February 2019
The Gathering Storm
THE EDITOR
Macron: "Why are there thousands of people outside." |
Official: Those are the people of France and they have come to say goodbye to you, Mr President." |
Macron: "Where are they all going?" |
|
We can enjoy the joke while appreciating its deadly serious observation about the New World Order brigade. It depicts Monsieur le Président de la République as a feudal throwback; an orchestrator of twenty-first century chaos who, faced with latter-day peasants in revolt, displays the same sense of superiority, entitlement and self-absorption they forever ascribe to their bêtes noires, the monarchs of the dreaded Ancien Régime, as if to say:"You uppity hordes can eat mud, but we are sticking with foie gras and vintage Sauterne! Be off with you!”
Insufferable and dangerous, this signature pomposity informs the criminal self-serving of globalists at the expense of the common good, isolating them from the hoi polloi they relentlessly manipulate and exploit, even as they sell off their nations and birthrights. Indeed, the protestations of the latter, now exploding throughout the West, are incomprehensible to rich, rootless trans-nationalists devoid of patriotic attachments and alienated from ordinary life and concerns.
Emmanuel Macron epitomises the type.
A former investment banker of Rothschild & Cie Banque (a French bank belonging to Rothschild & Co.), even Macron's presidential predecessor and fellow champagne socialist François Hollande has labelled him "the president of the very rich": which is to say, the latest self-entitled puppet churned out by the House of Rothschild to serve its interests.
What hope such a manufactured creature of masonic privilege comprehending the gilets jaunes ('yellow vests') and the millions they represent across the country, all fed up with the self-interested, unjust, incompetent Establishment personified by Emmanuel himself?
As our joke alludes: precisely zero.
Which is why the movement continues on: 27,000 protesters assembling on the tenth consecutive weekend as I write. Echoing these points, independent French commentator François Maceron observed that only the government is surprised:
As long as the causes remain, the movement will persist. So far there has not been a serious response to the concerns expressed by the yellow vests. Quite the contrary.
While the yellow vests are middle-class people who are struggling to live, and who demand that the [diesel] tax hike be stopped, the government takes care of the homeless and the unemployed; all the different categories who live with social help. In the medium term, this means that the middle classes will be punished even more. [Thus, the government] will do the opposite of what is asked.
It should be noted in passing that this government and the technocrats who support it are not superior beings as they try to make believe, but amateurs who have no idea of the social reality and the terrain they know only from the windows of the ENA. [Medias-Presse.Info, 10/1/19]
The elite training college for French civil servants, of which Macron is a typical fast-tracked product (being parachuted into a senior civil servant post at the age of just 27), the L’Ecole d’Administration Nationale (ENA) represents "the never-ending protected cycle of patronage, promotion, favours and cronyism." As citizen journalist blog Quid Verum notes, the "ENA has a complete stranglehold on the French state. Only 100 students graduate every year." Consequently, the ENA has become a "self-replicating elite caste — and a ticket to the French ruling class":
Astonishingly, every French President since de Gaulle has been an ENA graduate, excepting Georges Pompidou, who attended Sciences Po [Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, the second elite college]. Eight of the last ten French Prime Ministers have been enarques. All key civil service/government departments are run by enarques. How about business? 84% of the 546 top executives in France’s 40 biggest companies are graduates of a handful of elite colleges. 48% come from ENA and Sciences Po.
This systemic stitch-up underlies a popular protest movement which a diesel tax merely ignited. It has been brewing for decades. Quid Verum goes on:
The French elites are young men and women, who have been told that they are not just the intellectual crème de la crème, but morally superior. Better human beings, than their inferiors.
These people are arrogant. But they are also ignorant. Raised in very wealthy families and cosseted in the networks those families are part of, they have no understanding of ordinary people and their real lives.
Arrogance and ignorance is a very toxic mix. Macron’s tone-deaf appeal to climate change to justify the rise in diesel taxes, as well as his outrageous suggestion that ordinary French folk must drive less, is a classic example of the problem.
Et voilà, the heart of the matter in countries all over:
Elites blaming ordinary people, for problems that the same elites have caused. Elites never being held accountable for their incompetence. And elites never having to experience the conditions that their failed ideas cause.
