In terms of talking about contacts with the secret police, the National Security Letter is designed precisely to prevent this. Even to admit to having seen one is to court jail. They don't always use this, obviously, but it's impossible to know how often they are used by the very nature of it.
One effective resistance tactic, historically, is obscurantism. We're already doing this, e.g. esoteric meme culture. The Poles did something very similar in the 80s. Their underground punk scene, which served as a propaganda arm for the Solidarity movement, adopted a lyrical style that was deliberately opaque to those not in the know. When the archives were opened up after communism fell, it turned out that this had been very effective: agents sent out to infiltrate had been left utterly baffled by what they were hearing.
The secret police is definitely being expanded in the US. The IRS is being made much larger in order to squeeze the taxpayer, and I think we can all guess which taxpayers they'll be sicced on. The IRS is also going to be armed, now. So we'll be able to add economic repression to the list of tactics the regime uses to suppress domestic dissent.
How does the tactic of obscurantism help grow or even inform a dissident movement? Seems to me it allows them freedom from harassment but at the cost of political integrity.
If the secret police or punitive arm of the establishment can't figure out that Babylon stands for oppressive regime, maybe that's not because you're so clever and they're so dumb but because they don't care. You're actually comparing your movement to plucky Jewish resistance against gentile oppression. Why shut that down?
As to the Polish obscurantist punks, who I'd never heard of, here's what I found: "Although the participants of Jarocin Festival and the members of Solidarity shared a similar attitude towards the communist regime, they didn’t fight hand in hand. There were too many differences between them – members of the young generation were rebelling against the older ones, they didn’t want to follow in their footsteps but live their life, they looked different, talked different, shared different values and had different dreams."
They didn't want to hang w/ the naive boomers who were actually trying to upset the cart. Might get on some kind of list.
Establishing defences against harassment and infiltration are precisely the point. It also enables formation of a distinct culture, differentiated from the mainstream, within which resistance can begin to organize.
We've been doing that for years. It comes quite naturally under these circumstances as well as many others, eg criminals and teenagers using slang. Is it sufficient? No, and I wasn't arguing it is. But it's almost certainly necessary, which is why it always crops up.
I am confused about the intelligence services, at least in the French context. I have met a few students whose goal was to join them. When I occasionally meet one, I ask them about what they do now and some have answered that they work for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which means that they have probably joined domestic intelligence. They are all patriotic or nationalistic and heavily conservative. I have also met people who have retired from the intelligence services and they are patriotic and conservative too; one is even reactionary and royalist. These people also have an uncanny ability about never uttering any useful info about their former jobs. So I could not figure out whether most people there were patriotic or conservative or whether they are outliers. I have never met anyone in active positions in the intelligence services, however their personnel is supposed to remain dissimulated under innocuous job descriptions. Thus there are patriots in the secret police but I cannot fathom their actual numbers and power.
That said there are signs that the intelligence services work first and foremost for themselves and co-operate with their peers for their own good standing. They have official secret budget allocations from parliament but they also seem to run dark budgets. The CIA has been shown to be involved in drug trafficking in the past. In France during the celebrations of the first world war, the delegation from Kosovo was treated with great consideration whereas the Serbian delegation was treated with despise; the mere presence of a delegation from Kosovo made no sense. Furthermore a novelist portrayed as having contacts in the intelligence services has described several Western intelligence services running cigarettes, drugs, and arms traffics through Kosovo. Kosovo has also been described by many papers as a state run the local mafia. This has lead me to conclude that the French intelligence services, the CIA and others run all sorts of lucrative trafics and have dark budgets. They also have access to arsonists and assassins from the mafias they work with.
So the intelligence services work first for themselves and in association with their peers. Loyalty to the government or to the top civil servants comes second in my opinion. Some old episodes in France show this. In 1980 or so the French services received the betrayal of a top official in the KGB. They chose not to tell the president because there was an election in 1981 and waited for the new president to be elected. They did tell the CIA about him though ! Then they told about him to the new president and asked him whether they should tell the Americans. The French intelligence and the CIA used this to test the loyalty of the president to NATO and the USA ! Authentic treason. I could recount other episodes that display a similar state. They are all gleaned from papers or books published by inquisitive journalists and they have caused small scandals when they were revealed.
I do not know how to assess on the role of the intelligence services in the repression of conservatives, reactionaries, right-wing dissidents. In the USA and Europe it is more the universities, the media, the civil service and the corporations that have been on the attack. The intelligence may give a hand but I believe that this comes at the request of the politicians, the top civil servants, or the Mossad; and they might not be zealous about it. As for the infiltration of reactionary groups, it might be done by employees of NGOs, like the Open Society, rather than the secret police. The secret police might train them though. Plenty of sabotage and personal harm might be inflicted by purely private means.
«Moving on, the next step would be to engage in actual politicking. That means reaching out to different voter blocs and forming a coalition with them to gain votes.»
And here there is a rather important detail, that mostly politics is about interests, not ideas, not values, not dreams. Currently a large block of voters in the USA, UK and other countries have only one interest: stock and real estate prices and rents/dividends.
The profits that 20-40% of voters make from stocks and real estate, 100% redistributed from the lower classes, have been so huge for 40 years that they have written a blank check to the neoliberal (reaganista, thatcherite) parties that have delivered them.
