35 min read. Audio version here:
A few weeks ago we travelled to Naarm, Melbourne to stand with Julian Assange and around 3000 fellow supporters of free speech. We travelled with our friends and elders Su Dennett and David Holmgren, shared a hug with John Shipton, Julian’s father, and made a short video featuring David’s analysis at the rally.
John Shipton is a beautiful human – astute, observant and wise. A recent interview with John by Chris Hedges provides important context for those who are catching up with Julian Assange’s persecution by the US and the UK governments. Of course, the Australian Government’s moral backbone hasn’t shown up once again, either, despite the promise of Anthony Albanese. In early 2022 Julian passed “one thousand days in Belmarsh Prison, dubbed ‘Britain’s Guantanamo Bay‘.” In late 2022 his voice still cannot be heard. His message is disallowed, muzzled. He is the most cancelled, most chained person alive in the global New Normal Reich.
The gift of Nasty
We posted David’s political analysis of the Assange rally on YouTube the day following the rally. Yes, YouTube let us back on their platform last week and reinstated a video they’d censored of ours, after our appeal fed back to them: “A difference of opinion is called democracy not misinformation.” We think one of their bots called for a human to assess our appeal.
One of the comments posted on YouTube responding to our latest video, came from Lean Nasty, who was, well, a little nasty albeit well meaning.
“Where’s the woke left?” Bloody hell. I love you guys and your family but that’s just pathetic. We left all care about Julian. Some of us are not anti-vaxxers. Some are. That’s okay. By making it about the “others”, by focusing on another group, we lose sight of what really matters.
Lean Nasty apparently didn’t face the full force of state violence for refusing an experimental inoculant made by corporate criminals who made themselves (via the admissions of the state) legally immune to any harm caused by the rollout. That any government or person could trust Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca considering their track records, is beyond our comprehension, but to mandate the productions of such criminals is proof the state-pharma nexus exists and is gravely dangerous to human health and society.
We think our political placard must have hit a nerve. “We left all care about Julian,” says Lean Nasty, but is that really true? Before heading to Melbourne we didn’t consider who would be there, we chatted with David, Su and another friend Marita about many things but not that. The political right attended this rally in equal, if not greater, numbers than those of us who once proudly called ourselves Left. If this post-binary political movement continues to grow and Identitarians across the political divide showed up too, the 1% would be truly shitting themselves.
The new right seem to have a better understanding of how neoliberalism is shafting the 99% because their politics, akin to old skool socialists and anarchists (or Left libertarians), are still rooted in hard economic realities. The new right are the youngtimer working classes, trying to survive neoliberal economic shafting that targets them first. On the other hand, woke Leftists are often privileged enough to have been educated in universities that are themselves now fully framed by neoliberal values, both in their economic and cultural forms, and in their production of captains of industry and other workers who are managing the systematic destruction of the biosphere.
Woke influencers have been rewarded by neoliberalism for steering politics away from labour and property relations and into Identity as the primary politic. They have been rewarded by having the new-speak of woke’s Identitarianism rolled out through the neoliberal institutions. The banking system – the apex of the neoliberal church – can handle “birth parent” and “chest feeding” language reconstruction in their own institutions; they have no need for mothers, except for the tedious reproduction of labour, biologically, while they wait for the transhuman embryo factories to fire up.
Neoliberalism, as the global parent (and akin to its woke children), hates the family. The family poses a threat to neoliberalism because the family still posits the possibility of alternative cosmologies to the dominant hegemony, economic or otherwise. Assange’s parents were rightly suspicious about industrial schooling because schools have become compliance factories where children are manipulated to conform to the imperatives of the neoliberal state and its war, transhumanism, ecocide, iatrogenocide and inequality values.
Assange spent some time at school and was also homeschooled. His family’s cosmology questioned the dominant hegemony in a holistic way. The possibility for an alternative and holistic cosmology is one of the tenets of Artist as Family and our crafting of neopeasantry. We no longer participate in neoliberal art, science or economics, but rather have pragmatically and creatively reclaimed ancestral modalities that are rooted in a walk-for subsistence. In relocalisation.
Leftists have typically moved away from defending the family and so any discussion of it is automatically considered a politic of the right.
Neoliberal and woke psychopolitics are working towards a mass culture where everyone is schooled by groupthink, everyone takes Pfizer’s and Gates’ drugs, everyone eats lab meat and GMO veggies, everyone’s behaviour is monitored through centralised banking, and everyone lives in the promised utopia of the Metaverse. This is why the woke Left weren’t at the Assange rally, Lean Nasty. Because they are serving neoliberal psychopolitics, albeit mostly unwittingly, using neoliberal technologies of power on a massive scale to coerce and control populations in how they think and behave.
The collaboration is powerful because there is topdown pressure from neoliberal controllers and bottom up community action from woke influencers working together. Byung-Chul Han writes in his book Psychopolitics (2017), how Big Data and new technologies of power are corralling us into ever more enclosures. “Big Brother and Big Business,” he writes, “have formed an alliance. The surveillance state and the market are merging.” The Covid response by the state-pharma nexus and the rolling out of vaccine passports typifies this.
