Is Greta Thunberg the New David Irving?

The short answer is "no"

The Palestinian cause was an important one for my family while I was growing up. My brother bought a PLO scarf in the late 90s or early 2000s, which became a hand-me-down that I carried on wearing until around 2019 or 2020. I wasn't particularly conscious of making a decision to stop wearing it, but if I hadn't done so, I probably would give it a rest now, as tensions on this issue are riding particularly high. In Gaza, the PLO might have been relegated to the sidelines, as Israel spent years funding the knuckle-headed extremists in Hamas, but most people lack the nuanced understanding of Middle Eastern politics to make that distinction when they see a scarf.

Perhaps it would help if I wrapped it around my face. It's to protect myself and others, you know.

This is not to say that I have developed any love for the Israeli state – I think Palestinians and Israelis all have legitimate grievances against that wretched institution, and I also think it's extremely interesting that this war has broken out just a few weeks after massive protests against the Netanyahu government were erupting among the Jewish population. That institution, by the way, turned Israel into an open-air laboratory for Pfizer; the way that certain 'covid-dissidents' are now rallying behind the Netanyahu government is profoundly surreal.

Equally surreal is seeing everyone's favourite globo-shill Greta Thunberg accused of anti-Semitism after uploading a picture of herself holding a pro-Palestine placard in front of a small stuffed octopus. Said octopus was apparently a little too close to propaganda images from Nazi Germany and suchlike, symbolically depicting the alleged extent of Jewish influence on world politics as an octopus with tentacles wrapped around the globe.

Unlike Covid, BLM, Ukraine, or Climate-Change, the Current Thingers can't seem to form a consensus view on which side of this Current Thing they're supposed to Stand With. The comedic value of seeing pro-Zionist liberals freaking out because the BLM activists they supported in 2020 are now tweeting images of Hamas paragliders is almost as good as aforementioned octopus controversy.

Is this an indication that the coalition is falling apart, or is it just a case of media-generated schismogenesis reaching feverish levels? I'm not really sure. I wonder if the perception-managers are attempting something akin to a Stewart Lee comedy routine: dividing the audience into different segments, deliberately alienating more and more of them, and then trying to win them back by the end.

“Ok, so this Current Thing, yeah, this one, it's not like the other Current Things, ok? You have to have seen a lot of other Current Things to appreciate what this one's doing. Yeah, this side of the room get it...”

Whether by accident or design, the result of this is a non-Euclidean tectonic fracturing of all narratives. This is what Vladimir Putin's propagandist, Vladislav Surkov, was aiming for; to eviscerate the coherent narrative framework of any effective opposition movement by promoting a bewildering cacophony of contradictory ideas and stories. Adam Curtis introduced Surkov to British audiences with his usual breathy, ominous tone, as an example of how ker-azy Russian politics really is, but his tactics really weren’t that different from the kind of thing Western propagandists were already doing.

I'm not sure how well it will work out. The problem with taking a pneumatic drill to the foundations of every single coherent narrative is that, pretty soon, nobody will be able to come up with a coherent narrative in favour of the status quo, let alone against it. Being a regime-loyalist requires you to accuse every single ‘dissident’ - left or right, controlled or uncontrolled, down to and including someone as bland as J.K. Rowling - of being a ‘literal fascist’, while you support actual literal fascists fighting in Ukraine because a transgender propagandist told you that the Russians weren’t human. It requires you to get vaccinated to protect others from a virus that you are ostenisbly immune to, and regard those others who didn’t get the vaccine as the selfish ones who are risking your life. It requires you to frame ‘unsolicited compliments’ as an example of street-violence against women, but actual street-violence against women is ignored if the perpetrators happen to possess protected characteristics.

Is it any wonder people are so resigned and indifferent these days?

That might make them less troublesome to manage, but resignation and indifference still does not make for a particularly functional civilization, especially when emotional resignation turns into economic resignation, and you haven't quite ironed the kinks in the artificial super-intelligence to the point where it can run the first global industrial society with minimal human management.

