Category Archives: Tyranny

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Forgotten Lesson on Good and Evil

There are neither good people nor bad people, but individuals struggling between good and evil from within.

Article by Annie Holmquist.

Excerpt:

Although a decorated commander in the Russian army, Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned near the end of World War II for disparaging comments made privately about Joseph Stalin. His years in prison were hardly pleasant, but as Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, those years gave him striking insight into the reality of human nature:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Solzhenitsyn goes on to say:

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

This realization led Solzhenitsyn to recognize the problem with revolutions, namely, “They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them…. And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.”

What to expect in the near future

Article by Howard Kunstler.

Excerpts:

American oil production may be at an all-time peak now at about 13-million barrels-a-day, but most of that — about 8-million — is shale oil, which is a manifestation of our tremendous debt roll-up since 2009. Now that we’re at the absolute limits of debt, we’re also at the limits of shale oil. The production of shale oil paralleled the accumulation of all that debt both in size and rate of increase, and as the debt goes bad — meaning, unpayable — the organized capital sector will blow and shale oil production will fall as sharply as it rose. It is also a fact that shale oil is subject to natural limits — we’re out of “sweet spots” to drill.

That’s America. Europe is way worse because aside from whatever oil is left in the North Sea (not much), Europe has no oil. Europe’s largest gas field — Groningen in the Netherlands — is scheduled to cease operations in October of this year. You all know what happened to the Nord Stream pipelines. And then Germany, in some psychotic fugue state, shut down its entire nuclear power industry, while France is just not replacing its nuke plants as they age-out. Europe is completely screwed. They won’t have anything we might call modern industry. In the meantime, the WEF is playing them like a flugelhorn, keeping them distracted with “green” politics, an unchecked immigrant invasion, and sexual confusion.

So, the period of disorderly transition we’re in is not moving toward greater dominance by giants, but to the survival of the small and nimble. We will not see capital formation like the orgy of recent times; rather the vanishing of things falsely presumed to be capital, contraction not expansion. You’ll be struggling to identify and preserve real wealth, which you’ll find in unexpected places, like the friends you can count on, your reputation for honesty, your dependability, acquired skills, and your health, physical and psychological.

The WEF won’t be able to impose its Globalist nightmare of elite transhumanism and surveilled bug-eating serfs, and they know it now. They’re running scared. The vile Yuval Noah Harari has even said so publicly. The political figures and agents serving that cabal will be lucky if they are not hanged in the public squares. The political criminals here in America, the hoaxsters, the grifters, the seditionists, the Lawfare agents, the election fraudsters, know very well the danger of their looming prosecutions, and that’s exactly why the Democratic Party and its blob henchmen and flunkies are acting like desperate lunatics.

Expect: failed national governments, maybe even state governments; failed supply lines; failed electric supply, failed trucking, failed big box stores, failed supermarkets, failed giant companies; failed banks, failed investments, failed money, failed news orgs, failed airlines, failed car dealers, failed hospitals, failed colleges, and much more. But don’t discount human ingenuity and resourcefulness, our ability to work-around and reinvent systems for daily life, even if it’s on a downscaled and more modest level.

Expect rebuilt local economies from production to wholesale to retail. Expect smaller stores, fewer things to buy but much of it better quality. Expect a lot less long-distance travel but a lot more happening in your locality. Expect the rebirth of local culture — theaters, live music, news-sheets, dances — to replace all the canned entertainments we’re used to. Expect small private academies to rise to replace the shuttered central schools. Expect small, local clinics to appear from the ashes of the medical conglomerates. Expect Americans to return to churches as an organizing mechanism for community relations. Expect more formality and less slobbery in public. Expect all of us to feel a renewed sense of gratitude for being here instead of rage, resentment, and grievance, because it’s likely there will be far fewer of us around.

Descent Into Madness: Dostoevsky and the End of the West

Article by Boyd D. Cathey.

Excerpts:

Of course, it is not at all fashionable to believe in a literal Hell these days. Yet, the imagery of such a state envisioned by a number of our greatest authors over the centuries describes a reality which is becoming all too palpable in our day, at least for those who care to notice.

As tiny individual specks in the Universe we are as atoms, at times self-important, but in the scheme of things, miniscule and falling back continually on our own very limited powers and abilities, with the great leveler, Death, our conclusion.