The tyranny of neoliberal ‘kindness’
Jacinda Ardern – a well groomed WEF young leader who encapsulates woke Left psychopolitics – calls for a politics of kindness, while at the same time insisting her government is the only source of ‘truth’ for matters relating to information generally post Covid. When a government is claiming they hold ‘the truth’ a new period of tyranny has already begun. A recent article by Colin Todhunter titled, “Free Speech, Jacinda Ardern and the Tyranny of ‘Kindness’” published in OffGuardian offers important commentary on this unfolding crisis of cancel culture and censorship. Todhunter writes, “Like other political leaders, during COVID, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’.”
It took us quite some time to pop our own woke bubble, taken there initially because like so many things, woke started with good intentions; as a next-gen approach to the meritorious lineage of human rights activism that (in the industrial era) began with peasant and artisan resistance to being forcibly enclosed or cleared from ancestral and sacred lands, which their economic sovereignty depended on. The Crofters’ War (Cogadh nan Croitearan) in Scotland, for example, was “[w]aged over large parts of the 1800s. [T]he ‘war’ was a dispute between landowners and communities distressed by high rents, their lack of rights to land, or facing eviction to make way for large-scale farming operations.”
Land grabs started in the 12th century but escalated in early industrialising England, before British colonialism – the prototype for neoliberal global development – was rolled out across the world. Now Bill Gates is the biggest landowner in the US, land which is intended to kill family farming and bring in a next generation of ecology destroying GMO monocultures. The story of the industrial Left begins with the destruction of The Commons and the assault on land-bonded and artisanal classes and cultures by industrialists and classical political economists such as Adam Smith, and his theories of colonial development and free-trade imperialism (see” The Invention of Capitalism by Michael Perelman 2000).
The part of Left politics that’s now orientated by wokeness or Identitarian ideology foremost, doesn’t seem to grasp the current and historical significance of Julian Assange, whose only ‘crime’ was to expose neoliberal power’s true forms and deeds like any useful journalist should do to keep society from the wolves. So, finally, our reply to you, Lean Nasty (which we published over there at YouTube), went like this:
“Thanks for voicing your difference here. It is very welcome. We’re curious to know whether you listened to what was said by David [in the video] or did you get triggered by the cover image first, which lead to writing your comment? Regarding the cover image placard, for us it’s a very serious question: ‘why are those who purport to stand for human rights not at a rally for Julian Assange?’
Like any reductive shame label, such as the broad sweeping ‘anti-vax’ dismissive used against anyone questioning the state-pharma nexus, ‘woke’ has become shorthand for Leftists who have abandoned the larger geopolitical problems of our time and abandoned examination of any human rights abuse deemed not to fit into Identitarian ideology. There are many reasons for this, including the erasure of critical thinking from the education system and social media’s very intentionally engineered base-behaviour tribalism.
Yes, we agree, reductive language is always problematic, and politics leads us all there very quickly (such as your ‘anti-vax’ usage), but if you watch this video you may find a little more than just a political placard, which was written at the rally to express our grief that younger Leftists have abandoned Assange (or believe the manufactured smear campaign against him), and many have become apologists for state violence, be it mandates or war and everything in between.”
And not just apologists. The example Holmgren gives in the video of the German Greens being some of the most strident advocates for the war against Russia is just one story of this growing power-over trend in woke Left ideology. All over social media woke vigilantes came from lockdown waving Uncle Pfizer’s flag to waving the Ukrainian one without understanding the US’s meddling in that country for decades. The US influence in NATO to get military bases on Russia’s doorstep, for example, and their refusal to engage diplomatically with Russia to overt bloodshed and ecological catastrophe, is due to the capture of US congress by US armaments companies. This is why we’re facing a nuclear war.
So many of us, formally from the green Left, are now politically homeless, not just because Greens parties have become war mongers, but because they’re telling bright green lies about renewables, backing a growing industry of mineral extraction needed for neoliberalism’s bullshit climate fix – The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Our crappy little home-brewed music video, The majors and the Greens (an election ditty), gives you a little more insight into what we mean here.
But let’s sit with the gift of Lean Nasty’s comment for a bit longer, for there is blind spot work in it for us, too.
Is it possible to move beyond reductive, divisive and crude politics and move towards what Charles Eisenstein is calling Political Maturity or what we’ve been calling for – a sacred politics?
Does political maturity mean we don’t speak up when we feel attacked or are fearing of “another group” whose values we perceive as deliberately setting out to destroy our own? Or does it mean we do speak, but only use a language that doesn’t alienate or wound, like non-violent communication (NVC), where people focus on ‘I’ statements and are conscious of not projecting their fears or wounds onto another? We know NVC works in the household and community sphere where there is direct engagement, and we are well practiced at it. But does it work when groups, especially online, refuse to engage with each other and bunker down into ideological silos?
The psychopolitics of cancelling others often takes place in the cowardly domains of the virtual. A recent notable example is when former Victorian Greens party convenor, Linda Gale, was attacked by colleagues in the party who wilfully misquoted her, and destroyed her reputation in a trial by social media for questioning not dismissing Identitarian ideology. These cancelling events will inevitably lead to the collapse of The Greens as many of us turn away, but more broadly it leads to the further fracturing of society. Neoliberals know there’s much money and control to grow when social fracturing occurs. We call this Disaster Corporatism.
A century on, woke invokes the gratuitous decadence of 1920s Europe with the earnestness and puritanism of the Hitler Youth. This is the brilliance of neoliberal psychopolitics, which we refer to as pop-fascism, a force wrapped up in cuteness, smiles, virtuousness and apps.