I admit that this does begin to sound perilously close to that sophist's argument, summed up by Alan Moore's statement that

conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.

This one did the rounds all the time in the lead-up to 2020, as the ‘psy-op’ dial was cranked up to 11. Of course, they always left out the bit at the beginning, where Moore admits that conspiracies happen all the time, but as he’s apparently too terrified of the Coof to even leave the house these days, it’s safe to say he hasn’t thought about it too deeply.

The problem with Moore’s view is that it provides the educated classes with a convenient escape-route. Look at the utterly bizarre situation of the past three years, in which apparent geo-political enemies such as Israel/Palestine, or the USA/Russia, all got into lockstep with WHO-directed pharmaceutical totalitarianism, and enacted uniform policies of an experimental nature with disastrous effects on their own populations. For Moore and his ilk, the incredible consistency of the response is simply a result of the governments in question being so blindsided by a deadly virus with a 99.9999% survival rate that they threw out all of their previous pandemic-response procedures and implemented the same set of novel policies worldwide with only minor variations.

“Hans, is everyone the baddies?”

As many will know, I am in sympathy with the notion that much of what appears to be elite malignance or incompetence may stem from a source external to humanity. If you want to frame that ‘source’ in terms of the Jungian archetypes of the collective unconscious, because it helps you to continue reading this piece without deciding that I’m probably in need of urgent psychiatric attention, then, by all means; but to be honest, most of you here are probably able to receive such ideas with some openness and consideration, even if your own metaphysics can’t quite make the stretch.

I’m not going to pin down what I think that source might be, because I don’t have the clairvoyant skills to do so, and even if I did, such abilities are notoriously unreliable - Rudolf Steiner’s visions were pretty hit-and-miss, let’s be honest. Nonetheless, I think Jasun Horsley had a point when he argued, as he did when I met him in London recently while he was in town for the Big Mother launch event (see our recent podcast with Nina Power), that a force that seems fundamentally anti-human surely cannot have its ultimate origin in humanity. I’m not convinced that what is basically an ethno-state like Israel would be dumb enough to test out weird mRNA shit on its own population without some sort of spooky interference going on. Until the war kicked off, Zionist-friendly truthers were speculating that there was an ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy’ at work in the Israeli elites, due to their aggressive treatment of the Israeli population; would it be any less bizarre to suggest an anti-human conspiracy?

If that is indeed the case, though, I wouldn’t imagine that these external forces - again, call them archetypes if you prefer - would be monolithic in their intentions. That is to say, if there are demons who are assaulting us with fake vaccines, environmental poisons, and AI shenanigans, it is not unreasonable to suppose there are other intelligences that have our back.

That doesn’t mean we can just rest on our laurels and let the angels sort everything out though. If you don’t already have some form of prayer or contemplative practice in your routine, I’d say it would be a really good idea to consider incorporating something like that, because we’ll need all the help we can get in the coming decades. I don’t really care what faith you chose, as long as it’s not Satanism, or some mind-control cult-nonsense. If you are drawn to an Abrahamic faith, then go for it - but please do leave a bit of room for us eccentric pagans, esotericists, and heretics to carry on doing our thing unharrassed, for all the reasons I elucidated, in response to Naomi Wolf, back in March:

For what it’s worth, I suspect the powers-that-have-our-collective-back have been working fairly hard already. At least as hard as the creepy demons and their henchmen. I find it remarkable how many times the world has been narrowly saved from thermonuclear warfare at the very nick of time. In the same way, I don’t think the Covid vaccines have been anywhere near as damaging as they could potentially have been, and I think someone or something may have helped us dodge a few bullets there.

Even if I’m wrong, it won’t hurt to say “thanks” to whatever those forces may be. The worst that can happen is that you might feel a bit calmer than you did before.