Ideas & Essays

To be modern is to accept that which you should refuse; to adapt to evil rather than to resist it.To be modern is to have been melted down and poured into somebody else’s mould.To be modern is to have forgotten how to remember.To be modern is to be more detached from nature, more helpless, more dependent, more wasteful, more destructive, more short-sighted than your ancestors could ever have imagined, and yet to feel proud of yourself and your era.To be modern is to prefer artifice to organicity, surface to depth, quantity to quality.To be modern is to have absorbed so many meaningless facts that there is no more room in your head for meaningful knowledge.To be modern is to turn your back on common sense and conform to the collective insanity.To be modern is to be convinced that all change is necessarily good and to refuse to recognise the instinct that tells you otherwise.To be modern is to be at home both everywhere and nowhere; to be somebody and nobody; to be still alive and yet already dead.[Audio version]See also: The world out of kilter: occupation and zombificationComing soon: The world out of kilter: reclaim our lives!Thanks for reading Paul ...

The kind of society I long for is an organic one, in which people live in the way they see fit, guided by their own inclinations, the customs they have inherited and the circumstances of place.As an anarchist, I am obviously opposed to all authority imposed from above, to any kind of formalised, entrenched power, but that does not mean that there could be no kind of moral “authority” or guidance in the world I want to see.Traditional societies often look to village elders, wise women, and other respected individuals to help steer their decision-making.The advice they give arises from within the community concerned and, in order to be followed, will have to correspond to a generally-shared sense that the proposed direction is the right one.This is not the case with those who exercise power over us today. Due to the corruption of our society, authority is wielded in the interests of a group which neither identifies with the people as a whole nor is prepared to be guided by its wishes.Instead, it seeks to impose its own agenda on the population by any means necessary – by propaganda and persuasion, if possible, or otherwise by outright deceit, intimidation and ...

At the end of 2022 I brought out a 100-page booklet entitled ‘Enemies of the People: The Rothschilds and their corrupt global empire‘.To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive about publishing it, as I knew that it would probably lead to me being labelled not just a “conspiracy theorist” but an “anti-semite” as well.This did actually happen, despite my insistence right at the start of the booklet that “I am not singling out the Rothschilds because they are Jewish, but rather in spite of that fact”.Before publishing it, I made very sure that I was completely certain about everything I stated.I was confident that I had marshalled enough facts and reliable historical analysis to demonstrate the reality of the very disturbing situation that I presented in the final section:“The Rothschilds have, as I have shown, amassed vast wealth at the expense of the rest of us, consistently put themselves before others, profiteered from war after war, grabbed hold of industrial infrastructure, exploited humanity, destroyed nature, corrupted political life, used royalty for their own purposes, privatised the public sector, imposed their global control in a secretive manner and now imagine that they can dictate our future, confining us to a ...

We have seen how the Bolsheviks in Russia repressed the grassroots revolutionary movement and imposed a centralised authoritarian regime that declared war on small farmers and hitherto independent individuals, turning most of the population into powerless slaves to a giant industrial machine.We have also learned that they were funded and assisted by the global mafia, which obviously stood to gain by creating a forerunner of the dehumanised totalitarian industrial prison camp which they are currently trying to build via their Great Reset or Fourth Industrial Revolution.One question that still hangs in the air, however, is whether the Bolshevik example is really a fair representation of the communist philosophy as initially set out by Karl Marx.To address this matter, I will first call as a witness Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), the freedom-loving Russian revolutionary who was a one-time associate of Marx before falling out with him in a big way.By the time he wrote the pamphlet ‘Statism and Anarchism’ in 1873, Bakunin had noticed the dangers lurking in the Marxist creed and astutely foresaw the nightmare that would be inflicted on his own home country when these authoritarian communists later came to power.He warned: “They will concentrate all the powers of government ...

