To start with an anecdote of my personal intellectual history, I have to recall reading The Gulag Archipelago as a youth. There were two things that impressed me about this work although I later came to view much of the author’s assertions to be questionable and distorted. However, if one reads the entirety of Solzhenitsyn as literature there are still remarkable insights to be gleaned, even if the excessive attacks on the Soviet Union should be taken cum grano sale. The first point was formal— the use of footnotes in a literary text to comment on what had been written in the main narrative. The second observation, anticipating Foucault et al., was the function of ordinary criminals in a population of political prisoners.
Footnotes can have the formal function of lending an otherwise weak or absent authority to a text full of unsubstantiated or anecdotal assertions. They can also permit the shift of reader attention from a story to the underlying or derivative aspects of that story. They can also instigate a dialogue with the text by showing the reader how to expose the covert reading of the shadow text.
The role of ordinary crime in disciplining political prisoners was described in some detail in the hundreds of pages Solzhenitsyn devoted to his topic, what he called the archipelago of incarceration throughout the Soviet Union to which political prisoners under Soviet Union law could be sent. The form he chose was the literary version of the “docudrama“. Meanwhile less partisan authors and scholars have disputed the number of prisons and the actual number of prisoners suggested or claimed in Solzhenitsyn’s book. However, this does not invalidate one of his central observations, namely, the function of organized crime in the operation of an oppressive regime. To be clear about this, no matter what system creates and maintains prisons, prisons are instruments of oppression. Any discussion about theories of penitentiary organisation, correctional practice, punishment cannot erase this fundamental fact. Moreover any society that lacks oppressive/ repressive capacity cannot maintain stable commerce and social interaction. Therefore the question is not whether a society has oppressive or repressive instruments but what does any given society value and therefore support or repress in order to maintain such values?
No later than what I have claimed in an earlier essay is the shift from surplus appropriation to scarcity management in economic theory, modern political economy has been taught through mass education as a new religion— a secular form of the grace and sin regime established by the Latin and Reformed clerical elite in the reorganisation of sparsely settled sedentary populations in the Western peninsula of Eurasia into fodder for nomadic barbarians who would extend their empire over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. Until the political-economic apologists were faced with the abolition of slavery and the ascendency of an industrial proletariat, theory focused on how to allocate stolen wealth among the elite estates. With the abolition of slavery (around 1886), the principal occupation of political-economists and the school known now as Social Darwinism was to explain how to prevent the newly freed and the proletariat from claiming their share of the wealth their labour had generated over half a millennia. The explanation they developed was the theory of marginal utility and the redirection of economic management to administering newly discovered “scarcity.”
Introduction of scarcity as the underlying condition of political economy — perversely at times when capitalist crises of overproduction were recurrent — was a sleight of hand. Fast forward to the end of the War against the Soviet Union and Communism: in the US a Canadian Stanford (amazingly) economist named Lorie Tarshis published a textbook, The Elements of Economics (1947) An Introduction to the Theory of Price and Employment, that was recognized as the first textbook in the US based on the theories of Maynard Keynes. This book was quickly banned after a vicious letter-writing campaign led in part by archconservative and reputed CIA asset, William F. Buckley. When I say “banned”, I mean banned. In more than twenty years it has been impossible for me to find even second-hand editions of this book. It is available only in a very difficult to use e-book version in Internet Archive. That is the condition more than fifty years after it was first published. In its place was the Economics: An Introductory Analysis (1948) by Paul Samuelson. It is to the best of my knowledge the only introductory economics textbook in use in the English-speaking world.
Why is that important? What has that to do with Solzhenitsyn and organized crime in prisons, one might ask? Tarshis was far from being a communist as was insinuated at the time. Maynard Keynes was a liberal eugenics adherent and no friend of the working class or poor. However, Tarshis following Keynes included a very important chapter: on administered pricing and monopoly/ oligopoly. Samuelson’s contract as theoretical “hit man” was to expunge this critical element of political economy from the study and teaching of economics. He was also— thanks to the enormous academic-criminal enterprise of which many in his family have been a part, e.g. Lawrence Summers— able to reap accolades long before that ostensible bête noir of liberals, Milton Friedman, earned his fame as economic terrorist (especially as leading theorist of Chile’s economic destruction after 1973).
What is administered pricing? According to the fairy tale still propagated by the Samuelson catechism, all prices are derived from scarcity equations settled in the market by a tendency of supply and demand to reach equilibrium. The deceit— not unlike that propagated by climate hysteriacs- is that there is such a thing as “equilibrium,” never mind economic equilibrium. Tarshis distinguished quite clearly between real economies of scarcity or surplus and oligarchic/ monopolistic economies. For Samuelson et al. oligarchy and monopoly are merely “imperfect competition”. This is akin to calling something ugly, less beautiful.