French people are sick of being held in chains by a ruling class. They are sick of being poor and unemployed.
They want a new direction, for their beloved nation.
Sound familiar?
Betrayal and disgust
You might say!
Behind the "nationalism" and "populism" breaking out everywhere lies similar exasperation with the globalist 'ruling class'. The same types who have sought to overturn Brexit — in many cases spitting in the face of the majority of their own constituents.
"Depressed" by the thought of Britain keeping its "best mates in the world" — the Aussies — "out in the cold" for another 40 years, former Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer recently underlined the travesty we have endured since 4.40 am on 24 June 2016, when the result of the referendum was unofficially confirmed. In The Sunday Express of 20 January, Downer lamented that
"The British people voted to leave the EU but two-thirds of the parliament didn't agree with the people's decision. Dozens of cunning ploys are being used to defy the will of the people. ... The plan? To get Brexit cancelled."
While rebuking anyone who connects the EU's Nazi roots to its dictatorial fruits, the establishment has simultaneously orchestrated a propaganda campaign worthy of Goebbels — Project Fear.
Endless worst-case scenarios of leaving the EU are peddled by globalists high and low: from the Governor of the Bank of England (Canadian Mark Carney, a Goldman Sachs alumnus) to the champagne socialists of Labour's thuggish, hard-left Momentum group, and every 'progressive' armchair utopian in-between.
British life outside the EU (read: Brussels-Berlin-Paris) is portrayed in apocalyptic terms, ignoring the pivotal trading interests of major constituencies like Bavaria; i.e., the EU regions which out of economic necessity will all demand a deal be reached with wealthy Britain, whether before or soon after the 29 March deadline. Dire forecasts (never realised) are received uncritically by the BBC and the controlled corporate media, who then foist them on a poorly served and badly misled public.
And yet, despite the contrived chaos which has embroiled Brexit from the start thanks to the hysterical drumbeat of the ultra-europhile media, a recent ComRes poll found that a majority of voters (53 per cent) still want the referendum result to be respected. Less than a third of voters (31 per cent) wanted Brexit cancelled or a second referendum on the UK's relationship with the EU to be held. [Daily Express, 17/1/19]
Considering the prejudicial circumstances, these are remarkable figures. Moreover, the rank bipartisan betrayal triggered damning judgments.
Only 10 per cent of voters quizzed thought politicians were in touch with the mood of the country while 74 per cent disagreed.
Nearly four out of five (79 per cent) disagreed with the statement that Parliament was "emerging from the Brexit process in a good light," with similar feelings among both Tory and Labour voters.
More pointedly still, in response to the question: "The Brexit process has shown that the current generation of politicians are not up to the job," 75 per cent agreed.
Further big majorities felt the current political system did not enable their voice to be heard (67 per cent) and wanted a string of radical reforms to effect "a complete overhaul" of the British political system (72 per cent). The latter included a call for more decentralised decision-making; a Brexit outlook at complete odds with authoritarian Brussels!
Perhaps most telling and portentous of all, 52 per cent of voters agreed with this statement: "Theresa May is right to warn that if Brexit is stopped it will cause 'a catastrophic and unforgivable breach of trust in our democracy'." (Only 26 per cent of voters disagreed.)
Aloof and lacking all common sense, the Westminster bubble-dwellers are heedless of the ultimate consequences flagged by that poll finding — serious civil unrest. In similar fashion, they blithely ignore the potentially anarchic precedent of parliament hijacking the Brexit process to overturn the expressed will of 17.4 million voters. This recalls Oliver Cromwell's revolutionary clash with parliament, as noted by the House of Commons' European Scrutiny Committee chairman, Sir Bill Cash, and former Brexit Secretary David Davis during the Committee's televised 16 January hearing on the progress of departure from the EU.
Untrammelled violence
Of course, bloody revolution is more a French pastime than an English one. But headlines trumpeting the mobilisation of armed forces in the event of a 'no deal' Brexit gels with rising violence against despised "nationalists" everywhere.