Anyone wishing to understand what lay behind the brutal political repression and totalitarian industrial slavery imposed by the Bolsheviks would do well to read the work of historian Antony C. Sutton, notably his book Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. [73]He shows, with solid evidence, that the communist seizure of power was encouraged and funded by financial interests outside Russia.This is not to say that there were not genuine revolutionary forces at play in the country and that the tsarist regime would not have been toppled in any case.But the specific role of the Bolsheviks was to seize power, crush the genuine popular revolt and ensure that Russia was turned into an authoritarian centralised state – under the ultimate control of these financial interests – which could then impose their Great Project.This project was, of course, all about making money.Communist Russia was regarded as a “golden opportunity” [74] in certain circles.An enciphered telegram sent by David Francis, US ambassador in Petrograd (St Petersburg), a year before the revolution began, is very telling for a couple of reasons.Firstly because he sent it to the State Department in Washington, DC, to be deciphered and forwarded to Frank Arthur Vanderlip, the chairman of ...

By way of half-way interlude in my serialised article 'The false red flag', I'd just like to announce a real-life event coming up.On Thursday May 30, 2024, from 7.30pm, I will be giving a talk in the Scottish capital on 'the Organic Radical tradition'.The evening, organised by Common Knowledge Edinbugh, is free to attend, although people are asked to sign up in advance for their place.For anyone unfamiliar with the organic radical concept, the orgrad website explains: "In broad terms, organic radicalism is a political ideology deeply opposed to the modern industrial world."Its vision of human society is based not on money, greed and authority but on mutual aid, freedom and community; a way of living which would restore humankind’s well-being and its harmony with the rest of nature".Or, in the words of W.D. James in his latest essay on the Winter Oak site: "The Organic Radical school of thought hinges on the possibility of an organic social order which, in turn, provides the basis and motivation for radical critique and revolutionary change. "We might like to think that an emergent natural order will just happen. In a sense, it does; in the same sense that a plant just grows ...

Leo Tolstoy, with his dreams of a free Russian peasantry, had realised before his death in 1910 that the communists aimed to launch an assault on traditional rural life.Having analysed Karl Marx’s Capital and studied the new “scientific” socialism, he spoke out about what Pierre Thiesset calls the communists’ “industrialised, urbanised and technocratised horizon, where Progress becomes a new religion”. [45]“He had felt that the revolutionaries were going to fool the people by leading them into a dead end: that of the modernisation of the country and the end of the peasantry.“What is the point in socialising the means of production if it is to proletarianise the population, to send modern slaves to live in filthy cities and become appendages of machines?“The writer called on people to resist this development, to struggle against this so-called ‘civilization’.” [46]This, of course, made Tolstoy a “reactionary” in the eyes of the Bolsheviks, while those who supported his call for land and freedom were labelled “naive” and “retrograde”. [47]Vladimir Lenin, while recognising that Tolstoy (pictured) was a spokesman for the ideas and desires of millions of Russian peasants, declared that his ideas were, as a whole, “harmful”. [48]He announced, 15 years before his party ...

An authentic mood of revolt had been swelling up in Russia for some time before 1917, with a previous attempted revolution in 1905-06 violently repressed by the tsarist regime.A great inspiration behind this mood was the back-to-the-land Christian anarchism of the revered Russian novelist and thinker Leo Tolstoy, [11] author of War and Peace.Contemporary observer Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu wrote in 1910: “We know that Tolstoy’s ideas about land are those of the majority of Russian peasants”. [12]This radical outlook regarded the earth as a common treasury for all, like air and water: the land belonged to those who dug it and not to speculators.“Land and freedom” was the slogan that captured the imagination of peasant families, whose ideal was the mir, a village community based on traditional values and involving democratic decision-making, sharing of resources and mutual aid.These peasants lived simply, healthily and largely beyond the reach of both central state power and, crucially, of the money-based economy. [13]The same sort of thinking, based on popular self-determination, was even behind the creation of the Soviets – workers’ councils – that were later to give the communist empire its name.Voline, who was on the ground in 1905-06 when the first of these ...

