This is the fifth of the online bulletins we’re producing in lieu of getting a printed paper out. Although, as you’ll have read in the New Year edition of this bulletin, if the circumstances are right, we will be producing and distributing a printed paper.
There’s a bit less of a focus in this issue on the way the ongoing crisis is being leveraged to push us towards the great reset/fourth industrial revolution (4IR). There’s a bit more of a focus on what we do with the other two blogs that come under the umbrella of South Essex Radical Media (SERM) – The Thurrock and Basildon Heckler and Alternative Estuary. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly as events are moving so fast, focusing exclusively on the 4IR would mean producing a bulletin that would rapidly date. Secondly, given that our three blogs have differing audiences, we wanted to show regular readers of The Stirrer what else we get up to. We’ve no doubt that with the way things seem to be going, come the February bulleting, the focus will be back on how the ongoing crisis is playing out.
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Contents
1. Resisting the divide and rule agenda
2. Suggested readings
3. Looking at 2022
4. A couple of books for you…
5. RECLAIMED PLASTIC WASTE FUEL – SHOULD WE REALLY BE GOING ELECTRIC?
6. We can only try…
7. Friends & Allies
8. The last word…
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1. Resisting the divide and rule agenda
People are becoming more divided over what’s being done to us as the Covid crisis is leveraged to bring about the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) – however, there are some caveats… On the one hand, you have those who appear to have fallen prey to the aforementioned ‘mass formation psychosis’ and who test, regularly, mask almost religiously and eagerly await the next jab on offer. On the other hand, there are those who have rejected the narrative from the outset and despite constant vilification and being branded as ‘conspiracy theorists’, refuse to get jabbed and continue to fight against what’s being done to us. That’s pretty much how the media would like to portray it – a black and white battle of stark opposites. The truth is a lot more complicated as anyone who has a semblance of a social life and a willingness to listen without making rash judgements will tell you. There are a lot of grey areas in between those two polarities with a fair degree of shifting of positions as people’s experiences of the situation cause them to pause and reassess. One aspect of this is the number of double and even triple jabbed people who emphatically reject any attempt to impose vaccine passports, particularly digital ones. Also, there’s a growing number of people who have got as far as being triple jabbed and are now saying – ‘that’s it, I’m done, no more!’
The government know that the views of the population tend to be more of a spectrum. The corporations who the government do their bidding for also know this. A compliant and bought media know this. We’re talking about intelligent but flawed, often deeply flawed people who know exactly what’s going on in people’s minds, know that in many cases it runs against their interests, and will resort to any methods to change how people think. This ranges from the nudge units doing what it says on the tin through to upfront divide and rule tactics where the un-jabbed are demonised and disturbingly, are starting to be de-humanised. We all know some people who have fallen for this, hook line and sinker. We also know many who take a nuanced and complex position on the situation. We also know a fair few who are willing to change their position as new evidence emerges. None of this is good news for those pushing this agenda, hence what appears to be an increasing level of desperation and ratcheting up of a toxic agenda of divide and rule.
We’ve had almost two years of this. The impact on people’s mental health is incalculable. On the one hand, there are those who have been taken in by the narrative and who live in a morbid state of fear over catching Covid. They are the ones obsessively testing, wearing masks all the time and in a fair few cases lashing out at anyone not complying or who are questioning the narrative. The seemingly relentless diet of fear, doom and gloom across pretty much all of the mainstream media is on the one hand feeding this climate of fear and on the other, for those of us more sceptical about the narrative, simply dragging us down. Away from this, people are wearying of seeing the goalposts constantly being moved and not being able to make any long term plans for their future. There’s the separation and isolation that was a consequence of the lockdowns and the restrictions – the long term consequences of which will be debilitating for some. Towards the other end of the spectrum away from those who have uncritically accepted the narrative, there are those of us who have been fighting it, some for the best part of two years at some personal cost.
Friends have fallen out with each other over this. Families have been split by this. Relationships have ended over this. Political relationships have ended over this. Movements already riven with splits have suffered further fragmentation. People’s level of trust in each other has inevitably suffered. There’s more fear, division and atomisation than there was two years ago. That’s exactly what the government and the corporations they serve want – a fearful, atomised population is one that is easier to manipulate and ultimately control. What each and every one of us has to do is to avoid handing that on a plate to the bastards by getting sucked into their toxic agenda of divide and rule. That’s not easy given the cost some of us have paid but if we want a future worth living in, then we have no choice.