The problem with the "tory" nationalist "paleocon" politics is that most of the potential right-wing "tory" supporters are also stock and real estate owners, and their profits are far more important to them than "tory" nationalist paleocon ideas and values. Consider this excellent interview with Republican strategist G. Norquist:
«Pat Buchanan came into this coalition and said, “You know what? I have polled everybody in the room and 70 percent think there are too many immigrants; 70 percent are sceptics on free trade with China. I will run for President as a Republican; I will get 70 percent of the vote.”
He didn't ask the second question … do you vote on that subject?»
Eventually enough people voted on that subject to elect Trump, but there have two problems with that:
* Many of those people were left-wing social-democrats abandoned by the DNC, so their vote is "invalid" from a right-wing perspective.
* D. Trump was then subjected to a bipartisan (read: "corporate") campaign of propaganda plus a bipartisan campaign of stalling or undermining his policies.
An alternative to the "whig" globalist neocons will only arise when their corporate "sponsors" will become too weak to fund and support them, in a "end of the USSR" situation, a large economic crisis. But the USA is still quite far away from that, even if the UK and some other vassals might be closer to it. It will not be necessarily a "tory" nationalist paleocon alternative, it could be social-democratic or socialist one.
I mostly agree with you on this. My take is that the fraction of the tories that support immigration reduction and re-industrialisation do vote on it, when given the chance. However they are kept away from the levers of power, whether in the government or in the party. At general election or party election time they get some vague promises but nothing comes out of that. Their choices are always framed and party discipline takes over. Because they are captive voters, they do not matter. If Nigel Farage had had the courage, he could have poached them and a significant fraction of the poor English Labour voters to upstage both parties. But he quit. He must have been offered a deal.
In spite of the general recognition that immigration and house prices were the main causes of discontent behind Brexit, the tories brought in more Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, Arabs, etc. The little they did, the Rwanda agreement, might be scuttled. Should the population vote them away ? Labour and Lib-Dems are so much worse, so much.
It´s weird how on many angles I can agree with you. The Black Panthers were infiltrated by the FBI, resulting in the murder and imprisonment of some of its members. Around 1990 people who I knew were EarthFirsters fighting to protect the redwoods in N. Ca. had a bomb placed in their VW bug which blew up and severly injured the 2 main activists who were in the car and then they were accused of carrying a bomb. After 10 years of litigation, they proved that it was the FBI that had planted the bomb and they were awarded 1 million dollars. This was not publicized.
The "secret police", the CIA, the FBI, have infinite funding, mostly secret. Running a new political party is virtually impossible in the US as history has shown. Besides, once they would be elected, they would be intimidated immediately and either conform to the demands or be murdered (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oilxI6Dgoy8).
Also, another real problem is breaking thru the propaganda machine. How? I was thinking this morning of pirate radio, which we did to some extent in the past. But it never was significant enough and the police could triangulate where we were.
* The current neoliberal regime is supported by all those real estate owners who have been making huge capital gains for 40 years as real estate prices have been doubling in many areas every 7-10 years. That is so huge for the living standards of that 20-40% of voters that they will support anything as long as they keep getting those massive capital gains, and that big block of voters have decided most elections.
* For those who oppose neoliberalism the pushback is not done so much by the secret police, but by blacklisting (from both platforms and business and jobs) against the smaller "deviants" and by massive media and dirty tricks attack campaigns against the bigger "deviants" (from Sanders to Trump).
In general things change when there is a fight and turnover among ruling class factions, revolutions from below are fairly rare. In the UK there is a genuine split among the ruling class between right-wing libertarian globalists and right-wing traditionalist nationalists, and this resulted in a change of regime flavour with brexit, but the libertarian globalists have been pushing back, and in any case there is no significant party that represents non-right-wing politics, or even right-wing politics outside the libertarian/traditionalist factions.
Can you expand on how the blacklisting supposedly works?
For instance:
You let slip one or two based remarks to people you thought you can trust. But truth is, you gave them that yummy topic to talk about outside office hours. Be heard by other people, be the centre of attention. Everyone is a tattletale. Especially when meeting women. Drums of gossip start rolling.
Your sober, discreet remarks about he careless attitude of that nonwhite colleague, or over the truly insufferable, wayward corporate fanaticism of that other female colleague, are soon distorted and amplified into the monstrous tirades of a misogynist, racist bigot.
The drums of gossip keep rolling, soon people stop talking when you pass by and start glancing at you instead.
You are furious and outraged with everyone. People notice your scowl. They take it as confirmation that you really are a total lunatic: - See? Only the mentally ill could hold such deranged opinions. Human BioDiversity? Are we cosplaying Victorian scientists? Ever heard of the blank slate?
You stop going to work, you don't want to kill anyone. You start looking for a new job. You go to linkedin and there you discover, to your horror, that the whole profession shuns you.
You have lost your reputation, completely.
You will always be shadowed by some angry woman who'll learn where you have landed next as soon as you are forced, by workplace etiquette, to add your new colleagues to your linkedin. And she'll go on and spite you with them in private messages, even though she doesn't know them, and she hardly has ever even talked with you. People do stuff just for the sake of it, mostly. No particular motive is often required.