I have always had a rather uneasy relationship with the “socialist” and “communist” left.On the one hand I have been deeply inspired by many thinkers and rebels loosely associated with this tradition, from John Ball of the peasants’ revolt [1] and the legendary Robin Hood (robbing the rich to feed the poor), to Gerrard Winstanley [2] or William Morris. [3]I have campaigned alongside grassroots socialists and communists, in both Britain and France, on numerous occasions when our causes have coincided and would, of course, do so again.However, at the same time I have the gut feeling that there is something wrong about this movement.My ambivalent attitude embraces all the terms it uses to describe itself.Two writers who have greatly influenced me, Gustav Landauer [4] and George Orwell, [5] described their thinking as “socialist”, while going out of their way to warn us against communism.But at the same time, the most insidious “left-wing” organisation I have personally come across is the UK’s Socialist Workers Party – a Trotskyist outfit notorious in anarchist circles a quarter of a century ago for “parachuting” into struggles and diverting them away from genuine resistance to the system.Its “Globalise Resistance” front group, or “Monopolise Resistance” as ...

[This is the final section of my essay Our Quest for Freedom]While the message advanced in the quotations from Mollison and Dervaes is appealing, it does not tell the whole story.The system does not want us to be free. Its very existence depends on the fact that we are dependent on it, enslaved to it.That’s why it threw us off the land in the first place, that’s why it condemned the simplicity of our needs and our lack of interest in accumulating wealth as “poverty”, our natural ways of life as “backwardness” and our relaxed, unhurried, approach as “laziness”.The system needs always to encroach. It is the act of permanent encroachment, theft, destruction.If you and I declare ourselves free tomorrow and say that we will have nothing more to do with the system, it will send its shock troops to crush us, for fear that our defiance will spread like wildfire.But if hundreds, thousands, of small groups of people do the same thing simultaneously, all across the territory, the system is going to have logistical problems in crushing us all at the same time.If it knows that in each case it will be facing people ready to resist, with all ...

[This is from my latest book Our Quest for Freedom and other essays]You don’t necessarily need to have a written plan before you start building something, but ideally you should have a general idea of what you are planning to do and what the end product should look like!Our building for a free future therefore necessarily starts with imagining it.By coming together to discuss this, by exchanging ideas, we are in fact creating a culture.Because this culture stands outside all the thinking of the current system, and bases its outlook on completely different, even opposite, principles, it is a counterculture.Fellow freedom fighter Crow Qu’appelle has called for “a strategy of cultural inversion (creating a counterculture by consciously rejecting the values of the dominant culture), exodus (exiting mainstream society), and ethnogenesis (turning a counterculture into a permanent culture)”.From this, it is clear that a sense of purpose forms as much a part of this counterculture as it does of the individual who devotes his or her life to spirit, truth and freedom.It is a conscious rejection of current society – an “inversion” that is, in truth, merely the reversal of this society’s inversion of natural order.Our rejection has the conscious purpose ...

I have been going on for years about Gladio, the NATO-organised terrorist network behind a glut of false flag attacks in the second half of the last century, a forerunner to the false flag spectacles we have seen more recently.So I was intrigued to read, via Kit Klarenberg, that mainstream Italian newspaper La Repubblica has just published an interview with Roberto Jucci, veteran “general of top secret missions”, in which he talks about its activities.The paper seems to focus on the role of US “centers of power” in the murder of “left-leaning statesman” Aldo Moro.But also notable is the reminder that they worked “in conjunction with notorious Masonic lodge P2” of which one of the highest-profile members was the late politician and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi.Berlusconi, as The Independent reports, was “involved in dozens of court cases on charges including money laundering, mafia collusion and underage prostitution”.Researchers into nefarious goings-on have long shown an interest in the links between Berlusconi and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, so close to the Rothschild gang.And The Independent’s piece notes that Blair and his wife Cherie, who were known for frequently holidaying in Tuscany, Italy, were entertained by Berlusconi in 2004 at his ...