It is common nowadays to hear talk of ‘the elites’, especially ‘the global elites’. On the one hand, these phrases seem to refer to Bill Gates, George Soros, Larry Fink, Klaus Schwab and other Bond villains, plus the figures who play Oddjob to Goldfinger – accredited sidekicks and secretaries like Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, Anthony Fauci, Tedros Ghebreyesus and Gary Lineker. One the other hand, they refer to the entire higher educated class of professionals, teachers and administrators, the class of ‘nowheres’ as distinguished from ‘somewheres’ (David Goodhart) or ‘uppers’ as distinguished from ‘downers’ (Ferdinand Mount), or ‘democrats’ as distinguished from ‘deplorables’ (Hillary Clinton). This is confusing, but it makes sense. There are extremely powerful figures operating at a high level of influence. And then there are the enforcers. And then there are the jobsworths.
There is a hierarchy of elites, then – an uncelestial hierarchy – running from the conspiratorial through the corrupt and the colluding to the compliant. We all know this; but we tend to think about it sociologically rather than politically. For the edification of the one or two sceptical Cobbetts still in existence, I thought I’d sketch out a short conjectural historical explanation of the politics of ‘The Thing’, as A.J.P. Taylor referred to the ruling class: in other words, A History of the Global Elites.
In our history we have several ancient visions of a centralised world order. One was the Roman vision: Empire! And the other was the Christian vision: Papacy! These were fused by Constantine, but split again, in the West, though not in the East, and in the West maintained a high rivalry for a thousand years. However, this rivalry had nothing to do with ordinary life in medieval England, say, or France, where there was no centralisation, no state, no sovereignty and only lordship: in particular, feudal lordship. Feudal lords, as everyone knows, were in effect private, not public: and they existed in reciprocal relations of local service. The vassal owed the lord service; and the lord owed the vassal protection. Our medieval kings were just the first lords amongst many. Everything was a matter of practical subsidiarity: decided at the appropriate level. But into this working system stole the Roman lawyers of Bologna and other universities, who started speaking to the imperialists, and the Roman Christians who sought to turn Christian practice into ecclesiastical world order using selections from the Bible and Aristotle and also Roman law. They disagreed about much, but they agreed about the importance of central domination.
To cut a long story short, feudal struggles between rival lords were resolved by the kings, who, as the pre-eminent lords, forged high alliances with the centralising Roman-Christian-Greek theorists and forged low alliances with the people – especially the somewhat unattached mercantile people: those people who in the 14th Century associated in guilds and in the 17th Century in clubs and companies. The kings used their alliances to establish themselves at the apex of the novel thing called a state, armed with a doctrine of sovereignty (which meant supremacy): and this threw up new ideas such as raison d’état, the idea that everything should be done for the state, and absolutism, the idea that everything should be done for the state absolutely.
Is this clear? The centralisers of the first stage were the emperors and popes, with their claims about being dominus mundi, lord of the world, or vicarius Dei, vicar of God. The centralisers of the second stage were the European kings of the 16th Century and afterwards, with their claims to rule as supremely as the emperors and popes had done, but only within their own territories, now called states.
If you are interested, I take the first half of the story from a letter Lord Acton wrote in 1861, which Michael Sonenscher found so impressive that he printed it entire as an appendix in his recent book After Kant. And I take the second half from a book by Reinhart Koselleck from 1959 called Critique and Crisis.
The second half of the story is that there was were reactions against the sovereign kings, against raison d’état and against absolutism. Overt reactions against it– like those of egalitarian Protestant sects – failed. But one reaction which succeeded was that of the Freemasons. Descended from obscure traditions (Cabalistic, Hermetic, Rosicrucian, Templar), the Freemasons were in fact businessmen who were appalled by the absolutism of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. They formed secret corporations to defend a certain sort of freedom, and they protected themselves with elaborate and arcane rituals but also by emphatically asserting that they had no interest in politics.
Koselleck’s particular point is that asserting-that-they-had-no-interest-in-politics was a highly effective way of being political. The Freemasons disliked the absolutist state. They disliked states. They disliked politics. They liked business, they liked freedom, and they were convinced of the superiority of their mercantile cosmopolitanism and their capacity to solve the problems of the world by using moral arguments rather than using crude political expedients. But this was to become a politics of its own.