Where were we? Oh yes. The most ridiculous and outlandishly grotesque tales, that you have obviously never said or done - will become common knowledge about you, and you'll not be able to shake them away no matter how intensely you deny them. As I said, your reputation is completely ruined. What will you do, what is left for you in this world?
...so I was inclined to think the one described above is emergent behaviour, stemming from human nature and mass psychology. But I am open to the possibility that this could be the result of having being blacklisted.
«Can you expand on how the blacklisting supposedly works?»
A lot of employers use "background checks" businesses, overtly or behind the scenes, and contribute to them, and often even if the law theoretically bans them, there is often the loophole of making job offers conditionals on agreeing to them, and even so what can job applicants do if nobody tells them why they have been rejected or an excuse like "we hired a candidate with a better fit" is used? In most neoliberal states enforcement of labor legislation, if it exists, is rather weak.
It is a system similar to the chinese "social score" system, but privatised and even less transparent.
Once upon a time if you got on the wrong side of the city bosses ("You'll never work in this town again") you could take a wagon or a train or a ship and move to the other side of the country, but currently blacklists are available wherever the web is available.
I thought background checks were useful only to check criminal record and the like.
They can't check whether you are ideologically compliant to GloboHomo yet, especially if you don't have public social media, or you don't use those that much anyway.
They would have to resort to check gossip and hearsay but that is obviously unethical.
Remember this: The Secret Police force is made up of individuals - people who are your next door neighbors, who live in your communities. Out them, ostracize them and the cast them out. This is how we stop this.
The analysis you present is one reason Steve Bannon won for Trump. Trump is old line CIA.
Since murdering JFK the police state has though metastasis grown to be the entire Federal government. . By the time the Cold War ended, the West was already riddled with a culture in a profound state of decay, coupled with a spiritual malaise that would, in another generation, lead to a situation wherein each side of the dominant “left-right” political cleavage would come to contain significant amounts of irrationality and moral bankruptcy. Surely the utter collapse of the Christian West in the matter of a generation requires a more compelling explanation than what is generally given. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/12/14/atheism-the-core-of-modern-western-culture-in-the-thought-of-augusto-del-noce/
If you look into civil conflicts in general, people who talk to or come into the custody of the enemy are often tortured (or at least interviewed on scopolamine or something) before being let back in, as a security measure. You cannot have a successful movement if the core group is riddled with compromised people (which is not the same as infiltration).
Agreed that Rolo's exercise on how to build a populist takeover is of largely academic value, given the power the deep state has accumulated and exerted via what he calls the secret police. I see several additional obstacles to successful populist revolt in the US.
First is the climate of fear that already immobilizes much of the public. When my health care provider refuses to prescribe Ivermectin, presumably out of fear, how can one imagine a revolt that requires much more risk and courage?
Second, US citizens are too spoiled and weak, unlike populations in the global south, so oppressed and impoverished for generations that they are more easily persuaded to pick up the gun and join the guerillas.
Third, the inevitable demise of industrial economies starting in the West, driven among other things by underlying energy and other finite resource depletion, will is beginning to progressively weaken all centralized power structures, making a takeover of central government a useless endeavor.
Still, Rolo's thought experiment suggests creative revolt options open to proles or peasants. One is Tom Osher's horizontal government, called variously, social anarchism, decentralism, or simply relocalization. I tend to favor this option as the best chance for a civilized society as central power crumbles and people are thrown back on reliance on local resources. It may be a long shot, considering that historically in collapses of civilizations, local strong men tend to take over, instituting a feudal system that may be more or less oppressive depending the values of the autocrat and the ability of the peasants to organize themselves.
There is no such things as "inevitable demise of industrial economies in the West" or "underlying energy and other finite resource depletion".
Oil, gas, coal, hydrocarbon combustible sources in general, there is enough to go for another thousand year at least, even more considering the looming depopulation. Plenty of time to look for resources in space, and to invest further research into nuclear energy up to a point when it becomes cheap and safe enough to grant satisfaction of all energetic needs.
Because of course there is no such thing as 'renewable energy'. It's a contradiction in terms.
Rolo's main point is that the grip of the Deep State through the secret police shall increase as the economic and social conditions deteriorate. Central power will be reinforced in the next decades and it will turn authoritarian and violent. In France the revolt of the yellow vests was crushed with cudgels and rubber bullets. Worse means are at the disposal of the ruling class.
I doubt your point on the rise of local strongmen because in order to rise they need to be distant from the centre of power. However it takes 4 hours to fly coast to coast in the USA and even less in Europe. Cameras report instantly. No-one is far from the centre of power today.
I've been thinking exactly the same thing a government in exile would be key to taking down the decadent dismal corrupt cretin bearing regime. Could be in Russia but the shill media would say we're Putin's puppet. The raid on Trump's home is a clear sign the opposition is get very worried. We can still triumph but we must get organized focus and stop being afraid of the "rootless cosmopolitans".
Nowadays upper classes across international borders can readily identify each other in a crowd, by their woke cult irrational beliefs.
Most normal people falls in a cognitive lull - they internally can spot the nonsense, but seeing how all sort of crazyness is backed up by authority, they freeze on their gut feelings, and try to keep on with their lives avoiding the subject entirely.
