We are – we are constantly being told – living in ‘unprecedented times’, facing ‘unprecedented circumstances’ requiring ‘unprecedented measures’ for which there is no historical precedent and because of which – is the unstated implication – those in power cannot be held to account for the consequences of their actions. ‘Unprecedented’, however, is one of those words that should set alarm-bells ringing, implying, as it does, that we are in a moment about which history can teach us nothing. History tells us that we should always be suspicious when those in power start claiming we are in a moment about which history can tell us nothing. The call to forget the past is always made in the service of power; but there are very few things that history cannot teach us. Once upon a time, we studied history precisely in order to learn from it, rather than stumbling around without memory in the apparently unprecedented newness of the present. Whether that present is a product of ignorance or deceit, the past inevitably has a lot to tell us about supposedly ‘unprecedented’ moments, and so it is with the coronavirus ‘crisis’.
The two years between March 2020, when the ‘pandemic’ was officially declared by the World Health Organisation and the U.K. Parliament passed the Coronavirus Act 2020, and March 2022, when the date set for the expiry of the Coronavirus Act was reached and the last of the 582 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments made into law were revoked, have left us now, six months later, in our own re-enactment of that ‘phoney war’ that stretched for eight months between the U.K.’s declaration of war against Germany in September 1939 and Germany’s invasion of France in May 1940. With the lifting of the thousands of regulations by which our lives were ruled for two long years there has been an understandable desire to believe that the coronavirus ‘crisis’ is over and we will return to something like an albeit ‘new’ normal. But as new crises have sprung up to take its place – war in Ukraine, monkeypox, the so-called ‘cost of living crisis’ and the return of the environmental crisis – it has become increasingly difficult not to look back on ‘lockdown’ as only the first campaign in a war that has not been declared by any government but is no less real for that. Waged by the international technocracies of global governance that, under the cloak of the ‘pandemic’, have assumed increasing power over our lives since March 2020, this war is not being fought against foreign countries but against the populations of their member states. Trialled for compliance under lockdown, the weapons of this war are Digital Identity, Central Bank Digital Currency, Universal Basic Income, Social Credit, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria, Sustainable Development Goals, and all the other programmes instrumental to the United Nation’s Agenda 2030. If they haven’t been already, these look likely to be launched in a Blitzkrieg campaign, possibly this winter, with the World Health Organisation advising European countries to reimpose mandatory masking and vaccination. Just like the winter of 1939-1940, now is the deep breath before the storm.
My comparison with the opening of the Second World War, however, is not merely an analogy. I am not alone in thinking that the willingness of our governments to use the forces of the state against their own populations during the ‘pandemic’ on the justification of protecting us from ourselves signals a new level of authoritarianism – and something like the return of fascism – to the governmental, juridical and cultural forms of the formerly neoliberal democracies of the West, and one of the aims of my book is to examine the validity of this thesis. My purpose in doing so, however, it not to pursue an academic question about the meaning and historicity of the term ‘fascism’, but rather to interrogate how and why the general and widespread moral collapse in the West since March 2020 – another indicator of fascism – has been effected with such rapidity and ease, and to examine to what ends that moral collapse is being used. It is here, I believe, that history can tell us something about these supposedly ‘unprecedented’ circumstances and measures.
Something, but not everything. For while historical fascism arose in the context of the imperialism of European nation states and their struggle for power, a hundred years later that struggle has been reduced to their united and virtually unopposed ‘roll-out’ of the programmes, technologies and regulations of what has been hailed as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And while our economic, security and military alliances are dividing the globe into new axes of geopolitical influence, in the West – by which I mean Europe, North America and Australasia – the war we face is not between nation states but a civil war waged against our institutions of democratic governance and the division of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary. Insofar as these institutions and this division are being dismantled and replaced by the rule of international technocracies composed of the board members of private corporations and the unelected representatives of national governments, this ‘war’, more accurately described, represents a revolution in Western capitalism from the neoliberalism under which we have lived for the past 40 years. What it is revolving into, and the conclusion my thesis on fascism will seek to demonstrate, is the new totalitarianism of the Global Biosecurity State.
