If the Poles of Mars Have Melted, Why Bother Writing?

I heard a rumor that the poles have melted on Mars. Could this be in anticipation of US plans to colonise the planet?

In an earlier contribution I observed that the person transported to the Rockefeller-sponsored/ donated headquarters of US faux multilateralism, aka as the United Nations, for a pubescent tirade performance was incredible — in the sense of incredulous and mendacious. Of course, I circulated these comments among my younger, less sceptical friends aware that my unrestrained criticism would not endear me. However, I am simply too old to worry about the “terms of endearment”. I recall just after the GDR/ BRD border was opened — thirty years ago — when I was accidentally in Berlin (was this done for me?) that I watched a lot of very strange things which were not reported on television.

The day after I departed for a trip to the US to visit my mother who was dying of cancer induced by her exposure to photographic chemicals at a medical university where she had worked as photographer and lab technician. Leaving aside the story of her then immanent death, I recall clearly how I tried to explain to a person who was dying (and died several months later) that this was the time, the last time, to talk sincerely. I do not want to say the “truth” because that is another issue entirely. Unlike almost all those (mainly Hollywood) films readers will have seen, my mother was not able to say anything — even knowing that this would be our last conversation ever.

In case the reader cannot imagine, permit me to make the point of this digression clear. Even impending death cannot induce sincerity or candor where it has not been learned and practiced in one’s active life. I do not claim a monopoly of the truth or the right answers to every question but I have spent my entire conscious life trying to achieve sincerity or authenticity if you will. Hence my impatience with the article posted on DV (and certainly elsewhere) that leads me exceptionally to a direct reply — even if in the sense of parliamentary courtesy I refer only to the honourable contributor from Los Angeles (his city of residence according to the Internet sources I consulted).

Hence, Reader, I rise and pray to respond to Extinction Rebellion Sweeps the World.

The honourable author represents the phenomenon Extinction Rebellion I presume without sarcasm as a democratic, youthful and positive expression, a response to supposed problems that is to be welcomed and supported.

I disagree emphatically. Moreover, without prejudice to those young people who are justifiably frustrated with the resilience of the ruling corporate elite and the sheer force it is able to wield against any attempts to end wars, poverty, gratuitous state violence, and the massive health hazards created and maintained by parasitic capitalism, I reject and believe that such rejection is justified for critically thinking persons, any of the author’s assertions or insinuations that such a movement is either democratic or even benevolent.

Permit me to elaborate my objections:

First of all, the author insinuates that the so-called sans culottes were disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is historical nonsense. The sans culottes were what Marx later called “Lumpenproletariat”; i.e., ideologically vacuous opportunists mobilised in part because of their willingness and experience in petty violence (as part of the police-petty criminal dialectic) and in part by their own awareness that in the midst of massive social disruption crime can be dressed in politics. It is absurd to associate this kind of mob violence with Rousseau — an author whom it is reasonable to assume a largely illiterate criminal class had not even read.

It is a minor point but Rousseau may have inspired many of the revolutionaries in France but he was by no means the inspiration for the most powerful who were, in fact, bourgeoisie. Moreover the motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is nowhere traceable to Rousseau, per se. It is also doubtful that he was responsible for this motto’s establishment. Rousseau held no political office during or after the Revolution.

Second, a mere glance at the Extinction Rebellion website indicates that the demands are not democratic but “statist”. The idea that establishment of “citizens’ committees” makes a top-down state operation more democratic is absurd on its face. I would refer the Reader here to the speeches of the German democratic activist Rudi Dutschke, whose life was ended prematurely by assassination some 40 years ago. Democracy in Dutschke’s view cannot exceed the consciousness of those who are themselves involved in the democratic process. There are no fast tracks to “Bewusstwerdung” (becoming conscious).

There are even more serious objections to the author’s arguments, both explicit and implied. I will limit myself, however, to just a few.

The single issue “climate change” is not only absurd and arrogant it is also deceptive. While it is possible to forgive the vulnerability to absurd ideas, arrogance and deceit cannot be dismissed. Now I must, and am willing to concede that the author does not write to deceive. Yet what he reproduces is deceptive even if he is only the innocent bearer of the message.

It is not necessary to deny climate change. There has always been climate change. Most of us could not help learning in school that the earth rotates, revolves around the sun and in the process is part of an ever-changing universe. The moon we were told partly causes tides — moving more water than in each individual human body. So it is logical to believe that the moon and sun have an impact on our bodies even if we cannot measure it very well. Hence with this basic knowledge what has been added by the millennialism of the “climate change crusade”?