The rites and rights of youngtimers
How woke Left or Identitarian ideologies slide from human rights into neoliberal psychopolitics occurs by a certain kind of naivety for how this old power-over story of ‘get the kids early’ is brought forward into the contemporary moment.
The four main areas of concern that arise for us regarding the psychopolitical trans revolution, for example, which ideally we’d like to discuss in an open and nuanced social environment, are the four Ms – medicalisation, misogyny, misandry and the muzzling of debate.
- The medicalisation of young people transitioning across genders who require irreversible operations such as vaginoplasty and harmful drugs like puberty blockers.
- The unavoidable misogyny that comes with insisting a transwoman is a woman without engaging in open debate across broad feminist and broader social discourses.
- The inherent misandry that comes with insisting a transman is a man without engaging in debate across broad masculinist and broader social discourses.
- And the muzzling of all these issues in our communities, closing down discussion with “Vulnerable people will suicide if you discuss this,” or even worse, labelling someone a transphobe and turning them into a social contagion for asking questions.
These four Ms – medicalisation, misogyny, misandry and muzzling – are, we believe, worthy of attention and debate. We know we will lose subscribers for saying this, and we’ll gain some as well.
Nasty 2.0
Lean Nasty’s comment doesn’t seek to engage with the question on our placard: Where is the woke Left? Rather it appears to have touched a shadow point. When our shadows are exposed there is always the possibility of a learning, or at least the opportunity to ask a question of ourselves. Our use of ‘woke’ here may be provocative to some but it doesn’t attempt to shut down debate or silence anyone. It calls for engagement through its trigger; it provokes, and more importantly it is not afraid to ask the question. Where’s the woke Left? is calling for presence, for visibility. It invites debate and inclusion. We want to stand beside the woke Left at all rallies for Assange, but we also want to provide context for why they are not showing up to fight for freedom of speech.
Our question invites the necessary rupture or tension that politics often requires in order to better understand the ‘other’; for there to be argument so there can be movement. We call this ideological pitchforking which we also practice on ourselves to unstick crusty beliefs and move the dialectic into a more generative place. The pitchforking of our own hubris was what pricked our own woke bubble. There is undoubtedly always more we can do to aerate our own ideological composts.
Truth is never a static thing and this is why we value Indigenous thinking that observes the easy slide from right story to wrong story, from aerated compost to putrid compost. This has nothing to do with the game of right and wrong manufactured in an industrial cultural sense, because Indigenous wisdom is asking for each of us to observe the sliding that can so easily manifest in ourselves. There is no such thing as state truth because the state is a power-over leviathan that gets more monstrous with each new generation of technologies of power. The modern state, crafted out of English colonialism, and of course Roman well prior to industrialisation, is always wrong story because it is always a power-over cosmology. That’s why we’ve arrived at neopeasant anarchism – the crafting of social, ecological and economic relations rooted in the cosmology and intimacy of Mother Country.
For us, Mother Country will never be Birth Parent Country, but people are welcome to claim that misogyny.
Bodily autonomy and double standards
We didn’t know it at the time, but simultaneously two other rallies were taking place in the city. Unlike the Assange rally where people were uniting across the Left-Right binary, these two ‘other’ groups were clashing to such an extent police had to keep them separated. It got pretty ugly.
The irony of this clash is that the same set of protestors who are defending bodily rights in relation to abortion were the same demographic who attacked anti-mandate protestors in these very streets a year ago, jeering at people like us on social media and posting academic hit-pieces that called us racist, white supremacists despite the diverse multiracial attendees who showed up from across the state.
At those anti-mandate protests people also carried My Body My Choice placards. The exact same message. We agree in both instances, bodily autonomy must stand, even if the rights of an unborn child are extinguished or even if herd immunity was possible by ‘vaccinating’ into a pandemic with a novel inoculant, which it clearly wasn’t. It must stand because the neoliberal state-pharma nexus, cannot be trusted.
We also understand where the political Right are on this issue of abortion, so we can have empathy for that position even if we hold that bodily autonomy must stand. This goes for trans people wanting a new kind of body. Who are we to speak to that? Where things become problematic, however, is how this surgery is harming people, especially youngtimers, in a way abortion is not, and how youngtimers are the most vulnerable to trans surgery and big pharma’s greed.
If bodily autonomy stands as a universal ethic for both the Left and the Right, why then the moral inconsistency?
Ideological silos are a disaster for society though great for neoliberal power. For all of us to be fighting each other means the bankers and billionaires run away with the wealth while we all miss the sleight of hand that they’re dealing. Infiltrating woke has been a master stroke of neoliberalism, so too Gates and Bezos’ funding or ownership of what used to be reliable medias such as The Guardian and The Washington Post. All this capture has occurred by most of us watching the left hand while the right sneakily does the dirty work.
Charles Eisenstein suggests we have to be clear about who we serve and keep asking ourselves this same question. Tyson Yunkaporta calls for critical awareness of how quickly we can slide from right to wrong story. Rhyd Wildermuth is a gay-animist writer critical of wrong story wokeness. He refers to woke as ‘the new capitalist cosmology’:
so many corporations, banks, and neoliberal politicians have readily adopted the language of identity and at least the aesthetic of diversity and equity in their hiring practices, management styles, and political platforms. They have every reason to be happy with this cosmological shift, since they still get to keep property relations intact as long as they offer more expression to identity concerns.