Has this not been the insight and wisdom of our Christian civilization, that without that spiritual understanding, life becomes a mere few short years of banging about until our time is up?

It is Hope, that belief in something beyond ourselves, eminently spiritual, which enables us to lead lives according to both the Natural Law and the Divine Positive Law, which properly and superbly fit, guide and measure our own human natures.

Dostoevsky, through Father Tikhon, reminds us that there is a way out of the fetid and poisonous bog we are drowning in. In his day it was not taken by the revolutionaries who eventually would have their way in Russia and later in the world, with the charnel house counting eventually 100 million victims.

Like Verkovensky, that frenzied youthful demonstrator against Confederate symbols back in March 2019 was possessed, incapable—unlike Stavrogin—of recognizing his diabolical possession.

Good and evil stand in eternal conflict; one must triumph and one must be extinguished. Dostoevsky fully understood that, and so must we.

Carlson-Putin-Interview

Boris Johnson doesn't deny that he scuppered a nascent peace deal

One of Vladimir Putin’s statements in his interview given by Tucker Carlson is that then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson scuppered a peace deal early on in the conflict.

In a reply in his regular column in the daily mail, Johnson doesn’t deny it. He simply says:

“As every member of the Ukrainian government will confirm, from Zelensky down, nothing and no one could have stopped those lion-hearted Ukrainians from fighting for their country — and nothing will.”

What a despicable oaf, thinking he’ll get away with that sorry excuse of an excuse.

The Hysterical Style in Western Politics

Why the political rhetoric of Western nations is growing ever more insane and unhinged.

Article by eugyppius.

Extract (conclusion):

The hysterical style arises from a fundamental change in the nature of western government, which has been underway since the early twentieth century, and which has recently accelerated. Managers and administrators have replaced politicians as the primary political actors. Along the way, state power has been diffused and deformalised. Today, a wide array of bureaucrats, stakeholders, NGOs, philanthropic enterprises, journalists, academics and advisory committees all have a say in politics. Hysteria is a means of coordinating all of these widely scattered people and getting them to push in the same direction. The more distributed and generalised state power becomes, the more the hysterical style will grow in importance.

In this brave new system, there is no distinction between media propaganda and political processes. Press hysteria is about much more than simply marshalling support or directing public opinion; it is how our states coordinate their diffuse organs. Because Western nations cannot stir themselves without these hystericising impulses, their scope of action has become remarkably constrained. They have serious problems fixing anything, reforming anything, getting rid of anything, or instituting anything, unless they can do so in response to some minimally credible emergency somewhere. Politics ought to be predictable and boring, at least for those countries that can afford to make it so. Instead, we have unwittingly bred an insane system that is forever losing its mind over ephemeral and often quite illusory problems.

Still worse, all the hysterical appeals presently in circulation appear to be locked in competition with each other for attention and buy-in. Thus the hysterical style is forever escalating, with tamer appeals like those of Fridays for Future losing out to the more extreme rhetoric of Letzte Generation, with Pistorius warning of imminent war in five to eight years because he has to shout over the climateers, and with the anti-AfD contingent reduced to Nazi comparisons because they have to make their bête noire sound even worse than Putin. Trifling things like accuracy and honesty are impossible in this competitive system; the hysterical style rewards instead manipulative imagery, facile historical analogies and apocalyptic scientific models. Moderation is likewise hopeless, as it is easily out-competed and as over time the hysterical system selects for crazy excitable people who prefer to live frantic anxious overdramatised lives.

All narratives in the hysterical style have an acute phase, when they first burst onto the scene and command the most attention; and a longer post-acute phase, after they have been out-competed by other things to panic about. Ominously, post-acute hysterias never quite go away, and they continue to exercise some degree of control on the institutions of government for years or even decades. I suspect one reason that Europe can’t close its borders to the third world, is that this would require a coordinating border security hysteria, which is precluded by the persistent influence of the 2015 open-borders maniacs. The Covidians have likewise become a chronic political affliction, who will strive for decades to realise the next pandemic and reimpose random mask mandates wherever they have any power. You have to wonder what it betokens, as ever more post-acute causes accumulate at the margins of influence, subtly pushing politics towards irrational ends and forever threatening to erupt all over again.