The social climbing types (sociopaths), and those who were born in the cult, instead, are faced with a sort of rite of passage: they have got to humiliate themselves into believing nonsensical, self-harming woke principles to the point of being sincerely invested in them. Only then they are let in.
This creates an elitist bond internationally, that is similar to what was there in the old aristocratic Europe of the 1700s. An international clique of bums who identify much more with their peers across borders than with the common people they rule over.
This post and the previous one reveal us that even Russia, the archnemesis of the West, has a class of liberal wannabes at the top. So basically wherever you flee to establish your exile, your dissident status will follow you as does your shadow, and the wokesters will play whack-a-mole with you.
I've been thinking exactly the same thing a government in exile would be key to taking down the decadent dismal corrupt cretin bearing regime. Could be in Russia but the shill media would say we're Putin's puppet. The raid on Trump's home is a clear sign the opposition is get very worried. We can still triumph but we must get organized focus and stop being afraid of the "rootless cosmopolitans".
Not a substantive critique, but an aesthetic one. Only one faction of the German anti-communist crusade was Prussian. They were drab, trad and boring visually. But the Nat Socs, the SS, were anything but. They set the standard for right-wing military aesthetics. OK, they were posthumously sullied by you know who. The swastika is banned even today, just like everything else associated w/ them.
I was correcting Rolo about Nazi aesthetics and reminding him (and all) why their symbolism has been sullied. You bring up a different issue: revival of American nationalism v German. Fair enough. Perhaps that kind of nationalistic inappropriateness was what Rolo was getting at.
Trump tries to redeem the stars and stripes w/ his MAGA agenda. Problem is the American flag has been sullied by decades of faux patriotism. IMO his approach is just the latest sell out to Judaic interests under the guise of patriotic action. We'd have to go back to Lindbergh's America First to revive a real, sovereign movement. Trump of course doesn't mention Lindy.
There might be 2 appropriate American flags for a patriotic revival: the coiled snake from the Revolutionary War and the Stars and Bars from the Civil War. The aesthetics of the latter have always appealed to me and it's been reviled by the small hats; so you know it's a threat.
Would love to hear what others think about symbols of patriotism.
«But the secret police stops this process at step one. It is difficult to organize politically outside of the approved parties»
You talk a lot about the "secret police", but the USA and similar states use the that kind of stuff relatively rarely. It is mostly that dissidents are put on various blacklists so they become unemployable and also are subjected to media campaigns. See J. Corbyn and D. Trump (and even B. Johnson's more recent case is quite similar) for two different people subjected to "cancellation".
«who have an understanding with the Deep State to play by the rules.»
The various sides of "le pouvoir" are not entirely the same, but the corporate "sponsors" control both the official parties and the deep state.
«where the DNC has more power over domestic and foreign policy than the professionals running these organizations and the GOP is largely just controlled opposition»
There is little difference between the DNC and the GOP, they are both fronts for slightly different factions of their corporate "sponsors".
What is remarkable is how narrow is the difference between both right-wing parties, both of which are mostly "whig" globalist neocons. There are some "tory" nationalist paleocons in the GOP, but they are marginalized, like Senator Borah was between WW1 and WW2 (he was also accused of being a russian puppet).
In the UK the "tory" nationalist paleocons were allowed into power with Brexit and B. Johnson, because the "tory" faction is much stronger than in the USA, but the "whigs" have been pushing back hard and managed to get rid of Johnson, even if he looks to be replaced by another "tory" nationalist paleocon (the "whig" globalist neocon is R. Sunak).
Gore Vidal, from the insider Gore political dynasty, wrote:
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party [...] and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently [...] and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
George Mikes, an english-hungarian who wrote in the 1954 a humorous yet accurate description of the USA ("How to scrape skies"):
“In England you know for instance that the Labour Party is for the nationalization of various industries and the Conservatives are against it. In America such ideological clashes hardly ever occur. A practical issue may be whether the U.S. should give a large loan to Britain or not. In Siloam Springs (Ala) the loyal Democratic leader, with an eye on the Jewish inhabitants, may take up an anti-British attitude because of Palestine. In the next village, however, the bank manager's daughter may have an English fiancé, a former R.A.F. pilot, who is personally very popular and the Democratic Party leader will be inclined to say: 'Let the poor boy have the dough.' All this may seem very confusing but, in fact, it is quite simple. The difference between the two main American parties is very sharp and well defined; it is more marked than the difference between Communists and right-wing Democrats in any European coalition government:
(a) one party is in, the other is out;
(b) one party wants to stay in and the other tries to get it out.”
BTW it is no longer the case that “the Labour Party is for the nationalization of various industries and the Conservatives are against it”, both parties are neoliberal, as “in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all thatcherites now”.
Couple thoughts.
In terms of talking about contacts with the secret police, the National Security Letter is designed precisely to prevent this. Even to admit to having seen one is to court jail. They don't always use this, obviously, but it's impossible to know how often they are used by the very nature of it.
One effective resistance tactic, historically, is obscurantism. We're already doing this, e.g. esoteric meme culture. The Poles did something very similar in the 80s. Their underground punk scene, which served as a propaganda arm for the Solidarity movement, adopted a lyrical style that was deliberately opaque to those not in the know. When the archives were opened up after communism fell, it turned out that this had been very effective: agents sent out to infiltrate had been left utterly baffled by what they were hearing.