Brutal attacks across Europe and America are now commonplace. Consider, too, that the German arm of the Soros-funded "Antifa" are even more violent and better organised than their U.S. counterparts: the signature chant of the latter — "No Trump! No Wall! No USA at all!" —conveying the NWO divide-and-conquer strategy that aims to turn the West into a borderless communist dystopia.
Yet just as a complicit press allows Antifa paymasters like Soros to pursue their devastating agenda year on year, enriching the oligarchs (to include the owners of corporate media) while dumping unsustainable levels of national debt on current and future generations, so the globalist brownshirts also operate with impunity. Strong police reaction and arrests are rare.
Typically, last November an Antifa-affiliate group ("Smash Racism DC") descended on the home of conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson with a self-admitted mission of instilling "fear" in his family. Chanting on his front lawn, "Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night," they also threw themselves against the front door, cracking it. Carlson and his four children were out. But his terrified wife, home alone, locked herself in a pantry and called the police, who arrived minutes later.
The mob "eventually scattered," reported Fox, but it is unknown if any arrests were made. Before such bold and extreme criminality, how could that possibly be?! And why is the absence of swift, sure, well-publicised justice the indifferent pattern? As Tucker Carlson said:
"It wasn’t a protest. It was a threat. They weren’t protesting anything specific that I had said. They weren’t asking me to change anything. They weren’t protesting a policy or advocating for legislation... They were threatening me and my family and telling me to leave my own neighbourhood in the city that I grew up in."
Insouciant and seemingly untouchable, the Smash Racism DC mob had publicly vowed in a 3 November 2018 Facebook post that "soon the ruling class will wish for the days when we merely ruined their dinners." It sounds comically Bolshevist. As demonstrated at the Carlson residence just four days later, however, increasingly violent words and actions by left-wing figures and groups are no laughing matter. Typically:
The protests against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh saw irate screaming, near-constant attempts to shout down committee hearings, and even attempts to break into the Supreme Court building while the new Justice took his oath of office. Protesters also chased down multiple GOP lawmakers passing through Reagan National Airport, and harassed and assaulted Republicans in the halls of Senate office buildings.
Several prominent Democrats, including former Attorney General Eric Holder, Rep. Maxine Waters, and Sen. Cory Booker have also encouraged their followers to personally confront Republicans. Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declared Democrats shouldn’t be “civil” with the GOP until retaking Congress, and Sen. Mazie Hirono refused to say protesters shouldn’t follow Republicans to their homes or restaurants. [LifeSiteNews]
The point is that we should not expect much help from the press or authorities as this targetting of law-abiding patriots ramps up. François Maceron quotes a French police officer as saying: "In case of disturbances to the public, our task is first to restore normal traffic. Our role is not primarily to conduct arrests." This explains, he says, why "the thugs enjoy a great deal of impunity and come back every time." Contrariwise, consider the treatment of the gilets jaunes protesters. Under a truly shocking photo montage of bloodied faces and bodies, we read the following French report:
Review of the police repression over 2 months against #Yellowjackets: 6,000 arrests, 2000 wounded, eyes punctured, hands torn off, jaws exploded, young people disfigured, gassed and bludgeoned.
No, we are not in North Korea, nor in China, nor in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela led by the terrible Maduro, nor in the Putin Empire so hated by the politically correct establishment! We are in France where the corruption of the contemporary political world is worthy of the Third Republic. We are under the government of Macron who takes on the appearance of a small Cuban dictator facing the wrath of yellow vests ...
In addition to several hundred severely wounded protesters, 10 people have been killed amid the yellow vest protests. Inevitably, as Maceron comments, "some thugs have tried to take advantage of the excitement caused by the yellow vest movement either for the purpose of anarchy (destruction, attacks against the police or against buildings, vandalism) or for the purpose of looting." But true to form:
"To avoid the reforms it does not want to make, including a major tax reform, the government is trying to divert attention to the thugs. The government,... has used [this unrepresentative element] and will [continue to] use it to discredit the yellow vest movement, generally composed of peaceful people."
