bring down this ecocidal system, we will need to be inspired by thinking which has its roots outside that system, which existed before that system took hold of our lives and our minds.
“We look to the past to see what we have lost – what has been stolen from us by the modern capitalist world”.
Resist the Fourth Industrial Repression!, published on April 25, 2020, is a defiant refusal of everything which the ruling clique has been trying to impose upon us under the feeble excuse of “fighting the virus”.
I warn: “The 4IR is a death cult which dreams of wiping out everything that is natural, everything that is wild, everything that is free”.
In Anarchists against freedom! (April 26, 2020) I hit back at certain so-called “anarchists” who had gone so far in cowing to the official Covid line that they were claiming that a love of freedom was in some way “right-wing”.
The rebels will return (April 29, 2020) provides a larger context to this tragic ideological collapse and reconfirms my commitment to anarchist ideals, regardless of the state of the anarchist movement at any given time.
In Money, lies and power (May 21, 2020), I raise the possibility that the ruling class now envisages going beyond the accumulation of money as the means to its domination and is instead planning a world in which it simply has total physical control over the rest of us, who will be nothing but slaves.
“They have obviously calculated that they can get away with this, that their wealth, power and lies are now so all-conquering, and the majority of humankind so supine, gutless and malleable, that they will simply be able to trample all over us, for ever. It is up to us to prove them wrong”.
Fascism, newnormalism and the left (July 26, 2020) was inspired by a book on Italian fascism which I came across in an extremely random way and which clarified my thinking in a number of ways.
In particular, it helped me see how the dehumanising New Normal of the Great Reset is very much a continuation of the original fascist project under Benito Mussolini, in which 20th century industrial plutocracy sought to accelerate its production by reshaping living beings into regimented and obedient units of human capital.
The Great Battle for the Future (August 18, 2020) appeared first on the Organic Radicals site and explores Silvia Federici’s analysis of the Middles Ages, when ordinary people had escaped the outright slavery of the Roman Empire and were rebelling against authority to reclaim a better future – one based on social justice, freedom and local autonomy.
This massive uprising was crushed by the emergence of capitalism and then industrialism. As Federici explains, capitalism was the “counter-revolution” that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle.
I point out the striking parallels between this historical moment and the counter-revolutions represented by fascism, in the 20th century, and the Great Reset, in the 21st.
Klaus Schwab and His Great Fascist Reset, published on October 5, 2020, is by a long way the most-read article I have ever penned, despite its length. It has since been reposted on many websites and translated into various languages.
Here I take a close look at the agenda being led by the World Economic Forum, via three books by its boss, Schwab. I explain: “He and his accomplices are using the Covid-19 crisis to bypass democratic accountability, to override opposition, to accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the rest of humankind against our will in what he terms a ‘Great Reset’.”
Dismantling tyranny (December 14, 2020) looks at the long-term issues which underlie the Great Reset and insists that these have to be resolved if we are ever to make a clean break with the current system.
“If we were able to pull back from the brink of this global totalitarian coup, there would be no point in returning to the pre-Covid status quo, as all the conditions would remain in place for the global ruling elite to try the same thing again, a few years down the road, using a different trick”.
Impact capitalism is a phenomenon which forms a central part of the New Normal agenda, and which is little understood. Researcher Alison McDowell has been producing some crucial information and analysis on this issue and in Impactor Alert! (March 16, 2021) I try to convey the essence of what she has been showing us.
Ten things we have learned during the Covid coup is an Acorn piece, published on May 5, 2021. It sums up, in a few words, much of what I have been writing about in recent years.
Finally, there is Fascism: three brief insights (June 10, 2021), which seems to me to nicely complete this particular loop in an ongoing spiral of reflection.
Download Fascism Rebranded: Exposing the Great Reset for free here.