Political maturity begins with the question, who are we going to serve? And then a process. A process that requires awareness of the adversarial political system we inherited at birth. A system that has always been divisive and favoured the rich and powerful but has now devolved to such an extent that the feigned-democratic, adversarial and colonial nature of the Westminster System is now just a lobbyists’ utopia.
As Rohan Leppert argues, in relation to the June witch hunt in their own party for those advocating for women’s sex-based rights, “The Greens in 2022 has already shown that its rules are subject to appeal in the court of social media.” Bodily autonomy, human rights and freedom of speech for the woke Left are a cherry picked hodgepodge that includes some rights and dissolves others.
Another example is how so-called green technology has become the main ‘fix’ for Greens parties throughout the rich industrialised countries. These parties back the mining industry of rare earth minerals, turning this destruction of Mother Country into ‘saving the climate’. The deceit and hubris of renewables is promulgated by the woke Green Left in much the same way as identity is championed – advance the cause, conceal the harms. The Greens today are just another mining party.
In the days when wind and solar were advocated for by we greenies who saw that these technologies could accompany a radical powering down from oil dependency – a kind of energy methadone programme for heavily industrialised countries – we naively didn’t expect this technology to unfold into the mining bonanza it is today. If the bullshit promise of ‘renewables’ isn’t examined as critically as trans medicalisation harm, or the harm caused by Bill Gates’ capture of institutions ranging from the BBC, The Guardian and the WHO, or the wholesale corruption of major political parties by lobbyists, or the proxy war in Ukraine, and the next great transfer of wealth to bankers in the unfolding inflation crisis, then we’re all in for much more pain as the empire collapses and ecological ruination hits us from every other side.
Rhetoric is the grand tool of this political culture, handed down from the ancient Greeks who also questioned the value of it. Rhetoric is clever crafting, trigger language and often involves shorthand – terrorist, anti-vax, transphobe, TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists), etc. These shorthand labels aim to shame the opponent, reducing them into easily identifiable parts. But woke is more slippery. This is how writer and publisher Bari Weiss, describes ‘woke’.
Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.
Diversity and inclusivity are often used interchangeably but we argue inclusivity under woke ideology has become the opposite of diversity. We illustrate the distinction like this: Inclusivity: “Your story triggers me, please don’t tell your story.” Diversity: “Your story triggers me, I need to work out why.”
Having at first opened to the ideologies of woke, taken them on and sat in their well meanings, we eventually came to realise what was at stake as the fundamentalism became increasingly supported and steered by neoliberalism. A rally or protest inspires shorthand missives. A political rally is a series of short messages, symbols and gestures that are quick to grasp for the passerby, the press, the solidarity of the cohort, or for the perceived opposition.
So, where is the woke Left?
We could have written the longhand on this placard: “Where are the Leftists who have abandoned the larger geopolitical problems of our time and abandoned examination of any human rights abuse deemed not to fit into Identitarian ideology?” but in the thrum of the gathering we instead drew on the shorthand, “Where’s the woke Left?” because that was our first question on arriving, and it was super quick to write, even in serif.
Having been called anti-vaxxers, plague-on-bikes, ableists, neo-Nazis, Artist-as-Plague, granny killers, idiots, selfish spreaders of disease and the like, by people mostly residing in what used to be our political heartland – the Green Left – has been a big ride for us. Through this bleak period we’ve opened slowly to the gift of knowing what it’s like to be part of a contagion class. It’s actually very liberating, and has enabled us to see how neoliberal psychopolitics is always infiltrating grassroots groups who are coming together to do some good.
What we still fail to understand, however, is how woke Leftists (who are generally so loathing of straight white men) have so radically refused to question the coercive medical narratives of the most toxic straight white men in the world – Fauci, Biden, Trump, Andrews, Johnson, Macron, Trudeau, Gates, Bourla, Daszak, Schwab, McGowan, Bancel, Soriot, Morrison et al. There is zero sum critique of these abusive Covid ‘fathers’ from the woke Left. Why? Why did the woke Left cling to the coat straps of corporatist paternalism throughout Covid? And why can’t the woke Left see the link between this tyranny and the unlawful treatment of Julian Assange carried out by the UK and US governments?
We, in part, address this question in our blog post, The Left got Covid almost entirely wrong, and why it matters, and in the music video, We are here together, which we made a few months back, where we sing into the politics of cancelling free speech, mandating dubious injections, harmful child medicalisation and education industries, the power of dancing and climbing trees (as antidote to the derangements of hypertechnocivility), and the importance of political dissidents like Assange.
Youngtimers deserve better than what their neoliberal olders (not elders) are doing to them.
Rebekah Barnett’s recent Substack deep dives into elements of this current climate of what we’re calling ‘olders abuse’. People are suicidal due to vaccine injuries, disabled by them, gas-lit for trying to shine a light on the harm, and ignored by authorities who are desperately trying to sweep them all under the carpet. Safe and Effective: A Second Opinion is a new documentary that examines the extent of state-pharma corruption. We recommend you watch it before it’s censored.
Towards political maturity and the love of elders
If you’ve been attacked, shut down, gas-lit and/or shamed-labelled for your views or opinion, how do you cultivate or maintain political maturity? Is political maturity only possible by those privileged enough not to have been politically vilified? Politics always seems to default to base-behaviour language where smearing the enemy is paramount. Can we rise above it? Can we integrate poetical, sacred, nuanced and empathetic threads into political discourse?