According to the so-called “neo-classical synthesis”, only the horrible socialists try to set prices and make economic decisions according to plans. In the “free market” these decisions are the result of mathematical divination derived from the laws of economic nature. However, administered pricing, like administered energy policy, constitutes planning by invisible, publicly unaccountable actors in the private sector using such key performance indicators as return on investment (ROI) or simply how much profit can be obtained at any given price. Since vertically integrated cartels can manipulate input/ factor prices, also with the help of rigged taxation and accounting rules, the question is not at what price will a certain demand level be satisfied but at what price a certain rate of profit can be obtained. This is why such strategies as cross-subsidization or transfer pricing mechanisms can be used to obtain profits despite obvious price inflexibility at the end of the chain— the consumer. To the extent that this is discussed at all in Samuelson and his derivatives it is a pure aberration or distortion. Political power exercised to benefit these actors is concealed by the euphemism “externalities.”
How can a sane person say “distortion” when describing the impact of beneficial ownership of a media market where only five enterprises dominate the industry worldwide? When five oligarchical entities operate under such a regime that were there real, enforceable anti-trust law would be forbidden. Only ignorance or mendacity can call it an exception. It must be treated as the rule. That is point. Assuming that every single graduate that has passed through the Samuelson indoctrination continues either in academic or commercial economics, then we are talking about millions of people whose fundamental education ignores a central fact and operating principle of economics since the beginning of the 20th century. The anecdotal evidence of global ignorance/ mendacity ought to be sufficient to convince any sober thinking person that what we are told about the economy and the society it constitutes is at least twenty per cent nonsense. (I am being generous here.) The damage is actually much worse since the discipline is thus so detached from reality and bound by pseudo-scientific mathematical models that we cannot even begin to imagine another way of organizing resources. (Economist Michael Hudson has worked very hard to do this by returning to the original critical forms of political economic theory: Professor Hudson, who learned economics working in Business and not the Academy, also makes very clear that all modern economies are “planned,” Gosplan was responsible for the Soviet economy, while Wall Street—a closely held private financial cartel—plans the Western economy. See among others Hudson’s Superimperialism)
What does all this have to do with policing?
Since the declaration of the COVID-19 war in 2020 numerous business districts throughout the United States and other Western metropolises have experienced bizarre mass attacks mainly on the retail sector. These attacks often followed or were contemporaneous with mass demonstrations apparently organized and/ or supported by offshore NGOs like Black Lives Matter and Antifascist Action or groups demonstrably trained by the successor to OTPOR. The attacks included looting, vandalism, arson, and assault and battery. Millions of US dollars in property damage were recorded. Many businesses closed their doors or were forced to create expensive security barriers to customers. During this period policing was conspicuous by its absence.
Before continuing the term “offshore” should be explained. The construction of astro-turf organizations requires funding. Organizations are needed to obtain and pay for facilities used whenever masses of people are brought together for any purpose. A daylong event of any sort, especially in countries like the US with a low density of public conveniences, needs provision for basic things like toilets and drinking water. These are key logistical elements of any sustained mass activity and they cost money. A friend of mine from Leipzig who grew up there during the GDR era remarked often about the Monday demonstrations there: who paid for all the toilet facilities during those demonstrations? There was a US TV sitcom, All in the Family (a variant of the 1965-75 British satire Till Death Us Do Part) that was initially quite scandalous not only because of fluid bigoted language but also because the protagonist explicitly talked about and went to the toilet in prime time television. Perhaps American culture is so sanitized that no one can even imagine the necessity of a toilet in public life. Offshore NGOs are these conduits for cash and organizational resources whose actual beneficial owners are screened from public view. The National Endowment for Democracy directs funds for such entities beyond US borders. Other government agencies facilitate these cash and resource flows in the West.
Nevertheless it did not take long to find that massive amounts of money were funnelled to bank accounts of these AstroTurf agents, announced for use as bail bond, etc. At the same time banks on both sides of the great northern border were seizing donations for Canadian truckers protesting government policies. The spokespersons for these demonstrations claimed that they were being held to protest against police brutality and racism, ostensibly in official conduct and economic behaviour. These demonstrations received vast mass media and social media coverage. They were praised by public authorities at state and federal level and in rare instances also by local government officials. During these summers of discontent, much of the population was subject to house arrest; curfews and public assembly restrictions ordered in violation of all principles of due process under US law. In fact, demonstrations attempted to protest the violations of constitutional rights to free speech, due process and freedom of assembly were strictly suppressed by police at all levels while these peculiar demonstrations against police brutality and racism were unobstructed. It became clear that many demonstrators at these events had been bussed in from other locations around the country. Hence local residents were an insignificant part of the action.