The suggestion here is that it was the Freemasons who were responsible for the politics of the ‘global elite’. We can skate over the 19th Century because even Marxism was no more than a spirited sideline in a much grander story. Freemasonic politics was, and is, overtly antipolitical. It dislikes states. It also dislikes democracies. It dislikes limits. It is technocratic. It likes science. It is very sure of itself. It generates a vast network in which one gets on as one boosts one’s signal. It wants freedom, for the members of the arcane cult: those who adopt the neo-masonic beliefs (nowadays about diversity, migration, climate, pandemic) as badges of honour, and adopt quasi-masonic rituals to go with them (wearing masks, taking the knee, protesting that one is an ally of this or that community, assembling in Davos and wherever COP is to be held next year). It assumes that this science, this morality – technology plus appropriate belief – is enough to solve the problems of the world: and that what usually passes for politics is in fact inferior folly and distraction. It is very much in favour of the hypothesis of ‘The Anthropocene’, since it can pose as the St George that is going to slay the dragon of Machiavellianism, now that the Machiavellian state has proven that it has no ‘solutions’ to the problems of the world.
The neo-masonic global elite believes in solutions. Politics, as we know it, is a dirty business: and involves silt and sediment and scum– things that do not dissolve (like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage): but politics as the global elite knows it is, or should be, clean: it only approaches a problem if it involves a solution: dissolving something in some magnificent new solvent, to be designed by a corrupt scientist somewhere and signal-boosted by the colluding and compliant systems of the states that no longer work because they have been Gramscianly buggered-up by the long march of masonry through the institutions. The states no longer work because their old Machiavellian étatiste capacities have been eroded by the universalist, globalist, unpolitical, gentle progress towards a service state which is in fact a world state – except that it won’t be called a ‘state’, because the word ‘state’ is a tainted word.
I wonder what they’ll call the ‘world state’ when it comes? It won’t be ‘world state’. It’ll be Gaia – or Govenia, or Gretaria, or something equally vapid. Or it won’t even have a name. Someone should write a dystopia about how the Chinese and Islamic worlds will come to a grand world-historical compromise whereby Islam will supply the religion and China will supply everything else. All we will do, probably, is supply the name. We are good at advertising and doublethink.
Well, there are people in our civilisation, thinkers and theorists, who try to defend ‘politics’, and talk positively about Hobbes and Machiavelli. But those people – I read their books – also seem to have injected the neomasonic antipolitical gene therapy into their cerebral cortices, so it remains to be seen whether any of them of them will wake up and realise that they are doomed if they don’t realise that the state has been weakened too much by the masons.
I am not defending the state. But it is important for us to recognise just how much the history of politics reveals that the state has been undermined by the clever machinations of the centralisers of the third stage, the neomasonic global elites. They are worse, probably, than the old centralisers. They see no limits to their empire. And they are more certain of their right to rule than even the Romans and Christians.
The only hope, as the great political theorist Bertie Wooster put it, might be to restore a bit of the old feudal spirit.
One thing I did not mention earlier on is that one of the other reactions to absolutism, and a successful one for a time, was distinctly English. It was constitutionalism. 1688 and all that. This constitutionalism was also adopted by the Americans, who abstracted from English models while rejecting English rule and English traditions. Constitutionalism worked well between the 18th and 20th Centuries. It certainly preserved liberty by insisting on balance. It was responsible for that remarkable thing, liberalism. But it is possible that constitutionalism, too, has been twisted beyond repair by the masonic elites: to become just one more method by which they impose their antipolitical protocols on us.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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“Death of meritocracy in Britain”
Advancement in the UK is not too dissimilar to anywhere else. If the parents went to the right schools and universities, if they go to the right golf and tennis clubs. If they are well networked with the power and money, then the child a far greater chance of success. Once in the nice jobs, well, people promote people like them, don’t they.? Lets not kid ourselves that social and financial advancement has ever really come as the natural conclusion of competence and hard work. But even that pretence is hard to keep up when competence and hard work are wilfully ignored over choosing people solely for their immutable characteristics.
Grammar schools gave us proles a chance to advance when TPTB needed extra brain power . The fact that the kids from these excellent schools who went onto Oxbridge were known as “Stains” by the silver spoon brigade tells us all we need to know !
Went up to Oxford 1969; four of my peers studying Eng. Lit & Lang were working class Grammar School educated lads. Very smart. All went on to good jobs. Two as teachers. All agreed Grammar Schools a huge helop to them
Grammar schools provided a route to self improvement as did the proper technical colleges. Comprehensives do not.