Perilous gap
To understand why growing numbers of "peaceful people" would endanger their lives by taking to the streets of France, Italy, America, Germany and elsewhere is simply to comprehend the obscene and ever widening gap between the haves and have nots. As former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen admitted four years ago,
"It is no secret that the past few decades of widening inequality can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority."
The figures are jaw-dropping — and ominous. As one observer explained in a 13 December 2018 post:
According to a 2017 report from the Institute for Policy Studies, three billionaires — Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates — have amassed as much wealth as the bottom half of American society. That’s 160 million people! Or as Oxfam reported in January of this year, the wealth of eight men (including the three mentioned above) was equal to that of half the people on this planet in 2017. Yikes! And just to give you a sense of where we’ve been heading at supersonic speed, an Oxfam report a year earlier had 62 billionaires owning half the planet’s wealth. Imagine that: 62 to eight in a single year.
Then consider what we know about the rise of the billionaire class. Again, according to Oxfam, a new billionaire appeared every two days in 2017, while 82% of the wealth being created on this planet already went to the top 1% and the bottom half of the global population saw no wealth gains at all. In 2017 (the last year for which we have such figures), the total wealth of the globe’s billionaire class ballooned by almost 20%.
Nomi Prins, a former Wall Street insider and author of Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World [2018], also notes:
If the global economy really is booming, as many politicians claim, why are leaders and their parties around the world continuing to get booted out of office in such a sweeping fashion?
One obvious answer: The post-Great Recession economic “recovery” was largely reserved for the few who could participate in the rising financial markets of those years, not the majority who continued to work longer hours, sometimes at multiple jobs, to stay afloat. In other words, the good times have left out so many people, like those struggling to keep even a few hundred dollars in their bank accounts to cover an emergency or the 80% of American workers who live paycheck to paycheck.
This dangerously unjust situation is mirrored in the gritty France that lies beneath the glossy one. Quid Verum explains:
Many still understand France through the lens of Vogue magazine covers: a nation of affluent, happy people who live in elegant homes, with endless holidays, wine and food. A 24/7 utopia of chic, elegance and style.
Important to note: that France does exist. It is the world of the French ruling class, less than 1% of the population.
Think you know the real France? Here are a few facts that may shock you:
• The French state has been bankrupt since 2004. A minister finally admitted it in 2013.
• French GDP hasn’t risen above 2% in 50 years.
• In 2018, 14% of the population in France live below the poverty line (they earn less than 60% of the median income).
• Worse, more than 50% of French people have an annual income of less than €20,150 a year (about $1,900 US per month).
• The 'official' unemployment rate is 10% — about 3.5 million citizens (in reality, it's much higher). The youth unemployment rate is 22%. Yes, you did read that right.
• Astonishing but true: the French government employs 25% of the entire French workforce... and it's impossible to fire them.
If such gross and growing inequality is tailored for serious civil strife which will make les gilets jaunes clashes seem gentle, the callous decision of the Bruxellois Eurocrats to award themselves further huge pay rises this year will only inflame things.
Personifications of globalist self-interest, EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and EU Council president Donald Tusk are the main beneficiaries. Each will pocket more than £350,000 in 2019, dwarfing Theresa May's £150,000 salary as PM. In addition, Juncker receives a residential allowance of £36,844 and a generous expense account, details of which are kept secret. And next year he will be entitled to a pension of £52,500 for life.
While UK taxpayers struggle to make ends meet, £250 million is funnelled from London to Brussels every week, with little to show in return. The vastly improved pay and perks for Juncker & Co. will cost an additional £124 million.
"If ever there was an example of the EU gravy train this is it. Juncker and his cronies are arrogant beyond belief," responded David Davis. Trademark arrogance and disregard that can only end in blood and tears. Nomi Prins observes that:
Ultimately, what transcends geography and geopolitics is an underlying level of economic discontent sparked by twenty-first-century economics and a resulting Grand Canyon-sized global inequality gap that is still widening. Whether the protests go left or right, what continues to lie at the heart of the matter is the way failed policies and stop-gap measures put in place around the world are no longer working, not when it comes to the non-1% anyway. People from Washington to Paris, London to Beijing, increasingly grasp that their economic circumstances are not getting better and are not likely to in any presently imaginable future, given those now in power.