It’s easy to avoid politics and be turned off by reductionist arguments and shame labels, but what then?
Yes, othering is a systemic social problem, especially if the attack is on an individual. But so too is the absence of political critique and the absence of highlighting inconsistencies in a political class that shuts down dissent and peoples’ opinions that don’t fit within a specific ideology. We need more scrutiny of the psychopathic fathers of empire not more rules about what language people can or cannot use. And yes, we need less ideological warfare and more hugs. Thanks Su Dennett!
Where in woke ideology is the wisdom that can smell a rat when corporate greed, political corruption or medicalisation harm enters a room? Where is the wakefulness of not being played and the grace to say, “it’s true, they were never safe or effective, yes I truly bought the nudge fudge, and I labelled people who refused or questioned the jabs as anti-vaxxers, parroting the corporate media”? Where is the question: “If Assange is jailed for exposing war crimes of the empire – crimes that America and Australia, Britain and much of Europe commit their support to, if not implement themselves – and I let this take place on my watch, where will free speech be in five years? In ten? In fifty? Where will life be?”
As always, your comments are most welcome, your difference and your debate. And your questions too. We also want to hear, who do you serve? Who is your master? For us, it’s Mother Country and the flowering, fruiting abundance of the giving, birthing, making and dying earth that our lives are indebted to and we are part of. We say NO to neoliberalism, in all its captured forms.
Thank you so much. Your song is incredible. I just heard of the disastrous flooding in your area. I pray for everyone’s safety.
Thanks Lynn, yes there’s been a huge amount of rain here. Glad you loved the song.
Great perceptive piece. Thanks!
Thanks Norie!
I found David’s perspective heartening and your long article excellent. To be read again and shared. As a former Green/Left supporter/voter I find myself wandering happily with those bearing Red Ensigns and indeed seriously wondering about the up coming election. I am very glad to have found kindred spirits. #freeJulianAssange
Thanks Anny, what does that flag mean to you?
Fabulous, thank you. Particularly the 4m’s. With a teenage daughter bringing home the confusion from the school yard I see this contagion at work. I don’t understand how “society” has being so blind not to think these ideas can influence and might not always be true expressions of self – merely youthful confusion (we’ve all been there! Took me into my thirties to feel I finally knew who I was, if that is actually anything. I am what I am and I must deal with that). It’s the lack of mature conversation that is most concerning.
Just one request, is it possible to break your long posts into shorter posts? Pt1, pt2, pt3 and so one.
Thanks Ilona, yes, the politicisation and social engineering that occurs in schools is illustrative of how neoliberalism (through Big Tech, Big Ed, Big Data, Big Brother) infiltrates those environments.
Hi again,
My introductory comment / question on this article of your blog is as follows. Is it really necessary to reference the philosophy of Pauline Hanson? I do not think it would be very hard to reference other advocates opposing big banks and being supportive of ‘Made in Australia’.
Thank you
Allan
Hey Allan, thanks for your question. We’re not sure David was referencing Hansen’s ‘philosophy’, and we’re not sure if such a thing exists, rather he was drawing on her problem with big banks and how, back in the day, the Greens (and many on the Left) had a problem with big banks too. Yes, he could have referenced someone else too, that’s true. But not many pollies on the Right make a stand against big banks, so that’s probably why he referenced Hansen. Are you thinking of another pollie on the Right that would have been more suitable to reference? The context David was making concerned shared values across the political spectrum. The point of David mentioning this, we guess, was to explore ways to build political bridges across political divides that combine to resist neoliberal colonialism (aka global development). The old political/ideological binaries or camps are not working to dismantle neoliberalism, so David is suggesting having conversations, as he said. If this response is unsatisfactory then please feel free to ask more questions. David may see this thread and be able to speak to your question himself. Thanks for engaging, AaF
Hi AaF,
(I think I missed the second part of your response, so my response below is to the first response I read).
If the Greens were already anti big-bank and anti-globalist, why would they need to speak with Pauline Hanson? It was the suggestion by David Holmgren for the Greens to speak with Pauline Hanson that challenged me.
I may be fast-forwarding a little, but I am finding the concept of the radical left and the radical right somehow finding common ground as a little concerning. At this stage I have not accessed any published data, or undertaken my own research, so I am unable to comment with any backing. Although, I do have some very early formed thoughts based on ecological principles of certain minority groups being casualties of a radical left and radical right coalition. I do need to do more work on this before I comment further.
Thanks again for the chance to comment on your blog, always thought inspiring.
Allan
Thanks for your question Allan,
We like David are calling for more conversations with perceived ‘enemies’. Where can we agree? Where do we part ways? Where do we hold our ground? What do we let go? Can we collaborate? Can we reach solidarity? Who do we serve?
Gday Allan,
I guess it begs the question doesn’t it, whether One Nation has morphed from being a racist party into an Anti Globalist party, THE anti globalist party in the Australian context. I have noticed lately it has undergone something of a transition, has some more diverse members and is appealing to a wider variety of people. I think it is bigger now than Pauline Hanson, will outlive her and will no doubt benefit when it finally jettisons her extensive political baggage, accumulated through over twenty years of political trench warfare and hand to hand combat. She has actually been a political prisoner and is still going hard at it. She eats PHONies like Mereen Faruqi for breakfast, but her time is nearly past.