The secret police is definitely being expanded in the US. The IRS is being made much larger in order to squeeze the taxpayer, and I think we can all guess which taxpayers they'll be sicced on. The IRS is also going to be armed, now. So we'll be able to add economic repression to the list of tactics the regime uses to suppress domestic dissent.
How does the tactic of obscurantism help grow or even inform a dissident movement? Seems to me it allows them freedom from harassment but at the cost of political integrity.
If the secret police or punitive arm of the establishment can't figure out that Babylon stands for oppressive regime, maybe that's not because you're so clever and they're so dumb but because they don't care. You're actually comparing your movement to plucky Jewish resistance against gentile oppression. Why shut that down?
As to the Polish obscurantist punks, who I'd never heard of, here's what I found: "Although the participants of Jarocin Festival and the members of Solidarity shared a similar attitude towards the communist regime, they didn’t fight hand in hand. There were too many differences between them – members of the young generation were rebelling against the older ones, they didn’t want to follow in their footsteps but live their life, they looked different, talked different, shared different values and had different dreams."
They didn't want to hang w/ the naive boomers who were actually trying to upset the cart. Might get on some kind of list.
Establishing defences against harassment and infiltration are precisely the point. It also enables formation of a distinct culture, differentiated from the mainstream, within which resistance can begin to organize.
We've been doing that for years. It comes quite naturally under these circumstances as well as many others, eg criminals and teenagers using slang. Is it sufficient? No, and I wasn't arguing it is. But it's almost certainly necessary, which is why it always crops up.
I am confused about the intelligence services, at least in the French context. I have met a few students whose goal was to join them. When I occasionally meet one, I ask them about what they do now and some have answered that they work for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which means that they have probably joined domestic intelligence. They are all patriotic or nationalistic and heavily conservative. I have also met people who have retired from the intelligence services and they are patriotic and conservative too; one is even reactionary and royalist. These people also have an uncanny ability about never uttering any useful info about their former jobs. So I could not figure out whether most people there were patriotic or conservative or whether they are outliers. I have never met anyone in active positions in the intelligence services, however their personnel is supposed to remain dissimulated under innocuous job descriptions. Thus there are patriots in the secret police but I cannot fathom their actual numbers and power.
That said there are signs that the intelligence services work first and foremost for themselves and co-operate with their peers for their own good standing. They have official secret budget allocations from parliament but they also seem to run dark budgets. The CIA has been shown to be involved in drug trafficking in the past. In France during the celebrations of the first world war, the delegation from Kosovo was treated with great consideration whereas the Serbian delegation was treated with despise; the mere presence of a delegation from Kosovo made no sense. Furthermore a novelist portrayed as having contacts in the intelligence services has described several Western intelligence services running cigarettes, drugs, and arms traffics through Kosovo. Kosovo has also been described by many papers as a state run the local mafia. This has lead me to conclude that the French intelligence services, the CIA and others run all sorts of lucrative trafics and have dark budgets. They also have access to arsonists and assassins from the mafias they work with.
So the intelligence services work first for themselves and in association with their peers. Loyalty to the government or to the top civil servants comes second in my opinion. Some old episodes in France show this. In 1980 or so the French services received the betrayal of a top official in the KGB. They chose not to tell the president because there was an election in 1981 and waited for the new president to be elected. They did tell the CIA about him though ! Then they told about him to the new president and asked him whether they should tell the Americans. The French intelligence and the CIA used this to test the loyalty of the president to NATO and the USA ! Authentic treason. I could recount other episodes that display a similar state. They are all gleaned from papers or books published by inquisitive journalists and they have caused small scandals when they were revealed.
I do not know how to assess on the role of the intelligence services in the repression of conservatives, reactionaries, right-wing dissidents. In the USA and Europe it is more the universities, the media, the civil service and the corporations that have been on the attack. The intelligence may give a hand but I believe that this comes at the request of the politicians, the top civil servants, or the Mossad; and they might not be zealous about it. As for the infiltration of reactionary groups, it might be done by employees of NGOs, like the Open Society, rather than the secret police. The secret police might train them though. Plenty of sabotage and personal harm might be inflicted by purely private means.
«Moving on, the next step would be to engage in actual politicking. That means reaching out to different voter blocs and forming a coalition with them to gain votes.»
And here there is a rather important detail, that mostly politics is about interests, not ideas, not values, not dreams. Currently a large block of voters in the USA, UK and other countries have only one interest: stock and real estate prices and rents/dividends.
The profits that 20-40% of voters make from stocks and real estate, 100% redistributed from the lower classes, have been so huge for 40 years that they have written a blank check to the neoliberal (reaganista, thatcherite) parties that have delivered them.
The problem with the "tory" nationalist "paleocon" politics is that most of the potential right-wing "tory" supporters are also stock and real estate owners, and their profits are far more important to them than "tory" nationalist paleocon ideas and values. Consider this excellent interview with Republican strategist G. Norquist:
http://www.prospect.org/article/world-according-grover
«Pat Buchanan came into this coalition and said, “You know what? I have polled everybody in the room and 70 percent think there are too many immigrants; 70 percent are sceptics on free trade with China. I will run for President as a Republican; I will get 70 percent of the vote.”