And make no mistake, rather than sacrifice their great wealth, the 1% will crash the financial system and blame it on Trump, Brexit, or "nationalism." They can do this because they have financial and capital reserves to see out a crisis, and secondly, as history shows, they always rebound quickly from the financial earthquakes they set off. What Labour Prime Minister Clem Attlee stated about Britain in his book Labour Party in Perspective (1937) holds true everywhere:
Over and over again we have seen that there is in this country another power than that which has its seat at Westminster. The City of London, a convenient term for a collection of financial interests, is able to assert itself against the Government of the country. Those who control money can pursue a policy at home and abroad contrary to that which has been decided by the people. [p. 179]
He echoed the warnings of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower about shadowy powers who run the world; who will see countries aflame rather than step aside and put their ill-gotten gains and sinecures at risk. Anyone who doubts their current desperation, capability and intent need only read our regular despatches on the totally fabricated 'Russia collusion' investigation: a self-professed Deep State "insurance policy" to destroy Donald Trump in the event of his election. Two years on, this traitorous operation still hogs lying headlines which avoid all mention of its political origins, the multiple conflicts of interest of Special Prosecutor Robert Muller and his team, and the innocent parties ruined by their police-state tactics. Meanwhile, the epochal conspiracy — a transatlantic coup against a duly elected President — remains non-news. That is raw power!
A Western world in which truth and justice are so flagrantly perverted, where labourers are not only denied their just wage but mocked, manipulated and beaten up by the 1%, is looking down the barrel. For, history regularly demonstrates that there are limits to what people will endure:
[A] population will tolerate being led by an elite caste, as long as the same elite case can supply benefits to them, on an ongoing basis. Once the ability of the elite to 'buy' consent starts to decline, civil unrest and disobedience is guaranteed.
But when an incompetent elite switches from depriving the deplorables of benefits, to punishing and blaming deplorables for the incompetence of elites, uncharted territory beckons.
Prejudicial Pope
It would be nice if our pontiff made some of these connections. But he is too busy castigating the dreaded "populists" who reject his globalist sympathies and insane promotion of open borders.
He is blind to the current "shift away from previously dominant political parties and the systems that went with them [as] a true form of populism, which would genuinely put the needs of the majority of people over the elite few, build real things including infrastructure, foster organic wealth distribution, and stabilize economies above financial markets," as Noni Prins puts it.
So averse is Francis to this development that he has even ditched protocol to avoid meeting with Italy's most popular politician, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. "The Church has descended into battle against us. I was expecting it," Salvini said recently.
The Pope who does not judge sodomites, who claims not to 'do' politics, who so warmly welcomes illegals, transsexuals and other deviants, who recommends China and other dictatorships, judges as untouchable, unapproachable, the current strongman of Italy. Why? Because like Trumpians and Brexiteers, Salvini is taking back control of his country's borders, to stop the flood of illegal immigrants and reassert Italian sovereignty and identity.
For this papacy, Salvini and the trans-European identity currents he represents — seeking to affirm the priority of Catholic families and roll back hedonism and gender delirium — are an affront to globalism and its elastic 'values'. And so, in a world beset by a perfect storm of polarised communities, heightened socio-political tensions, anarchic violence and increasing persecution of Christians — a world in which martyrdom beckons — it is not the Vicar of Christ on earth but the likes of Trump, Orbán and Salvini who have become the beacons in the political, cultural, moral and religious battles; champions of the identity of peoples and Christian civilisation.
Shame on Francis! Yet curiously, as Maceron notes, under that secular leadership "the supporters of a Europe of Nations are closer to each other than ever before":
With the Hungarians, the Italians, and now the Germans, the Spaniards,as well as all the other Europeans who wish, in continental peace and friendship, to maintain the originality of their nation, one sees the possibility of fighting against the standardising Utopias and the financial and cosmopolitan oligarchies that support them.
The gilets jaunes and Brexiteers complete that righteous coalition.
As for our Catholic part, with the papacy in eclipse we must look beyond Rome to St. Joan of Arc and the martyrs for faith, inspiration, and the strength to endure the coming trials.