If you want to understand my drift better, check out SA state senator Sara Game’s twitter. She is a Jewish lass who is the future of the party, not its past. It will not surprise me in future to see tens of thousands of migrants of all ethnicities marching under the Red Ensign with One Nation seeking a fair go against the wokester corporate globalists. Anyone who resisted through the pandemic rallies has already seen what this looks like, a New Australia, it made me so proud.
If you want to know ‘why’, then look no further than the egregious atrocities of the last two years, and the conspicuous cowardice of unions and the fake wokester left, as Patrick so eloquently describes.
Thank you for this article.
I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s song ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’.
https://open.spotify.com/track/760420tYNmNjFgi8bWvbop?si=125b8252851a435a
Love that song 🙂
Thank you for this incise and whole sharing of your insights. Just one comment – when you say that abortion is not harming people in the same way that trans-surgery is, I partly agree in that the procedures during a trans-formation are more invasive than an abortion (thought that could be argued) BUT I think there is harm on a spiritual level after abortion (possibly not at the time of the event) and that there are so many issues around why a pregnancy is ‘unwanted’ that deserve attention. I don’t mean in an outside judgemental way at all, I mean the emotional pain of it all – even a lack of emotional pain deserves attention. The lack of connection between two people who make the baby, the fear, self-judgement, lack of self-awareness and self-worth, economic concerns etc etc. All these are symptoms of a sick society wherein people making babies are trying to make sense. I am pro-choice and had an abortion myself in my early 20’s. I was a mess at the time, struggling with some traumas which left me quite disconnected from my reality. Society at large was just becoming a whole lot more cruel – we are talking Thatcher/Reagan years and even then, I could see it and feel it. I had no place in that ‘wrong story’, (thankfully) but was completely disempowered by it as it drowned me. It’s taken decades to see the extent of the sickness but now I am switched on and connecting. Very grateful for your strength, vulnerability, steadfast efforts and support of ‘the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible’ (Charles Eisenstein – as you know!).
Thanks Rachel, we connect with what you say about the prolonged emotional pain of abortion and how you put it in terms of sacred business not judging business. Really appreciate that. We know this pain from miscarriage as well. And thanks for naming neoliberalism’s entry point with Thatcher and Reagan. These two mark the ramping up of unbridled global development (neo-colonialism), the glorification of greed, the escalation of pollution and consumption ideologies, and the complete disintegration of the boundaries between state and corporate life. Of course those two didn’t create it alone, they came from a long line of uninitiated men (mostly).
Amen!
As always a most inspirational and enlightening talk. Thank you. You say that the group fighting for Assange seems to be more organised than the ‘Freedom Fighters’. The Assange group has a person to fight for, whilst the FF do not. Assange is visible, Freedom almost an abstract feeling for many. They need a focus point maybe a Gandhi?
To the point of trans-gender. I had a grand daughter, now a grandson. He is now 16. It is very hard to understand. All I can do is to be there and love him. I would never want to be without him.
Thanks Ellen, we’re not sure where you heard that about Assange and FF.
David mentioned that the Assange supporters have been there from the beginning and the mob most likely from the Right (carrying Red Ensign flags etc) have joined this fight because Assange garners support from across the political spectrum from those who wish to preserve free speech.
We’re glad you’ve chosen to be there to love your grandchild, unconditionally. It’s the industries exploiting young people and those imposing language militarism who we critique in this piece, not young people in their exploring, seeking and longing to find themselves. This seeking has always been the case, this rites of passage, only kids and young people now have to endure adult interference, which herds them into a box rather than getting out of the way and allowing spaciousness to occur. The market doesn’t like spaciousness and exploration.
Thank you so much for raising many important questions and topics for consideration. I really appreciate it. There’s so much complexity and nuance within the many areas you’ve raised, so it is difficult to tease much out without always being aware of the importance of context, and the intricate relationships between metrics and values, but just a few little things.
I caught up with Greens Senator Janet Rice this week, whom I’ve known since forest activism in the 80’s, and raised some of these questions and sent this on to her. She’s extremely wary of corporate power – she deals with this fact every day – but has a basic trust in the Australian scientific community. Perhaps like me she knows too many ethical activists in the field to believe in the kinds of coverups you suggest. I remain, however, agnostic – while respecting the intelligence and care of the doctors and scientists I know, there’s just so much complexity, so many factors involved. But I appreciated catching up with a student of mine at hospital on Thursday – she’s a medical research scientist working on antibiotic resistance as well as Indigenous medical knowledge systems – so not covid – and while she’s not naive that medical and pharmaceutical malfeasance exist, she is sure it’s not the case with covid. She’s German, familiar with theories such as mass formation, and doesn’t buy it. And as I’ve said before, knowing personally the scientist in charge of the department logging and tracking adverse reactions to covid vaccines makes a real difference to me. That personal connection – living in community with her – means I trust the wider systems to some degree, since I know good people as part of them.
That doesn’t mean I wasn’t saddened and angered by the lack of compassion or social intelligence in the lockdowns or the inability to pivot when new science came to light. But I also have compassion for the difficulties of being a bureaucrat in inefficient, inflexible systems, and therefore the inevitability of bad decisions.