This book was preceded by 18 months of research and writing between March 2020 and October 2021, during which I published more than two dozen articles about the coronavirus ‘crisis’. So when, in February 2022, I started writing the current book, which I conceived as a single work rather than a collection of articles, I took as given the major conclusions I had reached from this research. Although, by now, the same or similar conclusions have been reached by many others, these are still sharply at odds with the official narrative about the coronavirus ‘crisis’ that many more continue to believe in or at least to obey. It is not necessary, however, for the reader to accept every one of these conclusions in order to derive some benefit from the current work. Part of the object of this study is to sketch the larger context in which to understand how what for two years were contemptuously dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’ now constitute the reality in which our immediate future is about to unfold with terrifying speed and finality. The question confronting us now is not one of doubt or belief in the reality that is all around us, but of how to oppose it before we are submerged into the new totalitarianism.
Since the revocation of coronavirus-justified regulations in the U.K., much of the resistance to the various programmes and technologies of biosecurity has become bogged down in challenging the justification for the lockdowns and demonstrating the injurious and fatal effects of the vaccination programme. And while there is value and importance in this work – particularly in halting the criminal injection and indoctrination of the young – it has been accompanied by a reluctance to look at what these programmes have prepared our compliance for in the next stage of the Global Biosecurity State. Although implemented on the various justifications of convenience of access and movement within the Global Biosecurity State, national security against present and future biological, cyber or military threats now all placed in the in-tray marked ‘terrorist’, and, of course, the great environmental catch-all of ‘saving the planet’ from global warming, these programmes will be implemented outside of any immediate threat such as that represented by the coronavirus ‘pandemic’, and can expect less compliance, perhaps, than that which met the restrictions on our human rights and freedoms under lockdown. For this reason, they are likely to be implemented quickly and all at once, with Digital Identity holding our biometric data made a condition of numerous freedoms, cash withdrawn from circulation and replaced by Digital Currency controlled and programmed by central banks, and a Social Credit system of compliance monitored by artificial intelligence and policed by facial recognition technology all a reality to which we will wake up one day with no choice but compliance or having our access to the rights of citizenship removed by default.
This is the context in which I have written my book, which is neither an academic study of the history of fascism nor a journalistic account of the past two-and-a-half years, but a work of political theory. Some of the chapters are written around the work of other writers on different aspects of fascism and totalitarianism, including the Italian semiotician and cultural critic, Umberto Eco, the Italian critical theorist, Fabio Vighi, the French sociologist and philosopher, Georges Bataille, the German literary critic, Walter Benjamin, the Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek, the English novelist and journalist, George Orwell, the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, and the German political theorist, Hannah Arendt. And although the book has been written for a popular rather than a scholarly readership, I haven’t shied away from addressing the political, legal, economic, cultural, philosophical, psychological and moral issues raised by the Global Biosecurity State. The positive response to my articles that preceded this study have encouraged me to think that there is a wider readership in the U.K. for this level of analysis than we are made to believe by our rigorously anti-intellectual culture. In this respect, I hope my book will provide a more historical and practical framework in which to understand and respond to the past two-and-a-half years than the vituperative, sectarian, authoritarian and politically naïve character of what debate there is in Parliament, the mainstream media or on social media platforms.
As readers familiar with the work of Hayek will recognise, my title is taken from his enormously influential book, The Road to Serfdom, which was published in the U.K. in 1944 during the Second World War. Intent as he was on refuting the Marxist argument that fascism was the reaction of a decaying capitalism to the rising threat of socialism, Hayek argued that Italian fascism, German National Socialism and Soviet communism all had common roots in central economic planning and the resulting power of the state over the individual. He therefore opposed the U.K. following the model of socialism that had been laid out in the hugely popular Beveridge Report in 1942, and which the post-war Labour Government would fail to implement fully in the creation of the Welfare State. In doing so, he also laid the grounds for the neoliberal revolution in the late 1970s that conquered the West and which has brought us to this point. So although I share neither Hayek’s equation of fascism with socialism nor his championing of liberalism and capitalism as defenders of the rights of the individual – both of which have been refuted by the return of fascism in the political, juridical and cultural forms of the most advanced capitalist economies over the past two-and-a-half years – Hayek’s fears and warnings about the threat of the state to the freedom of the individual are even more relevant today than they were 80 years ago. If 350 million Europeans had lived under fascist governments for a decade and more when Hayek was writing, how should we describe the digital serfdom to which the Global Biosecurity State is reducing the more than 900 million people living in the former neoliberal democracies of the West today? It’s under the banner of this warning, therefore, that I’m publishing The Road to Fascism.
Simon Elmer is the author of The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State, from which this article is an excerpt.