As argued in an earlier article, there is an ideology and a strategy at work here. The religious component is a missionary strategy based on and organized through a “purity” cult. However, the social transformation or re-engineering which is the long-term plan has a serious economic component, too. That economic component is rooted in the theories of eugenics and marginal utility or marginalism. Both of these theories arise with a fundamental ideological change that matured in the Manhattan Project.
Prior to 1942, the prevailing – by that I mean also in popular culture—model of humans and nature was mechanical. Nature was a machine and humans, including their cerebral –corporeal interfaces, were mechanical. The culmination of this human model can be found in Frederick Taylor’s time-motion studies, explained in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911). There was a critique of this model among the Romantics but this minority was itself marginalized in favour of the apparently modern “systems” theories. Romantic criticism of the emerging industrial society was complex and contradictory since, unlike the Enlightenment, Romanticism was not a concept of social coherence but an attempt to deal with the inherent incoherence of society and human personality. In any event by 1942, the Romantic approaches to humanism were thoroughly marginalized (to use this metaphor again) in favour of systems theory together with an analogue and then digital-calculation model human nature. When the first artificial intelligence (AI) claims were being asserted at US research universities, one of the leading developers of the underlying programming, Joseph Weizenbaum, denounced the cause in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). In a talk he gave in the late-1990s in his native Germany, he reiterated that the so-called Information Society was fraudulent. Compulsive computation, as he called it, not only erroneously equated data with information. It also substituted calculation for judgment.
Thus it also followed that the mathematical, compulsive model of the world prevented the judgment that would have condemned the Manhattan Project as the quest for the world’s most nihilistic weapons. Today the computer model of man, the “hackable animal”, whose every act is described and defined on the basis of mathematical modelling, includes the negation of judgment (and of values). Instead this mathematical model of man, merely an aerobic program medium with disposable parts, forms the basis for re-engineering of a society that will be “sustainable and robust”. However, there is a grand deception in this language developed through the appropriation of opposition language in the 1970s and its propagation as reconstituted liberation product—political-economic Velveeta. If the economy is driven by calculation of utility and economic man is governed by this rule, then he—yes, he—must by nature be a calculator and governed by the “laws” of mathematics. From this follows the anti-humanism of Norbert Weiner (Cybernetics, 1948) and Yuval Noah Harari. It is crucial to recall that atomic weaponry and genetic engineering were developed contemporaneously and have continued parallel to this day as elements of a unified weapons suite.
The so-called UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ought to be judged first of all by their source. The source of all international policy from the United Nations and its agencies was and remains the executive suite of the world’s largest multinational corporations and the governments they own. The flowery language aside—and one must see it for what it is, marketing (propaganda)—this is the agenda of institutions that have all been sworn to the worldview for which the Manhattan Project stands—atomic domination or annihilation of humanity. From this standpoint the human computer and the digital economy are a continuous fabric with the ARPA Net, now called the Internet, which was designed as sustainable communications in the wake of the two atomic strikes the then US Strategic Air Command had planned to destroy the USSR. That is the immoral foundation of this still proprietary technology that billions have been persuaded is the public sphere and governed by liberal freedoms like speech and assembly.
While there have been legal and commercial challenges to create some kind of public sphere out of this technological space—something akin to squatting and the doctrine of adverse possession—we have seen that the real owners of the Internet regularly assert their ownership, either through state agencies or corporate entities. We have yet to establish a doctrine that the electrical and communications grids upon which the theory of Internet liberty is premised can actually be articulated, let alone aggressively defended. Instead we are debating as to why private owners and their state agents do not respect archaic and naïve ideas about human liberty. Is this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness?
There is no enforceable legal regime because there is also no comprehensive economic regime that includes the human as someone more than a computer or machine with legs. There is no biological or moral regime because the argument has been accepted that humans are not animals like the rest of life on the planet and hence no more enemies of Nature than rabbits, fish, birds or fruit trees. Instead the psychopaths of compulsive calculation swoop around the planet to gather, catalogue, patent, digitalize and synthesize everything that could enable their sustainability. Those who fanatically argue for population reduction never appear on the assisted-suicide rosters. Could it be that they don’t mean a reduction of all the population?
Seemingly parallel—but actually at deniable arm’s length—the CIA sponsored World Economic Forum has not only taken the mantle sewn with SDGs, it has also turned them into the loincloth for the not yet unsustainable to wear called “Diversity – Inclusion – Equity”—DIE, for short. (Their marketing departments certainly advised a different order of wording to avoid the obvious connotation.) The principal sponsors of this exclusive club and cutout for the “sustainable class” coincides with those whose wealth derives from the exact opposite of those terms, if one understands them naively. In fact, the WEF and the wholly owned United Nations apparatus are all beneficiaries of the atomic extortion system created by the Manhattan Project. What D-I-E means is literally what Stanley Kubrick so effectively depicted in Doctor Strangelove. It is the world depicted in Soylent Green. It includes the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Outbreak. This Hollywood propaganda product has been called “predictive”. It is part of creating the psychological conditions for re-engineering.