Thanks for your comment Maya, we thought you might like to read Tyson Illingworth’s story just published today. We have months of research published here that attends to what you bring here, but Tyson’s story of injury and permanent damage encapsulate what’s really going on for someone on the receiving end of state violence who did comply. A story that won’t be aired in msm or by anyone remaining in Australian institutions serving the state/pharma nexus, wittingly or otherwise. We would question your trusted source. Tyson represents tens of thousands of stories around the world not being seen by Guardian, ABC or Age reading ‘experts’. Their stories are disappeared from view, and we know from history what occurs when that happens. Visibility is everything, Maya.
Just wanted to share my ongoing appreciation for your work, and especially for this latest piece. I’m sorry to have missed you at the rally. I arrived late, but ended up spending the afternoon with the doctors & myriad supporters marching in protest against the Health Practitioner National Law Amendment that has just been passed by Queensland parliament and soon to be adopted by all states.
I was heartened to see that event coordinated, if only informally, with the Julian Assange rally, in so far as this implies perhaps increasing awareness of the shared interests that are obscured when the issues we’re grappling with are cast in terms of left-right binaries. I particularly appreciated David’s comments relating to this point.
Disheartened though to see that legislation pass with no substantive changes to the provisions that should be most concerning to all Australians, even with the AMA speaking against them. Disheartened also by what seems to be almost a complete lack of awareness of the amendments and what they imply. I’m embarrassed to say that the situation was drawn to my attention only very late in the piece, and by a Canadian friend no less.
I read Maya’s comments above on the reassurance she receives from her personal relationships with individuals working within the health bureaucracy apparatus. While I know Maya only slightly, we have close friends in common, and think of her as someone whose views should be taken seriously. I wonder, though, about how the experience of even senior and pivotal figures could be isolated effectively from structural influences of such magnitude. I suspect that health bureaucracy is an area that may be particularly vulnerable to what could perhaps be termed “failures of personal assurance”, because the individuals involved are formally recognised as “our best minds”. That it a lot for any individual to be expected to live up to. I don’t think it’s going too far to call it an unfair burden to place on their shoulders.
Thanks again Josh for what you bring to this post, esp the Health Practitioner National Law Amendment, which sees to the further disintegration of the patient-doctor relationship, and how you present “our best minds” in “the health bureaucracy apparatus”. Yes, there is no overarching evil narrative, rather it’s a decades-long story of continuous erosion characterised by revolving doors, long lunches, pharma-sponsored conferences, lobbying of politicians, pollies and ex-pollies investments in pharma, and a general culture (perhaps well meaning) collusion between corporates and governments. The outcome is systemic corruption in the state-pharma nexus and this corruption isn’t even viewed as corruption but rather business as usual in today’s world such as the radical overprescription of childhood immunisations.
We too are friends of Maya and very respectful of her work in the arts. We feel Maya’s research with Covid, however, has been wanting and like so many rested on a few ‘experts’ or media sources rather than deep diving and referencing broadly, developing her own diverse media ecology of independent investigative journalists. Australia is one of the least media diverse nations in the world, so it’s not surprising how uninformed a nation we are. It is surprising to us, however, that highly creative, out-of-the box thinkers have not used their talents to critically examine the fraudulent Covid response that has landed Moderna and Pfizer billions of dollars, and critically examine the heinous human rights abuses and widespread (and mostly unreported) injuries that have taken place and are still occurring under that regime. So many in Australia still believe the state-corporate ‘fact checkers’ but have done little to fact check the fact checkers, and look into who funds them and what conflict of interest they generally hold.
Yes Josh, good old fashoned ‘group think’, followed by an absolute unwillingness to risk group exclusion by reflecting on possible anomalies and, heaven forbid, errors.
In the constrctivist, post modern neo liberal matrix, perception is everything, and general principles have sadly gone by the wayside as ‘old hat’
Cheers
Your words are so painful that they sting. But they are so true. I readily got the jabs when they were offered. I was so sick of lockdowns I would have done anything to go back to ‘normal.’ I shunned anybody who was unjabbed and called them selfish and refused to let family who didn’t get the vax to see my children or join in christmas dinner. It’s so painful to think what I did. I hold so much shame. How could I not see how we were all gamed!
But now my eyes are opening and I can see the collusion of big business and the state far more easily. My three teenage children and are non-binary all of a sudden and two of them want surgery and hormones. I am very open minded. I would love my kids no matter what, of course. But this is a manufactured contagion running rampant through our kids via social media, tik tok, instagram, msm etc I want to support my kids but the medicalisation is just too much. They’re just kids! They think technology will save them and they can just undo the damage to their bodies like getting a tattoo removed. There is no foresight, as they are so young and naive as I was geting on board with pharma’s agenda with the vaxx. Their teachers at school are so worried but can’t say anything for fear of being called transphobes or terfs. Meanwhile, big business and big pharma are laughing all the way to the bank.
Oh Emily, this is difficult for us to read. Thank you for your courage and humility to share what you have here.
I agree Emily, it is so alarming what is happening to our young people. I am a high school teacher and teach kids who identify as young men, women, and everything in between. I teach people who identify as dogs, cats, unicorns and I even teach an eagle. I can be dismissed if I laugh, or call someone by their wrong pronoun. It is truly insane!