It would be tempting to say let’s leave the healing of the divisions all of this has caused until it’s all over and we’ve won or achieved what we think is a victory. It would be utterly wrong to do so. At a human level it would be wrong because all consuming hatred ends up corroding the soul and what would be the point of ‘winning’ if we’re diminished as human beings. At a strategic and tactical level, it would also be wrong. Earlier in this piece, I talked about the grey area between the two extremes the media would like to pen us into. I talked about the way a fair few people are starting to shift their position on what’s being done to us on the basis of their experience and starting to find the truth of what’s going on. We need all the allies we can get in this fight. It doesn’t matter if they’re only coming over now, we should be welcoming them with open arms.
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2. Suggested readings
Three key readings on dystopia / transhumanism
Transhumanism will likely be one of the issues that will centre in many debates / rows / toxic slanging matches during the course of this year. It could well prove to be another issue that will further fragment the anarchist movement, such as it is. To help prepare you for this, here are three readings to get you going:
Activating the power of life – Paul Cudenec | Winter Oak | December 21, 2021
When an animal, such as a human being, finds itself confronted with a grave and immediate danger to its life, it reacts in a very particular way.
Understanding the severity of the situation, it releases in itself a reserve of defensive energy which it has held back for such an emergency – this, it knows, is the time to make use of its last-resort capacity.
I feel we have now reached that point with regard to the transhumanist technocratic tyranny being imposed on us under the so-called Great Reset.
We have all perhaps spent too much time discussing exactly what label we should apply to this malevolent force.
The Vaccine Moment, part three – Paul Kingsnorth | The Abbey of Misrule | December 20, 2021
This time around, I want to look at the story the Machine is telling us about these times. I want to look at the world we are being rapidly steered into, as covid-19 becomes a kind of techno-political sandbox: a testing-ground for new ways of being human in an increasingly post-human world.
The Artificial Reproduction of the Human: the Road of Transhumanism – 325 Collective | Nevermore | August 20, 2021
The transhumanist movement began in the USA, in Silicon Valley, in the late 1980s, but if we try to track down the origin of this ideology, we find ourselves in 1883, when the term eugenics was coined by Galton, or in 1957, when Huxley [Julian, brother of Aldous] gave a speech where he used the word transhumanism to describe his transcendent belief in the human, and we end up with the cybernetic paradigm which arose during Second World War in the military sector.
Two key readings on the ‘great reset’
It feels that every time we mention the term ‘the great reset’, people are rolling their eyes and thinking ‘conspiracy theorists’. We’d like to present these two readings from well respected sources that will hopefully go some way to disabusing people of the idea that ‘the great reset’ is a conspiracy theory when in fact, it is a demonstrable reality.
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation – Fabio Vighi | The Philosophical Salon | August 16, 2021
A year and a half after the arrival of Virus, some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s). Why all the humanitarian zeal? Cui bono? Only those who are unfamiliar with the wondrous adventures of GloboCap can delude themselves into thinking that the system chose to shut down out of compassion. Let us be clear from the start: the big predators of oil, arms, and vaccines could not care less about humanity.
What Is the Great Reset? – Michael Rectenwald | Imprimus | December 2021
Governance is not only increasingly privatized, but also and more importantly, corporations are deputized as major additions to governments and intergovernmental bodies. The state is thereby extended, enhanced, and augmented by the addition of enormous corporate assets. As such, corporations become what I have called “governmentalities”—otherwise private organizations wielded as state apparatuses, with no obligation to answer to pesky voters. Since these corporations are multinational, the state essentially becomes globalist, whether or not a one-world government is ever formalized.
More readings on these issues can be found on this page on the blog: Readings: Dystopian futures
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3. Looking at 2022
This post was first published on our sister blog, Alternative Estuary
In these troubled and increasingly dystopian times, the concept of ‘looking forward’ to the coming year may seem strange to people understandably filled with trepidation about what’s to come. We totally understand that and would be lying if we didn’t admit that we’re more than a bit fearful about what’s coming down the line to us in 2022. We’re using the words ‘looking forward’ in the context of rising to the many challenges 2022 will be throwing at us.
From the fourth industrial revolution that seeks to tie us into a de-humanising matrix of high tech control divorced from nature through to the adverse impacts of a changing climate, there will be challenges aplenty to deal with. Without wanting to be hyperbolic, the next few years will in various ways, be the most challenging we’ve ever faced. Bear in mind that this piece is written by someone who has over forty five years of activism in one form or another under their belt!