Grammar school boy here, work for an SME. We’re an eclectic bunch, AFAIK no-one from an especially deprived background, but no-one from an especially privileged one either. I think we’re broadly here, earning decent money, on brainpower and hard work, and the bosses are generally the smartest and most productive. I guess most of us had stable families. Perhaps we’re an outlier.
“Britain’s arts scene is as woefully woke as ever”
Woke is supposed to be about equity, which can only guarantee that we all end up at the lowest common denominator.
Absolutely spot on, Neil. You end up with rubbish art. Emperor’s New Clothes art. Equity is a nonsense word in this regard. The woke community have taken a few words such as equity, inclusivity and diversity and basically weaponised them so that these three words, so redolent of the French Revolution’s ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ now play a massive part in business, arts, sport, and politics….to your peril if you do not play along. You dilute the talent to please the less talented because that’s ‘fair’ rather than deal with the education and skills transfer aspects so that the less talented can earn their place. You include everyone to provide an entirely skewed perspective on reality because it’s ‘fair’. I have no problems with anyone of any race, colour, religion, sexual orientation etc of taking their place but only if or when they are worthy of that place due to their own efforts and abilities like all fo us, not because of some unwritten rules. And when they reach their goals, they act as inspiration to the others who follow, because they want to be better and more talented not because it’s ‘fair’.
“The Sunday Times has an extract from Anthony Seldon’s new biography of Boris Johnson revealing what really went on in Number during the first lockdown.”
Yes, of course this will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
“Net zero fuel failure triggers train chaos across South West”
So, will this effect E10 petrol for cars?
Maybe why it was released in the winter months? because they know the algae will become a problem when the temperature picks up?
Curious!
Curious couple of lines in the report:
…it is understood that engines were blocked by algae, which forms “organic growths” in train fuel tanks. The algae forms if biofuel sits unused for a period of time and is not treated with chemical additives…. Engineers are racing to flush fuel tanks and potentially fill them with standard diesel instead.’
1) I bet the additives are fossil fuel based (!) and 2) wot, not replacing with more ‘clean’ ecofuel then??
I was under the impression that the E10 just has a greater percentage of Ethanol. But as Ethanol is usually derived from Corn, we are growing food, then processing it and using it to power cars.
Feel free to correct me as I’m a bit sketchy on this.
What it’s derived from depends where you are. Corn (Maize) mostly used in the USA, Sugar in Brazil, Wheat (animal grade) in the UK. But the source is not the problem. When moist air comes into contact with the fuel, some of the ethanol mixes with the water, whereas the rest of the mix doesn’t, so it’s possible to end up with water/ethanol junk in the system, at the bottom of a container. If that gets sucked into the system, you’ve had it. Apparently the “shelf life” of E10 is only about 90 days.
The fuel which includes plant based material also rusts in internal components of engines. Small engines which are not used regularly are particularly at risk of rapid wear, such as mowers, chain saws etc.
One solution is to only use new petrol but that raises the question what to do with the remaining old stock. Also an inhibiter can be used but it too has an expiry date. 2-D oil additive is also recommended to be used when fresh.
What all this leads to is worn out engines and/or discarded fuel. Green, eh?
“The U.N.’s conflation of words with violence is dangerous“ The image above of the handgun hidden within the loudhailer and the words ‘It’s not just a comment’ has to be one of the most Orwellian images I have seen so far. It’s basically saying ‘Speech is not free’. Large unaccountable international organisations full of unelected bureaucrats many of whom are probably still ambitious ex-politicians or thwarted politicians, wanting to impose their ideas, making grandstanding virtuous pronouncements which then get filtered down to the country level and aimed at the masses…What could go wrong? The true violence is the way in which we are being silenced. And slowly herded into our future, no, THEIR future. We must resist, not comply, and be free – I won’t use the words ‘civil disobedience’ here as they imply that we are somehow being naughty and have transgressed. We haven’t. They have.
Instead of civil disobedience how about we civilly frustrate their dystopian plan?