So amid the Woke Crusade, the legally protected vandalism of vast majorities by “pure” fanatics, two phenomena have emerged to coincide with the worldwide counter-insurgency by force of arms (aka the War on Terror and now the war against Russia). These have been a) mass migration from the countries that the Anglo-American Empire and its vassals have been plundering and pillaging since 1975 almost without meaningful opposition at home or abroad and b) abject failure of even the most rudimentary public safety and policing mechanisms to function.
The rampages since 2020 mainly in the US and the mass illegal migration, in the US and EU but also in countries unfortunate enough to border the imperial plunder and pillage operations everywhere except perhaps Russia and China, are destroying the economic order in which the vast majority of people live their lives. Officially this disruption is a struggle for social justice. However, justice is not a natural condition but one created within definable social contexts. Precisely these contexts, until now, defined by nation-state legal and moral regimes, are under universal attack. The assailants are not secret. The attack on definable social contexts in which local communities can establish and maintain social justice is being organized and conducted at the strategic level by those who own the United Nations and compose the World Economic Forum. The sustainable development goals they pursue are those which clearly permit them to sustain their position and power amidst the destruction of every other social structure that could in any way deviate from the digital-computational vision of life (let us not call it humanity) they have been raised to promote and impose.
It is clear testimony to the effectiveness of the psychological weapons used that while so much has been scrubbed from the Internet (or blocked by available search engines), one can still find a notorious 60-Minutes interview in which George Schwartz (Soros) unabashedly admits that since the age of 14 (!) he has unrepentantly participated in the deportation of people (also to slavery or death) in order to profit from confiscation of their goods and property. This man has been able to promote himself as a philanthropist while enriching himself for some 79 years by the same methods. His Open Society foundations, in addition to acting as conduits for other government agencies, have served as cadre schools and organizational support to thousands whose business model is the destruction of the citizen framework that has historically guaranteed social justice or any kind of organized cultural and economic life—for power and profit. He is demonstrably one of the major funders of the AstroTurf NGOs that wage the war for “purity” (DIE) throughout the world. Mr Soros is just the most prominent and unabashed of the atomic war elite. The dissolution of the legal and social context for communities, historical nations or states, is being pursued to create a world of statelessness in which no institutions are available to protect human beings, especially from those who are like Soros.
The removal of policing, whether of borders or city streets, is elemental to this policy. The destruction of the SME sector, one of the COVID-19 objectives, was accelerated by the armed propaganda tactics of the offshore AstroTurf NGOs. There is a complex of weaponry deployed and the US itself has finally become the target of the strategy its owners have pursued for decades in every corner of the empire. Mass migration will flood the labour market in a country already deindustrialised. It will replace furloughed and mRNA poisoned workers and their families with raw muscle from abroad. At the same time the US will be subjected to unique tactics.
While the EU comprises populations long accustomed to national registration, social management and lack of lethal force among the citizens, the US is a society with a notoriously well-armed population. Moreover its most traditional elements include police, fire brigades, and military veterans indoctrinated with even more patriotism than the average person outside the US can imagine. This poses a threat—mirrored in the regime’s fanatical attempts to prevent Donald Trump from standing in the next POTUS election. The ruling oligarchy has surely been asking itself, especially after growing barracks unrest following the forced mRNA injections, whether its uniformed security forces are sufficiently loyal. Therefore it is very likely that among these “military-aged” illegal immigrant males there are cohorts of trained paramilitary infiltrated into the country, like in Libya or Syria. All this can lead to a major reorganization of the economy based on new forms of forced labour and political repression. Without the SME sector the US population becomes even more dependent upon the oligarchs that own corporations like Amazon. At the same time the barriers between licit and illicit economy are being dissolved/ demolished. When ordinary business has to pay protection only armies will be able to do business.
The digital war, launched against humans and nature in 1945 with the obliteration of two Japanese cities, opened a new era, the era of global nihilism whose lingua franca is mathematics and whose form of reality is the mathematical model in which humans are mere computational factors. There are cultures on this planet still that resist this compulsive computation and its practice of natural and human degradation. They cannot be reduced to digits or some factor or marginal utility. They are not enemies of Nature but integral elements of Nature. It is necessary to remember that. Those who bombard us with lies about sustainability are only the descendants of the Strangeloves, the Tellers, von Neumanns, Oppenheimers and the psychopathic misanthropes who paid them for creating the means by which they may sustain themselves (they believe) at the expense of annihilating the rest of us. The Sustainable Development Goals and DIE are the immoral basis by which sustainable atomic, biological and chemical war can be waged against Nature and its human members.