Post Script: A Guide to navigating your purchase on Lulu without using PayPal
Click on the links for either a hardback copy (£30.00 plus shipping & handling) or paperback copy (£19.00 plus shipping & handling):
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My book is now also available as an e-book. I’d much prefer you bought a hard copy, as it’s our addiction to digital technology that got us into this mess; but if you are hard of seeing and prefer an e-reader, you can order it as follows:
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Many of us on here instinctively saw the March 2020 lockdown madness right away as a watershed moment and a clear leap forward towards the dystopia Simon Elmer describes.
Since then, for me at least, it’s been very stressful and relentless battle to alert people to this danger.
To be honest, I still don’t see anything but the large mass of the people marching towards their digital enslavement either oblivious or resigned that there is nothing they can do to avert it.
Anyone who’s alarm bells went off in early 2020 deserves a big pat on the back for having the wisdom and intelligence to understand that something was just not right with Covid 19.
Despite the almost universal understanding that this ‘virus’ had a 99.8% survival rate, that those dying were dying ABOVE the average age of natural death and that, despite social media, know one actually knew anyone who had unequivocally died of it, the governments still decided to lock the world down, stamp on civil rights, shut down the world economy and insist that everyone was injected with a highly dubious experimental drug.
Just as an illness has no chance of being cured unless the diagnosis is correct so Covid 19 has been misdiagnosed and the treatment and cure will, therefore, be ineffective.
This is an illness, just not a virus. Covid is actually an imaginary virus that does not exist in reality.
The real illness is Mass Psychosis, easily the biggest outbreak since the Medieval Witch Trials and just as lethal.
It is the apparent irrational, bizarre and illogical reaction to this illness by the Governments and elites that have indicated to the skeptics that this MUST have been planned but, in fact, makes sense when we understand that it is actually the Doctors, scientists, politicians and media who were MOST affected by this group collective insanity.
The doctors were busy ventilating panic attacks, the elderly were being dispatched in the care homes with Midazolam and Morphine, the scientists were insisting PCR was 100% accurate (when the true figure could well be 0%) and people were dying at home from the effective shutdown in the health services. Add the vaccines, that must be killing people if Covid does not exist, and all those deaths, added together, equal the supposed Covid and excess deaths.
The Governments and elites are, today, simply acting out of irrational fear as the real cause of Covid has still yet, I believe, to be understood. Some of these people may understand what has happened but, if true, they would have to keep quiet as jail, or death by mob, may be a distinct possibility for daring to admit it.
The actual threat is that not understanding that this was a Mass Psychosis outbreak over an imaginary virus could lead to something even worse in the future.
As the saying goes “those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”
We’ll have to wait and see.
The mass psychosis you refer to is the brainwashing that has taken place across the whole of the NHS, and you most definitely. I know upwards of a score of people who work in the NHS or associated fields and their adherence to the Covid1984 story is absolutely astonishing. Have you all been drugged and chipped?
Despite your disavowal of the covid story you have still been captured by it.
Have you not read and understood the above article? Covid1984, real or imagined, is not the point. The real point is Control and lockdowns were simply the opening Blitzkrieg aimed at taking control of national populations.
Your blinkered intransigence is staggering. For someone in your position I must say you are a menace and sadly I am beginning to think the same of all NHS staff.
How exactly have I been brainwashed if I’m saying that the medical profession went stark raving mad over an imaginary virus and slaughtered lots of innocent people?
You obviously don’t work in the NHS but, believe me, that’s NOT a popular point of view.
In fact, If I said it out loud to the management, I’d almost certainly be sacked.
Same here. I was posting on the DT website in April 2020 that Covid was “a very useful crisis” and the Establishment were using it to force through policies which otherwise they would struggle to advance – ie a cashless society.
I do think Covid was a test run, it started pretty well with lockdown compliance high, however I think the jabs where a failure. 20-25% of the population withstood the coercion. Jabbing kids was beyond the pale for most except the most ardent brainwashed zealots. The 40,000 who stood their ground in the face of no-jab no-job are heroes who proved that no amount of coercion will work on many of us.
Will they one back and try again? Maybe, maybe not.
Schwab et al couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.
Is that to say we shouldn’t be very concerned by the direction things are going? No, of course not, but let’s not imagine they’re more competent than they are, and let’s realise how impractical their ridiculous ideas are. The control they want is absolute, and they are too blinded by idealism to realise it simply cannot succeed.
“The weakness of all dictatorships is that they are vast bureaucracies – what does not exist on paper does not exist.”
Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal
You don’t need to be competent to dictate to people. You just need power.