Spot on Aethelred
Happy St George’s Day! I celebrate my ‘Englishness’ because there is much to celebrate about it. I consider myself more English than any other even though I have a lot of Scottish, some Irish and Welsh, and no doubt other, bloods in me too. I love this country for the humour, the pubs, the quirky eccentrics it has produced, the folk music, rock music, the landscape, the old architecture, the politeness, the coastlines, the fact that it was this country that set the ball rolling in the anti-slavery movement, our common law and so much more and our ability to not give up but to continue our fight when the odds are against us. It is not because of a perverse sense of superiority over others, a nationalist stance. It is not easy to pinpoint what it is to be English but I feel there is something in the ability for self-deprecation, modesty and tolerance – maybe it’s that last one that could be our undoing, I don’t know, but it’s a good attribute to have. And yes, there are some who don’t have these qualities but they are relatively few. If you travel about the country, you will more likely meet good, kind people. And I know I could probably go into a pub with many of you and have a pint, a laugh and a chinwag and that we can agree or disagree with humour and courtesy and part friends. Anyway, just some Sunday morning musings….Gawd bless yer all!
..cheers Aethelred…I was thinking about having a ‘dry’ day…ah well, the best laid plans….LOL!
Thanks Aethelred. Lovely words and much appreciated.
Most welcome, HP, and Gums. Actually, I have subsequently learned that our patron saint should be St Edmund and the original flag of ancient England was a white dragon on a red background. This was the dragon slain by St George!
Well this is interesting….
https://www.emerald.tv/p/did-the-fda-just-admit-that-it-overdosed?utm_source=direct&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Two days ago, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made some monumental changes in the COVID vaccine schedule in the proverbial dead of night that should concern everyone.
The FDA essentially revoked the authorization for all previously licensed COVID vaccines. It’s the end of the old “monovalent” doses. The FDA also cut the dosage for all the new “bivalent” vaccinations by 75%.
So what ‘new’ data is informing this decision? Worth a read….
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-mob-fear-and-the-new-totalitarianism/
How the Davis Deviants are winding up and using mob tactics to destroy societies.
I think this is a double read.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-guardian-goes-from-badge-to-worse-with-its-slavery-slurs/
The Groan is going after football club badges in its campaign against slavery but not realising that it’s own masthead uses Guardian Egyptian type.
Firkin marvellous.
Both clubs founded long after slavery was ended by the UK. 1894 for City, early 20th C for United. City founded originally by a Vicar’s daughter, to provide sport for working people. Obvs all HUGE supporters of slavery. As were the railway workers of Newton Heath FC, who were to morph into United a while after they went bust.
If British citizens are enjoying time off for good behaviour in Spain will they receive UK emergency alerts today?
It seems like nearly nobody received the emergency alerts even on UK territory. Massive incompetence or?
They just changed the headline from ‘fails to go off on all phones’ to ‘on some (most…?!?) phones’. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/23/emergency-alert-phones-live-updates-london-marathon/
As Mrs B. just said, the really worrisome thing is that this massive failure and display of incompetence doesn’t surprise us at all.
World beating my a*se.
But luckily for Brits, it’s currently going downhill in all other countries as well.
Saw earlier that the bill for todays test was, wait for it…£22 million…
Worth every penny if it saves lives from tornado’s and avalanches…
£22 million?
That’s BS. What that figure tells us is that another £22 million was stolen from British taxpayers and went in to the pockets of our so-called elites. For accounting purposes it will be logged as ‘Emergency Alerts,’ but that us simply cover for stealing.
Seriously?
The test was successful for me because I did not receive the alert.
JC wrapping up on the SARS-Cov-2 topic, apparently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpdTQbiflYU
YOU WILL GO NOWHERE AND BE HAPPY
The age of “cheap flights” is over, Bloomberg reported this week. They go on to say that the cost of flying to Europe from the UK has already increased by over 30%, and that’s not just a temporary bounce thanks to the “pandemic”.
Tellingly, the article does not in any way consider this a bad thing – indeed, it goes out of its way to celebrate the passing of the age of “absurdly cheap” air travel.
This is all due to climate change, apparently, since airlines have to “decarbonise” they are being “forced” to increase their prices. Under European rules, airlines have to pay for their carbon emissions, and the price per unit is set to increase a lot over the next couple of years. Meaning air travel in Europe – and potentially the rest of the world – is going to keep getting more and more expensive.
This is all part of the Great Reset, clearly. The thinking behind lockdowns, and the Covid narrative in general, was about making our world smaller – physically AND conceptually – boxing people in and keeping them separate. Lowering people’s expectations of freedom and standard of living, whilst at the same time telling them it’s all for the greater good.
Oddly, the cost of flying in the US is also increasing rapidly, but for (allegedly) totally different reasons. It’s weird how much that happens recently.
From, “Our Week in the New Normal” at Off-G.
Thanks, HP. We must fight these barstewards and get our world back because they are lesser people and do not deserve it!