When you look at the array of problems we face that adversely impact our lives and are damaging the planet that’s our home, they all stem from pretty much one direction – a self serving, technocratic (techno-fascist even) elite that cares not a jot for the lives of us mere plebs. By various means, fair and if needs be foul, we have to stop these bastards in their tracks and start bringing power back down to the grassroots in our communities. We have to do that in a way that rebuilds the connection with nature we should have to be fully rounded human beings.
As we have written and said many times before, one way of achieving this is by starting to build the new world we want in the shell of the dysfunctional, decaying, dystopian one we currently have to endure. One way of doing this is setting up or supporting grassroots projects that give people a collective sense of empowerment, autonomy and start to free us from the all embracing matrix of high tech that will inevitably end up de-humanising us.
There are arguably as many ways of setting up a grassroots project as there are projects themselves. Part of what Alternative Estuary has always been about is encouraging people to share their experiences of the projects they’re involved in and the lessons learned from them. We’ve also been about encouraging mutual aid and solidarity so when a project needs extra help on an initiative, people from other projects are willing and able to step in and volunteer their time and energy.
2022 is going to be a challenging year in many ways. As grassroots activists, we have to recognise that we can’t do this alone – we need the support and mutual aid we can offer each other. Our aim in 2022 is to see Alternative Estuary play a part in helping to build the kind of network of grassroots activists that is considerably greater than the sum of its parts. We look forward to as many of you as possible joining us in helping to achieve this.
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4. A couple of books for you…
It’s not often we plug books we haven’t even read! These look like they will be interesting and useful – once we’ve read them, we’ll post up reviews:)
Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below
by Peter Gelderloos
Are alternative energies and Green New Deals enough to deliver environmental justice? Peter Gelderloos argues that international governmental responses to the climate emergency are structurally incapable of solving the crisis. But there is hope.
Across the world, grassroots networks of local communities are working to realise their visions of an alternative revolutionary response to planetary destruction, often pitted against the new megaprojects promoted by greenwashed alternative energy infrastructures and the neocolonialist, technocratic policies that are the forerunners of the Green New Deal.
Gelderloos interviews food sovereignty activists in Venezuela, Indigenous communities reforesting their lands in Brazil and anarchists fighting biofuel plantations in Indonesia, looking at the battles that have cancelled airports, stopped pipelines, and helped the most marginalised to fight borders and environmental racism, to transform their cities, to win a dignified survival.
You can pre-order the book from here
The Book of Trespass
by Nick Hayes
This review is from the Bristol Radical History Group
…the fences that divide England are not just symbols of the partition of people but the very cause of it.
Bristol Radical History Group subscribers will find inspiration in Nick Hayes’s book. He sets out to trespass on a range of properties and rivers throughout England, defiantly ignoring the fact that he – and we – are excluded from 92% of the land in England and 97% of its waterways.
In the course of his walk descriptions, Nick Hayes reveals some surprising historical heroes – William Tyndale, for a time a chaplain at Little Sodbury and now commemorated by a statue in Millennium Square. His translation of the New Testament, says Hayes, was:
“…arguably the single most dramatic de-privatisation of power in the history of England: he had turned the sheep of the Church’s flock into independent, self-determining freethinkers with their own interpretation of God’s will.”
The Church responded by garrotting him and then burning his dead body at the stake.
Occasionally the author can’t resist the temptation to amble off down side paths but his descriptions of nature and his drawings are vivid and the main track of his journey is clear throughout.
…the historic repurposing of the land from common wealth to private profit.
You can order the book from here
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5. RECLAIMED PLASTIC WASTE FUEL – SHOULD WE REALLY BE GOING ELECTRIC?
This piece was first published on FISHINABOX NEWS, SAVE THE PLANET. It’s not a ‘conventional’ way of looking at things but it’s certainly an interesting and possibly for some, controversial take. Which is why we’re posting it up here because we need an open and honest discussion about the direction we’re going in…
Putting Diesel back on the map?
That is the unpopular choice these days right? We should be moving away from fossil fuels, but where has this thinking even come from? Especially after corporate interests in fossil fuels and the global media marketing machine has been slamming electric cars as a joke for over 100 years, oppressing the support in developing a market for electric vehicles, hindering progress all the way down the line whilst promoting their own corporate interests in “dirty” fuels from oil and gas, until the skies and earth are so clogged and smogged that the general public finally have taken notice and a deal had to be brokered between all financial parties.
A hard game for legislators to play when the oil industry has been bank rolling governments for decades right?
Wrong..