He didn't ask the second question … do you vote on that subject?»
Eventually enough people voted on that subject to elect Trump, but there have two problems with that:
* Many of those people were left-wing social-democrats abandoned by the DNC, so their vote is "invalid" from a right-wing perspective.
* D. Trump was then subjected to a bipartisan (read: "corporate") campaign of propaganda plus a bipartisan campaign of stalling or undermining his policies.
An alternative to the "whig" globalist neocons will only arise when their corporate "sponsors" will become too weak to fund and support them, in a "end of the USSR" situation, a large economic crisis. But the USA is still quite far away from that, even if the UK and some other vassals might be closer to it. It will not be necessarily a "tory" nationalist paleocon alternative, it could be social-democratic or socialist one.
I mostly agree with you on this. My take is that the fraction of the tories that support immigration reduction and re-industrialisation do vote on it, when given the chance. However they are kept away from the levers of power, whether in the government or in the party. At general election or party election time they get some vague promises but nothing comes out of that. Their choices are always framed and party discipline takes over. Because they are captive voters, they do not matter. If Nigel Farage had had the courage, he could have poached them and a significant fraction of the poor English Labour voters to upstage both parties. But he quit. He must have been offered a deal.
In spite of the general recognition that immigration and house prices were the main causes of discontent behind Brexit, the tories brought in more Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, Arabs, etc. The little they did, the Rwanda agreement, might be scuttled. Should the population vote them away ? Labour and Lib-Dems are so much worse, so much.
It´s weird how on many angles I can agree with you. The Black Panthers were infiltrated by the FBI, resulting in the murder and imprisonment of some of its members. Around 1990 people who I knew were EarthFirsters fighting to protect the redwoods in N. Ca. had a bomb placed in their VW bug which blew up and severly injured the 2 main activists who were in the car and then they were accused of carrying a bomb. After 10 years of litigation, they proved that it was the FBI that had planted the bomb and they were awarded 1 million dollars. This was not publicized.
The "secret police", the CIA, the FBI, have infinite funding, mostly secret. Running a new political party is virtually impossible in the US as history has shown. Besides, once they would be elected, they would be intimidated immediately and either conform to the demands or be murdered (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oilxI6Dgoy8).
This is why I am suggesting a possible solution is horizontal governing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wywMhg604W8). To get this idea in the heads of the public.
Also, another real problem is breaking thru the propaganda machine. How? I was thinking this morning of pirate radio, which we did to some extent in the past. But it never was significant enough and the police could triangulate where we were.
To summarize some of my previous arguments:
* The current neoliberal regime is supported by all those real estate owners who have been making huge capital gains for 40 years as real estate prices have been doubling in many areas every 7-10 years. That is so huge for the living standards of that 20-40% of voters that they will support anything as long as they keep getting those massive capital gains, and that big block of voters have decided most elections.
* For those who oppose neoliberalism the pushback is not done so much by the secret police, but by blacklisting (from both platforms and business and jobs) against the smaller "deviants" and by massive media and dirty tricks attack campaigns against the bigger "deviants" (from Sanders to Trump).
In general things change when there is a fight and turnover among ruling class factions, revolutions from below are fairly rare. In the UK there is a genuine split among the ruling class between right-wing libertarian globalists and right-wing traditionalist nationalists, and this resulted in a change of regime flavour with brexit, but the libertarian globalists have been pushing back, and in any case there is no significant party that represents non-right-wing politics, or even right-wing politics outside the libertarian/traditionalist factions.
Can you expand on how the blacklisting supposedly works?
For instance:
You let slip one or two based remarks to people you thought you can trust. But truth is, you gave them that yummy topic to talk about outside office hours. Be heard by other people, be the centre of attention. Everyone is a tattletale. Especially when meeting women. Drums of gossip start rolling.
Your sober, discreet remarks about he careless attitude of that nonwhite colleague, or over the truly insufferable, wayward corporate fanaticism of that other female colleague, are soon distorted and amplified into the monstrous tirades of a misogynist, racist bigot.
The drums of gossip keep rolling, soon people stop talking when you pass by and start glancing at you instead.
You are furious and outraged with everyone. People notice your scowl. They take it as confirmation that you really are a total lunatic: - See? Only the mentally ill could hold such deranged opinions. Human BioDiversity? Are we cosplaying Victorian scientists? Ever heard of the blank slate?
You stop going to work, you don't want to kill anyone. You start looking for a new job. You go to linkedin and there you discover, to your horror, that the whole profession shuns you.
You have lost your reputation, completely.
You will always be shadowed by some angry woman who'll learn where you have landed next as soon as you are forced, by workplace etiquette, to add your new colleagues to your linkedin. And she'll go on and spite you with them in private messages, even though she doesn't know them, and she hardly has ever even talked with you. People do stuff just for the sake of it, mostly. No particular motive is often required.
Where were we? Oh yes. The most ridiculous and outlandishly grotesque tales, that you have obviously never said or done - will become common knowledge about you, and you'll not be able to shake them away no matter how intensely you deny them. As I said, your reputation is completely ruined. What will you do, what is left for you in this world?