An enormous amount of power is concentrated in the state and its institutions. That power can be and is captured and used for the benefit of some at the expense of most others.
Given that the state has accumulated all that power over time, somebody will be there to wield it. I suppose you can hope that it will be well-meaning people that only act in the interest of the general public. Or you can be realistic and expect that people who are good at manoeuvring their way into power are likely to be not very nice people.
The massive accumulation of power in the state (or in anywhere really) is the fundamental problem. Once that happens, you can only expect that eventually terrible things will happen.
Competence or incompetence has literally nothing to do with it whatsoever.
I think you both make valid points.
More competent tyrants are more dangerous, surely.
Another question is whether the power grab has a notional “benevolent objective” or whether it is unambiguously malign. While I don’t agree, it could be argued that climate change or better management of the economy would both be better addressed by having a system based on central bank digital currency / personal ID / social credit. For example, limiting people’s ability to fly or drive using a system other than rationing based on price might be seen as fairer. Likewise, the use of negative interest rates to manage an economy would be arguably much more effective with a CBDC than the current system.
For people you say “couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery,” they seem to be achieving their objectives so far.
In other words – what Icke said.
If I write a book can I also advertise it on here in the guise of an article?
The Advertorial Interaction with Free Speech and Journalism by Occams Pangolin Pie. Now available from all good bookshops. Please see screeds of details below on how to register your retina with our online Credit Score factors.
Anyone else find the phrase Add to Cart sinister?
Only when preceded by the words ‘Bring out your dead’.
A good piece, thank you. I’d suggest flying farther above the clouds and seeing with even clearer perspective.
The Hegelian dialectic currently at play (create the thesis and its antithesis, control the synthesis, perpetuate conflict) was also around during WWII.
Wall Street financed Nazi Germany. Mussolini was employed by MI5. And so on.
The point is – the enemy is always YOU.
The Satan-worshipping cabal of top-tier international finance has always been at war with humanity. Let’s stop shying away from the fact we are at OPEN WAR with them.
We must then wage this war wisely – with unity, kindness, compassion, awareness.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/8306475.stm
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
But precisely why are the RPTB doing this.
Surely a major factor is that they realised years ago that Capitalism which they grew fat on, was dying and 2008/9 was final proof, the temporary way out only being to print more and more money which only kicks the can down the road.
The result now is that every “Western” nation owes trillions in debt.
But who exactly is that debt owed to?
It’s owed to the RPTB, the very bastards screwing us at the moment.
You’ve got to give them credit for using climate change, proxy wars and “pandemics” to instil the necessary fear to gain compliance, our only salvation being grateful acceptance of their digital social credit system – purely to enable them to carry on screwing us.
One way out would be for every nation to simply say in unison that they will not pay the “debt”.
I wonder what action the likes of Black Rock, Vanguard, The Great Unseen Banks ie the Rothschilds/Rockefellers etc would take to stop it happening.
I believe a certain Austrian Chancellor tried that about 90 years ago.
It didn’t end well.
Don’t lump Vanguard in with BlackRock, please.
The two are quite different organisations, with completely different ownership structures.
Jack Bogle (RIP) founded Vanguard in 1975 to great scorn from all the money managers, as the first passive Index Fund and a mutual which has done enormous amounts to improve the lot of the Regular Joe.
BlackRock, on the other hand… Don’t get me started, but I will write that Rob Kapito is a proper douche and a huge part of The Problem.
Thanks for the information.
I didn’t appreciate the distinction.
While appreciating the differences in structure (investors vs shareholders, etc), Vanguard Group Inc is one of the top investors in BlackRock (7.86% / 11,930,799 shares) and BlackRock Fund Advisors is one of the top investors in Vanguard (14.29% / 90,297,279 shares)(as of June 2022) and, for all practical purposes between them they own significant holdings in the vast majority of global companies. Vanguard’s purpose is focussed on (from their website): ‘investor needs first’ – which I assume is RoI or profit rather than social justice for all, just like BlackRocks shareholders. So pots and kettles, when it comes down it. Tim Gielen’s vid worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuSpEgFkW94
Great to see Simon Elmer on DS. Elmer’s writings were hugely important and instructive for me very early in the plandemic, and back then, I wasn’t aware of anyone writing with more lucidity about the confected crisis and its totalitarian implications. I remember thinking instinctively right at the onset of the corona exercise that the state had effectively declared war on us, and it was so reassuring to read the words of someone who was able to express this in such an intelligent and coherent way.