For one let us start with the propaganda. Every day we are told that such and such or so and so does not comply with the Kyoto Accord. But does anyone talk about what the Kyoto Accord really is? No. There is constant self-flagellation (but mainly the flagellation of non-whites) about the failure to reduce carbon emissions. Well, if we all held our breath until we died we would have no more CO2 problems. The Kyoto Accords are not an emission-reduction agreement but an emission trading framework. Ever since NATO was able to disable the Soviet Union and COMECON economies and annex all but the Russian political apparatus, there has been only one mode for exercising non-military power: the “market”. By “market” is really meant the banking and commodities trading cartels domiciled in the US and UK, but whose directors are resident wherever they cannot be reached by accidents of jurisdiction.

‘Compliance with Kyoto has nothing to do with reducing pollution, ending the exploitation of natural resources by international corporations at the cost of the human population. Kyoto is an agreement to implement a regime by which those who are forced to use inefficient and polluting energy sources are compelled to pay to the rich for that privilege — so-called carbon taxes. It is also an agreement to financialise the already virtually unrestricted pollution by international industrial corporations (mainly NATO-defended) by creating and enforcing the “market” for emission credits — a derivative financial instrument. Kyoto — like so many international agreements — has nothing to do with the benefit of ordinary people on the planet. It is an agreement like that adopted at the Berlin Conference in the 19th century: to divide Africa among the Europeans.

Why would the author encourage an organisation with such a dubious impact on the consciousness of those who genuinely are frustrated and interested in improvement of the quality of human life? I will assume for the sake of argument that this interest is sincere and extends beyond satisfaction of one’s own personal anxieties.

I submit to the Readers that the answer is complex, but not complicated. In other words, it is possible to understand but difficult.

Let us begin with the organisation of Extinction Rebellion. If it is, as the author would have us believe, analogous with the sans culottes, then we have to say that it is an organisation that has adopted the tactics of the lumpenproletariat — of opportunistic or ignorant exercise of brute force without consciousness (or interest in) as to the consequences of such violence. The ostensible single issue strategy of the organisation betrays this opportunism.

Since 1945, the Atlantic forces organised in 1947 as NATO have been challenged by the demand for popular sovereignty in the colonies of Europe and the US and socialism even in the reactionary US. The defeat of the NATO in 1949 and the victory of Chinese over Western colonialism (per capita worse than the horrid 1917 revolution in Russia) was probably the most traumatic event of the century for capitalism (the nihilist ideology of Euro-American piracy). The official policy issue was framed in terms of “decolonialisation”. The colonised framed this as “independence”.

The most important practical issue, however, was how to maintain control and how to defeat independence movements and prefer “decolonisation” agents. The most important conflicts for this process were the US war against Korean independence, the French wars against its Indochinese colonies and Algeria and ultimately the US war to absorb French Indochina (with its drug industry) and surround China –which it ultimately lost in forty years ago when the last UH-1 left the CIA compound in Saigon.

As the only military power capable of challenging independence armies, the US armed and funded all its European allies in order to defend its future “open markets”. In Korea and Vietnam, it intervened directly because domination of Asia was seen by the US elite as the logical terminus of Manifest Destiny. The inability of the US to dominate Asia militarily in the same way it dominates Latin America led to massive research investment. On the one hand the war department (renamed “Defense”) spent trillions to develop weapons of mass destruction aimed mainly at peasants. On the other hand it invested millions in social sciences to find witting and unwitting scholars and activists who would create what now is called “Humint” in US military jargon. Humint is a euphemism for what the Gestapo did. In fact, the first advisors to the US military for Humint were Nazis and Madison Avenue marketing types following the lessons of Edward Bernay (used effectively to create mass hysteria for WWI).

In this process the CIA et al. developed a complex program called “Phoenix”, originally ICEX, which cleverly combined civilian operations with assassination and other forms of terrorism. People like the deceased Phoenix operative with ambassadorial rank, Richard Holbrooke, were trained as twens to combine building clinics with killing cadres. This was not an accident of war but the product of a vast intellectual undertaking to which an obscure graduate of Ohio State University belonged, no later than when he published “National Security through Civilian-based Defense” in 1970. This booklet, a reverse engineering exercise, analyses without references, the strategy of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, derogatively called Viet Cong in the US, and develops the concept of covertly organised middle-class resistance to Communism based on the lessons “learned” by US scholars about the yellow enemy. This work would lead the US war department and other agencies to fund what became the Albert Einstein Institution. From this modest sinecure Dr Gene Sharp (Oxon.) would become the equally modest prosyletiser for “non-violent” warfare against NATO targets.