...so I was inclined to think the one described above is emergent behaviour, stemming from human nature and mass psychology. But I am open to the possibility that this could be the result of having being blacklisted.
«Can you expand on how the blacklisting supposedly works?»
A lot of employers use "background checks" businesses, overtly or behind the scenes, and contribute to them, and often even if the law theoretically bans them, there is often the loophole of making job offers conditionals on agreeing to them, and even so what can job applicants do if nobody tells them why they have been rejected or an excuse like "we hired a candidate with a better fit" is used? In most neoliberal states enforcement of labor legislation, if it exists, is rather weak.
It is a system similar to the chinese "social score" system, but privatised and even less transparent.
Once upon a time if you got on the wrong side of the city bosses ("You'll never work in this town again") you could take a wagon or a train or a ship and move to the other side of the country, but currently blacklists are available wherever the web is available.
I thought background checks were useful only to check criminal record and the like.
They can't check whether you are ideologically compliant to GloboHomo yet, especially if you don't have public social media, or you don't use those that much anyway.
They would have to resort to check gossip and hearsay but that is obviously unethical.
Remember this: The Secret Police force is made up of individuals - people who are your next door neighbors, who live in your communities. Out them, ostracize them and the cast them out. This is how we stop this.
you say, "I have brought up all of these topics on the blog before at one point or another, but now I’m trying to bring it all together."
you're doing a good job of it. thank you!
The analysis you present is one reason Steve Bannon won for Trump. Trump is old line CIA.
Since murdering JFK the police state has though metastasis grown to be the entire Federal government. . By the time the Cold War ended, the West was already riddled with a culture in a profound state of decay, coupled with a spiritual malaise that would, in another generation, lead to a situation wherein each side of the dominant “left-right” political cleavage would come to contain significant amounts of irrationality and moral bankruptcy. Surely the utter collapse of the Christian West in the matter of a generation requires a more compelling explanation than what is generally given. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/12/14/atheism-the-core-of-modern-western-culture-in-the-thought-of-augusto-del-noce/
https://www.hegaion.com/2012/11/facts-from-life-of-vaclav-havel-and-his.html
we need to resurrect the Secret Policeman's Ball
If you look into civil conflicts in general, people who talk to or come into the custody of the enemy are often tortured (or at least interviewed on scopolamine or something) before being let back in, as a security measure. You cannot have a successful movement if the core group is riddled with compromised people (which is not the same as infiltration).
Agreed that Rolo's exercise on how to build a populist takeover is of largely academic value, given the power the deep state has accumulated and exerted via what he calls the secret police. I see several additional obstacles to successful populist revolt in the US.
First is the climate of fear that already immobilizes much of the public. When my health care provider refuses to prescribe Ivermectin, presumably out of fear, how can one imagine a revolt that requires much more risk and courage?
Second, US citizens are too spoiled and weak, unlike populations in the global south, so oppressed and impoverished for generations that they are more easily persuaded to pick up the gun and join the guerillas.
Third, the inevitable demise of industrial economies starting in the West, driven among other things by underlying energy and other finite resource depletion, will is beginning to progressively weaken all centralized power structures, making a takeover of central government a useless endeavor.
Still, Rolo's thought experiment suggests creative revolt options open to proles or peasants. One is Tom Osher's horizontal government, called variously, social anarchism, decentralism, or simply relocalization. I tend to favor this option as the best chance for a civilized society as central power crumbles and people are thrown back on reliance on local resources. It may be a long shot, considering that historically in collapses of civilizations, local strong men tend to take over, instituting a feudal system that may be more or less oppressive depending the values of the autocrat and the ability of the peasants to organize themselves.
There is no such things as "inevitable demise of industrial economies in the West" or "underlying energy and other finite resource depletion".
Oil, gas, coal, hydrocarbon combustible sources in general, there is enough to go for another thousand year at least, even more considering the looming depopulation. Plenty of time to look for resources in space, and to invest further research into nuclear energy up to a point when it becomes cheap and safe enough to grant satisfaction of all energetic needs.
Because of course there is no such thing as 'renewable energy'. It's a contradiction in terms.
Dear Karlo,
Rolo's main point is that the grip of the Deep State through the secret police shall increase as the economic and social conditions deteriorate. Central power will be reinforced in the next decades and it will turn authoritarian and violent. In France the revolt of the yellow vests was crushed with cudgels and rubber bullets. Worse means are at the disposal of the ruling class.
I doubt your point on the rise of local strongmen because in order to rise they need to be distant from the centre of power. However it takes 4 hours to fly coast to coast in the USA and even less in Europe. Cameras report instantly. No-one is far from the centre of power today.
I've been thinking exactly the same thing a government in exile would be key to taking down the decadent dismal corrupt cretin bearing regime. Could be in Russia but the shill media would say we're Putin's puppet. The raid on Trump's home is a clear sign the opposition is get very worried. We can still triumph but we must get organized focus and stop being afraid of the "rootless cosmopolitans".
Government in exile, where?
Nowadays upper classes across international borders can readily identify each other in a crowd, by their woke cult irrational beliefs.