But I find the current state of biosecurity affairs fascinating. We seem to be in a strange period of limbo where the corporate and state powers responsible for the plandemic are unsure about whether to maintain the pretence any longer. There was certainly a plan to forever change the social contract, making access to normal life contingent on regular ‘vaccinations’ but this clearly collapsed under the weight of its own nonsense and became completely untenable when it became obvious even to the most brainwashed that the injections didn’t work, even on their own preposterous terms. ’They’ overplayed their hand and in doing so exposed themselves to more scrutiny than they have even known. I think at this point we – the ones who weren’t fooled – have the initiative and need to make sure that the crimes of the last nearly three years don’t go unpunished.
Any way, I’ll be ordering the book. Enjoyed the article.
“Since the revocation of coronavirus-justified regulations in the U.K.”
Well, the enabling legislation – the Public Health Act 1984 – is still on the books.
Yup …. and Hunt, who supported Chinese-style full lockdowns and mandatory jabbing, has effectively been appointed Fuhrer.
This is the current status of The Tyrants Charter (pt 2) AKA The Coronavirus Act 2020.
It was last updated 7th October 2022.
Note Northern Ireland temporary powers remain in force.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-act-2020-status#full-publication-update-history
The Tyrants Charter (pt 1) AKA The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 – is still valid, festering on a back burner, ready to be reignited.
Elmer’s book certainly sounds interesting. But his launch piece here doesn’t mention the other war that has been going on at more or less the same time.
And it is important to note that the war against affordable and reliable energy (which IS mentioned) started, at latest, in 1988. It seems possible that the Covid war came about because the Climate, or initially Warming war, had run out of steam.
But the war that is not mentioned here, or at least in Simon’s piece, is “The War on the West-how to prevail in the age of unreason” admirably set out in Douglas Murray’s brilliant new book, which amazingly seems to have had little mention on LS, or anywhere else.
Douglas specifically writes about the Critical Race Theory nonsense, the rise of REAL (anti-white) racism, of antisemitism, or the complete uninterest of our Beloved Leaders in the ongoing invasion, in the Muslim rape gangs, in the continual attacks on Western (especially British) history and culture, the incessant ‘blame’ for slavery to the West (which Britain went to great pains to abolish) but the ignoring of the larger and much longer slavery to the East and, of course, the slavery that is so obvious today. He also points out the sheer oddity of heaping blame on an obscure letter by David Hume, whilst airbrushing far more direct racist and antisemitic letters from Karl Marx.
This is by no means a criticism of Elmer’s book, which obviously I have yet to read. But it does seem odd that the war that he describes in the piece above was going on, just before the death of George Floyd sparked off paroxysms in the war against “whitey”, usually by the same “Antifa” protagonists.
An excellent excerpt, book ordered! I just wish that someone would be able to help organise the resistance, instead of each of us desperately trying to be prepared and doing our own thing. I make contact with other like-minded individuals in my area (or even generally), but it won’t be anything like enough. Anyway, forewarned is to a certain extent forearmed. (I am interested that Toby has let this go at the head of today’s DS email. Is he moving away from his bumbling foolishness of government idea?)
In order to implement this dystopia it would be necessary to change human DNA and achieve an enormous loss of individuality. Perhaps there is a connection between these things and concealing the faces of human beings while regularly injecting them with gene therapy. Sorry, if that sounds slightly sarcastic. These two assaults are the most objectionable, closely followed by Social Credit Scoring and biometric surveillance and governance. Patrick M Wood has predicted much of this for some years, but Elmer’s article and book are more than welcome. I too have been derided for venturing to warn of our impending fate, but fewer people are laughing now.
Part of the reason for the government’s easy removal of our democratic rights was the gutless, ignorant journalists in the mainstream media. None of whom carried out any accurate research or queried if the governments actions were fair or reasonable and the politicians who did not properly query what the government was doing. Hancock was a complete medical imbecile given the job of health secretary pretending he knew what he was taking about, signing off laws he knew nothing about. How is he still an MP?
The financial collapse, caused by decades of fraud, quantitative easing, selling out to the CCP, building-up unpayable debt that was never properly resolved after 2008 isn’t going to go away. Of course government’s are going to try to impose all manner of control measures to save their own skin whilst blaming the inevitable consequence of years of irresponsibility on a pandemic, institutionalised racism, Climate Change, Vladimir Putin, another pandemic, Dr Evil plotting to take over ze world, etc.