I chose to get the vaccine for my own personal reasons and I hold true to those. But to see how many of my students now have injuries – heart issues, gut issues, behavioural issues, inflammation issues. It is frightening. Last year I had 7 previously healthy students away for three weeks with heart issues. 7 in one class!
I can’t speak up about any of these issues with my colleagues. I have a duty of care to speak up, but I also have a duty of care to my family, and so I hold my tongue in order to keep my job. You have your shame Emily, and I have mine.
This is shocking to read, Noel. So many stories like yours about vaccine injury and no proper world wide investigation. Public health has failed us. In the crude attempt to stop vaccine hesitancy growing they have ignored the extent of the injuries, and radically expanded vaccine hesitancy and exposed the state-pharma nexus where we see once again governments aiding corporate or industry profits ahead of the well-being of people and the well being of ecologies.
I forgive you Emily, the hard part will be forgiving yourself.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a Pirate, I’m just glad mum and dad stopped me from chopping off one leg and one eye.
I am sure if I still wanted to be a pirate when I was twenty one, they would have given me their blessing, even if they thought it wasn’t great.
A great rant
Getting back to basics (neopeasantry?).
I could assert “I choose to breath clean air, drink rainwater and awake to a bird chorus”. The stalwarts on either side of the “fight” you outline could discount this assertion as irrelevant, indulgent, bourgeois, ableist, avoidant, neoliberal, elitist, idealistic etc. However, these same stalwarts also have this “picture” front and centre of what they would like reality to look like for them, those close to them and even for everyone. This vision is a an Attractor.
Now that the folly of the left, the naivety of the right and the appetite of the market is plain to see, maybe there is a FRESH opportunity to undermine the war with a back to basics call?
I think there is a place for a diversity of peasants – even some who have uses for cheap fossil energy other than making solar panels – all warmly encouraged to make their own mistakes.
Yours in Flower Power
“A diversity of peasants” and “a back to basics” in food, energy and medicine resources sounds like our kinda cuppa, David.
The body autonomy piece—I can’t help but be bamboozled by the contradiction among some. It’s as though they reach into a bucket and choose to justify the things they’re culturally welded to.
Vaccinations (got them, but have a healthy distrust for the system that dispenses them and am against mandate). Abortion (your body, your choice). Routine male circumcision (horrendous). Heck, even ear piercing of toddlers (horrendous).
In the States, in particular, there is of course a vocal group who are anti vaccine mandate under the premise of body autonomy (yep, right on!) but who circumcise their sons and condemn abortion.
Thanks John. Some good points. How do we find common ground without the suppression of the ‘other’? It seems so easy for our species to enter into power-over relations (wrong story) when we are disconnected from the much more-than-human realities of the living of the world.
Of all the world’s problems, from nuclear submarines to climate change, focusing on trans issues seems an odd one – exactly how many people are engaged with that issue?
Meanwhile Pfizer’s share price – surely the ultimate index of their wickedness – is at the same place it was twenty years ago and in fact lags the overall share market at a modest 35% increase over the past 5 years.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=pfizer+share+price&source=hp&ei=_WBbY8niINX01sQPi-mNqA8&iflsig=AJiK0e8AAAAAY1tvDaphLrJIyH6KI20RFeA23CCzuijY&ved=0ahUKEwiJ1dKlkYL7AhVVupUCHYt0A_UQ4dUDCAo&uact=5&oq=pfizer+share+price&gs_lp=Egdnd3Mtd2l6uAED-AEBMhAQABiABBixAxiDARhGGPoBMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgAQyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgAQyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgAQyBRAAGIAEwgILEAAYgAQYsQMYgwHCAggQABixAxiDAcICERAuGIAEGLEDGIMBGMcBGNEDwgIIEAAYgAQYsQPCAgsQLhiABBjHARivAcICCBAAGIAEGMkDSJwsUABYoSVwAHgAyAEAkAEBmAGpBaABsRmqAQowLjE0LjEuNS0x&sclient=gws-wiz
Thanks again for your uninvited steering of our content, Patrick. As you would have noticed by reading it in full, this post focusses on the suppression of free speech and the enclosures of bodily autonomy. If these important things don’t interest you, then maybe find a place where your own specific issues and needs are met. Your attempt to steer our content will always prove futile here.
I’ll take that as a ‘touché’ moment 😉 If your whole premise is that it is about the money, the fact that Pfizer isn’t performing especially well is of relevance.
Pfizer isn’t performing well, Patrick, because ‘the world’ (the bourgeoisie in the rich countries that swallowed Pfizer’s lies or workers who were threatened with their livelihoods if they didn’t take Uncle Pfizer’s dirty lil prick) is finally waking up to the fact that Pfizer used taxpayer money to produce a shit product which they made US$ 100 billion from. We’ve been onto Pfizer for many years, like Monsanto and all the other corporate criminals in that league. It’s a pity you and your cohort at the Labor party continue to turn a blind eye to their long standing criminality and harm, and pharmacolonisation more generally. But then again their lobbyists pay Labor well to see no evil.
We’re posting this complimentary piece here. It’s by Jennifer Bilek who writes in it:
“Women are being systematically reduced, in language and law, to ‘cervix havers,’ ‘menstruators,’ ‘gestators,’ and ‘bleeders’ because they have the lion’s share of responsibility for the reproduction of our species which technocratic elites are attempting to colonize.”
Bilek’s piece, Gender identity: a corporate fiction, is well worth the listen.