Oil and Gas appear (from the money changing hands in the financial press such as FORBES and other money papers) to have been bought off with the the world economic forums “covid great reset”, (convenient and well timed, how did that happen eh?) that’s a rough guide PPE profit return to the plastic industry of 75 billion dollars every quarter (pay off) to make plastic screens and PPE useless junk (future landfill), the required use of a business cost legislated by the sham governments of the world to ensure the money keeps rolling in line with expectations so that the petroleum industry can sit back, with the pay off, as new money carries on oil and gas turn a blind eye to the electric vehicles industry. It’s a done deal and everyone’s happy right?
Wrong…
Electric cars, clean, money making luxury vehicles guaranteed for every business middle manager with a car deal, tax breaks, no emissions, no congestion zone controls etc in a Tesla,. even has vegan leather upholstery, what’s not to love?
Vegan cars, definitly a step forward though despite popular opinion in the non vegan world that fossil fuels are not vegan, fossil fuels are not exploitation of animals, nor is it the use of animals either, fossil fuels are the compressed biodiversity of millions of years of geological History, that’s all biodiversity, mostly plant matter, not the blood of a baby cow, so don’t get lost on it, running a car on fossil fuels is not a vegan debate and in my experience the only people who DON’T understand ethics enough and actually still bring that one up are consumers of animal body parts. There is more to fossil fuels than main stream media care to admit.
Electric cars, amazing, though the industry drivers of “climate change” that gave them credibility on the market place are less amazing and more about following the money.
You can read the rest of this piece here
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6. We can only try…
Here are some posts from the previous two months that went up on our sister blog, The Thurrock and Basildon Heckler. The common theme is trying to get some truthful answers out of Thurrock Council. At a deeper level, it’s dealing with the consequences of what could be seen as the start of system failure.
This sorry saga rolls on…and on…and on… – December 15, 2021
Any chance of an explanation of why the A13 widening project is overdue and over-budget? A supplementary question – how many more weekend closures of the A13 do residents of Stanford-le-Hope and the surrounding villages have to put up with?
They couldn’t…. – December 8, 2021
Why can’t Thurrock Council organise meetings without screwing it up?
The Stanford-le-Hope railway station debacle – the STILL unanswered questions! – December 6, 2021
Please…can someone tell us why many of the buildings at Stanford-le-Hope railway station were demolished before properly worked out and costed plans were in place? A supplementary question – will we ever see a replacement station?
Facing the music…from a distance! – November 24, 2021
What do Thurrock Council expect to gain by shutting the much loved Thameside Theatre?
Gaffes and finger pointing – just another day at Thurrock Council! – November 23, 2021
How the heck can Thurrock Council defend a financial ‘investment’ strategy that has effectively dropped them (and us residents) in the shite?
Sort it out! – November 17, 2021
Does it seriously take over a year to sort out broken lights on a housing estate?
High rise towers spreading like an unwanted rash – November 15, 2021
Are Thurrock Council seriously considering flattening half of Grays town centre to allow a rash of high rise apartments to be built in its place?
This is just two months of posts holding Thurrock Council to account. They’re posing questions that residents and local media outlets all want answers to. We’ll be carrying on as we left off in 2021 – doing what we can to hold Thurrock Council to account and supporting everyone else doing the same. One day, we may actually get some answers…one day…
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7. Friends & Allies
https://winteroak.org.uk/acorn/
bookofours
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8. The last word…
Right, that’s it for this edition of the bulletin. The next one will be out in around four weeks time. Somehow, we’ve got a feeling events will be moving pretty fast by then as those who presume to rule over us struggle to maintain the narrative they’ve been feeding us for almost two years. That will not be the end of the crisis which at some point in the first half of this year, will start to morph towards another threat that will be hyped and exploited in a bid to keep us scared and therefore complaint. Too much has been invested in the project of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) for all of the actors involved to simply give up and walk away from it. We’d love to be wrong but the truth is that we’re at the start of what will be a long period of struggle.
2022 is going to be a crunch year in this crisis. At some point, when those leveraging the Covid crisis to push the 4IR agenda realise that as well as a growing weariness with the whole situation, non-compliance and opposition are growing, things are going to get pretty nasty. As mentioned earlier, how that will manifest itself and how it will play out are difficult to predict. A number of factors may well coincide to spark off a rapid change in the situation that could catch many people off guard. We have to be as prepared as we can to face off and deal with whatever that may be – materially, physically and arguably most important of all, mentally. As things stand at the moment, we have enough slack to allow us to prepare but, as mentioned earlier, we cannot afford to be complacent in any way. What us refusniks have to carry on doing is building those networks of mutual aid and solidarity that will get us through what’s coming.
thestirrer.net 