Around 1989 with the culmination of NATO warfare against the Soviet Union and COMECON, a previously little known financial manipulator from the same right-wing Hungarian clique to which people like Holbrooke were connected by marriage, would borrow the slogans of the anti-communist philosopher Karl Popper to create with his manipulated millions (or billions?) the “civil society” myth. This “civil society” implicates the entirety of outsiders without actually including them. Thus the alleged philanthrope turned the money he stole from the British Treasury (actually British taxpayers) with his naked speculation against sterling into an international organisation for disenfranchising citizens and concentrating civilian authority in unelected, foundation-financed, elite (mostly university-educated) cadre organisations which appropriate the voices of the mass of citizens, especially in countries where NATO is attacking their government.

Extinction Rebellion is one of the products of this “photosynthesis”.

But what makes this possible? Are the people who associate with Extinction Rebellion stupid, ignorant or insincere? Are they “dupes” — as it used to be said of Westerners who remained communists despite the benefits of the West? Are perhaps the facts right — that is to say members are driven by good will and best available knowledge? Honourable author and Readers, I do not assert that everyone associated with Extinction Rebellion or similar organisations is either a “dupe” or stupid.

It is necessary to understand that Extinction Rebellion originates in a complex of political warfare, what the military types call “asymmetric warfare”. That is a euphemism for the fact that the army can incinerate you and your village at enormous cost and you can impede the market simply because you are unable to buy the newest product upon which a major corporation has placed all its bets.

Political warfare is complex but not complicated. As the principal authors from the Albert Einstein Institution are fond of saying it takes only about 3% of the population committed to make substantive change. Anyone who has studied school classroom behaviour can grasp this. I have called this the “bully principle”. The question that I raised in my previous article was if all these activists know that 3% is the critical mass — where is the 3% to stop police murder of Blacks, or to end real estate and bank usury, or to create universal health care (it is being dismantled where it already was achieved)?

The answer is that the single agenda “climate” movement the author so lauds is not a movement at all but a staging. This stage action involves a few people who pose as research and guidance and a mass of people who have little in common beyond (1) their desire to see a simple unifying solution to world problems and (2) their inability to think historically or in terms of class consciousness. The simplification or better said reduction of all problems to one cause mimics the West’s interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, just as radioactive cesium imitates calcium in the bone marrow.

Especially in the US with its medieval fundamentalism and slavery-based political ideology, a scheme of religious-motivated vigilantism is enormously attractive. Witch-burning and lynching, popular but top-down managed forms of retribution, persisted long after Europeans (until the fascist era) had abandoned mass religious persecution. It is still an essential element in popular culture, even among those who do not enjoy John Wayne or Clint Eastwood.

The CIA and other secret police agencies recruited across the political spectrum — especially in the US. The recruit was not always witting. However, one element was always present and the psychologists in the Company understood this very well: the deep belief that no matter how heinous the US regime may be, it was the best of all possible worlds and hence had to be defended. If anyone should doubt this they only have to read the text to Lillian Hellman’s Candide, brilliantly rendered to music by Leonard Bernstein.

This also explains the composition of Extinction Rebellion and the “climate” movement as a whole. It is ultimately a political warfare strategy based inter aliaon the counter-insurgency doctrines developed by the US regime during the war against Vietnam. It is a part of Phoenix. It is mainly “white” and ultimately it is directed at “non-whites” and the poor- – even if many associated with it still believe the contrary.

As I have argued elsewhere, the US regime went to Vietnam for tin, opium, cheap rice, and cheap labour among other things. Just as it was in Indonesia where a million were killed to secure primary commodities from that country and three plus million in Korea before that. “Communism” was just a term used to rile the religious fanatics in the US and Europe to attain the necessary degree of participation in whatever witch-burning, lynching party or mass murder was planned to perfect the theft. “Climate” is the crusade of the post-communism era. It is still a religious crusade. It is rooted in the irrationalism of Christendom.

It is truly regrettable that the author either has not read his history or is at best indifferent to it. It is shameful that he submits to the reader such a superficial and distorted homily.

Readers, I thank you for your attention and yield the floor.

T.P. Wilkinson, Dr. rer. pol. writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..