The Revolution of German Farmers | Eva Vlaardingerbroek & Anthony Lee

Interview with Jordan Peterson.

From the video description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speaks with German farmer Anthony Lee and journalist Eva Vlaardingerbroek. They discuss the ongoing farmers’ protest, the war on efficient agriculture, what is now being panned as the failed German state, the ludicrous net-zero goals creating excess electric vehicles while cutting off the generation of power, and how a grassroots movement can make genuine change at the local and national levels.

Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a Dutch journalist and previous YouTube host of the “Let’s Talk About It” program on the channel Riks. Vlaardingerbroek has published opinion articles in newspapers such as the Dutch weekly Elsevier Weekblad and appeared on programs like Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. She advocates for a cultural return to faith and a rejection of the WEF manifested, globalist ideology.

Anthony Lee is a German farmer who has become outspoken in recent months as he followed news of farmers struggling all across Europe. Now affecting his home country, the time has come to take a stand, and not just for German farmers and workers, but for everyone.

This episode was recorded on January 15th, 2023

Fighting for Truth in Climate Science Is Important

Article by H. Sterling Burnett.

Excerpt:

I don’t claim mine is the majority view on this point. Indeed, my life would be easier—and based on offers that have been made to me, my living standard higher—if I conceded the science and joined with those pushing draconian restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and profiting from various green energy boondoggles. All I have to do to receive higher pay, accolades, and to bring an end to the abuse and threats from those who think I’m “worse than the Nazis” (something said and written to me a number of times), is to play the game and join the consensus. All that’s holding me back is my stubborn, arguably foolish, belief that I should speak the truth on this and other matters of public import of which I am knowledgeable as I see fit, let the chips fall where they may.

Ring cites as an example of playing defense, at a great cost to society, the response of big oil companies to the various lawsuits filed in multiple political jurisdictions by cities, states, and various activist groups. Oil companies have largely conceded the science, saying in effect, “Our products have been beneficial, producing a lot of good, but are also changing the climate for the worse, so we agree we must phase them out in a timely fashion. Not now, but over time, and in the meantime, we’re investing in lower carbon solutions.”

That’s like a popular but abusive spouse saying, “Look, I’m a pretty good guy and contribute to society, but along the way, I beat my wife. But I’m doing it less now than in the past, and in the future I expect to stop doing it entirely.” That’s not a very compelling argument.

The fight for sound science, per se, but climate science, specifically, is a fight for truth and all the progress science can provide. It’s a moral fight. That is why I continue to fight for what I believe to be the truth about climate change, even in the face of ad hominem attacks in print, through email, and online, attempted and sometimes successful censorship, and the occasional threat of physical violence and death.

How the West Was Defeated

Article by Pepe Escobar.

Excerpt:

Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.

The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.

At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.

Another key reason was his 2002 book Apres L’Empire, a sort of preview of the Empire’s Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.

Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book (“I closed the circle”) allows himself to go for broke and meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US but of the West as a whole – with his research focusing in and around the war in Ukraine.

How the Climate Hysteria Is Lowering Your Standard of Living

Interview with Doug Casey.

Excerpts:

But perhaps the average person doesn’t think about these things or care. The standard of living has gone up for so long that we tend to think it’s automatic and divinely ordained. I’m not so sure about that. Everything tends to wind down unless there is enough outside force to counteract it.

The planet will be just fine. It’s been here for 4.5 billion years and will be here for billions more, long after humanity has disappeared or gone elsewhere. Anyway, the climate hysterics don’t really care about “saving the planet”; even they aren’t quite that stupid. What’s going on is that they actually hate humanity. And themselves. The world is suffering from an episode of mass psychosis.

One currently fashionable indication of this is the 15-minute city, which governments are trying to impose all over the world. These would penalize you if you exit your designated 15-minute zone more than X number of times per month. The idea is green. And, like most green notions, it is very retrogressive. They want to return people to the status of medieval serfs, when few ventured more than 15 minutes from their hovels.

I hate to think something so dire is in the cards. But Dark Riders are at large, and the eye of Sauron is scanning the world. The tendency towards authoritarianism or even totalitarianism worldwide is growing—not to mention the possibility of World War III.

The negative trends go way beyond carbon hysteria and appliances that don’t work very well.