Most normal people falls in a cognitive lull - they internally can spot the nonsense, but seeing how all sort of crazyness is backed up by authority, they freeze on their gut feelings, and try to keep on with their lives avoiding the subject entirely.
The social climbing types (sociopaths), and those who were born in the cult, instead, are faced with a sort of rite of passage: they have got to humiliate themselves into believing nonsensical, self-harming woke principles to the point of being sincerely invested in them. Only then they are let in.
This creates an elitist bond internationally, that is similar to what was there in the old aristocratic Europe of the 1700s. An international clique of bums who identify much more with their peers across borders than with the common people they rule over.
This post and the previous one reveal us that even Russia, the archnemesis of the West, has a class of liberal wannabes at the top. So basically wherever you flee to establish your exile, your dissident status will follow you as does your shadow, and the wokesters will play whack-a-mole with you.
I've been thinking exactly the same thing a government in exile would be key to taking down the decadent dismal corrupt cretin bearing regime. Could be in Russia but the shill media would say we're Putin's puppet. The raid on Trump's home is a clear sign the opposition is get very worried. We can still triumph but we must get organized focus and stop being afraid of the "rootless cosmopolitans".
Not a substantive critique, but an aesthetic one. Only one faction of the German anti-communist crusade was Prussian. They were drab, trad and boring visually. But the Nat Socs, the SS, were anything but. They set the standard for right-wing military aesthetics. OK, they were posthumously sullied by you know who. The swastika is banned even today, just like everything else associated w/ them.
Americans trying to redeem nationalist German symbols is ridiculous - the Germans may as well try to redeem the stars and stripes.
I was correcting Rolo about Nazi aesthetics and reminding him (and all) why their symbolism has been sullied. You bring up a different issue: revival of American nationalism v German. Fair enough. Perhaps that kind of nationalistic inappropriateness was what Rolo was getting at.
Trump tries to redeem the stars and stripes w/ his MAGA agenda. Problem is the American flag has been sullied by decades of faux patriotism. IMO his approach is just the latest sell out to Judaic interests under the guise of patriotic action. We'd have to go back to Lindbergh's America First to revive a real, sovereign movement. Trump of course doesn't mention Lindy.
There might be 2 appropriate American flags for a patriotic revival: the coiled snake from the Revolutionary War and the Stars and Bars from the Civil War. The aesthetics of the latter have always appealed to me and it's been reviled by the small hats; so you know it's a threat.
Would love to hear what others think about symbols of patriotism.
I like those. I'm also a fan of the Gonzales Flag, but it doesn't really have an aesthetic, it's blunt and crude and that's what I like about it.
Hadn't heard of this flag. Thanks.
https://ammo.com/articles/gonzales-flag-battle-of-gonzales
«But the secret police stops this process at step one. It is difficult to organize politically outside of the approved parties»
You talk a lot about the "secret police", but the USA and similar states use the that kind of stuff relatively rarely. It is mostly that dissidents are put on various blacklists so they become unemployable and also are subjected to media campaigns. See J. Corbyn and D. Trump (and even B. Johnson's more recent case is quite similar) for two different people subjected to "cancellation".
«who have an understanding with the Deep State to play by the rules.»
The various sides of "le pouvoir" are not entirely the same, but the corporate "sponsors" control both the official parties and the deep state.
«where the DNC has more power over domestic and foreign policy than the professionals running these organizations and the GOP is largely just controlled opposition»
There is little difference between the DNC and the GOP, they are both fronts for slightly different factions of their corporate "sponsors".
What is remarkable is how narrow is the difference between both right-wing parties, both of which are mostly "whig" globalist neocons. There are some "tory" nationalist paleocons in the GOP, but they are marginalized, like Senator Borah was between WW1 and WW2 (he was also accused of being a russian puppet).
In the UK the "tory" nationalist paleocons were allowed into power with Brexit and B. Johnson, because the "tory" faction is much stronger than in the USA, but the "whigs" have been pushing back hard and managed to get rid of Johnson, even if he looks to be replaced by another "tory" nationalist paleocon (the "whig" globalist neocon is R. Sunak).
Gore Vidal, from the insider Gore political dynasty, wrote:
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party [...] and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently [...] and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
George Mikes, an english-hungarian who wrote in the 1954 a humorous yet accurate description of the USA ("How to scrape skies"):
“In England you know for instance that the Labour Party is for the nationalization of various industries and the Conservatives are against it. In America such ideological clashes hardly ever occur. A practical issue may be whether the U.S. should give a large loan to Britain or not. In Siloam Springs (Ala) the loyal Democratic leader, with an eye on the Jewish inhabitants, may take up an anti-British attitude because of Palestine. In the next village, however, the bank manager's daughter may have an English fiancé, a former R.A.F. pilot, who is personally very popular and the Democratic Party leader will be inclined to say: 'Let the poor boy have the dough.' All this may seem very confusing but, in fact, it is quite simple. The difference between the two main American parties is very sharp and well defined; it is more marked than the difference between Communists and right-wing Democrats in any European coalition government:
(a) one party is in, the other is out;
(b) one party wants to stay in and the other tries to get it out.”
BTW it is no longer the case that “the Labour Party is for the nationalization of various industries and the Conservatives are against it”, both parties are neoliberal, as “in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all thatcherites now”.