Saturday, April 23, 2022

"Technik and Totalitarian Global Dictatorship" and profile of Jacques Ellul by Organic Radicals

TECHNIK AND TOTALITARIAN GLOBAL DICTATORSHIP

Posted on April 19, 2022by winter oak

Forty-five years ago, dissident French thinker Jacques Ellul wrote about all the contradictions and difficulties involved in maintaining what he called the “scientific-state-techno-economical complex”.

Looking ahead, he wondered out loud how it could ever be kept functioning and expanding in the future.

He concluded, with foresight which seems uncanny in the 2020s: “In truth, there is one way, but only one: the most totalitarian global dictatorship that could ever exist”.

Ellul was already featured on the Organic Radicals site, but we have significantly expanded our profile of this important social critic, too little known outside of his native country.

He died in 1994, but many of his statements sound like clear warnings of the Great Reset to come.

This is undoubtedly because what we are experiencing today is, like all the previous stages of Technik’s advance, the logical continuation of one single process of ever-tightening central control.

The industrial agenda of the thing they call “progress” is unnatural and anti-human and, as such, will never be willingly embraced by healthy and free-thinking human beings.

If subtle manipulation no longer does the trick, as the domination is pushed beyond previous limits, brute force will always be deployed to impose it.

As Ellul understood, it was therefore inevitable that the rule of Technik would lead us to this point in history, in the same way that a road heading in the direction of a cliff edge will inevitably one day reach the fateful drop.

Our revised profile of Ellul can be found here.

Source: Winter Oak

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jacques Ellul

“The myth of Progress has killed the revolutionary spirit”

Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was a sociologist and philosopher close to the anarchist movement in France and one of the inspirations behind the contemporary décroissance, or degrowth, movement.

Although a veteran of the French Resistance against Nazi occupation, and a student of Marx in his youth, Ellul was never fully part of the radical left in France.

This was partly due to his Protestant Christian beliefs: the Situationists, for instance, felt they could not work closely with him on that account despite the similarities in their respective positions.

Jean-Luc Porquet stresses that this did not mean that Ellul was somehow less revolutionary than other dissidents: “We mustn’t forget that Ellul was anything but a reformist and that he declared himself to be a revolutionary: he thought that this world is unjust and absurd and that we have to make profound and radical changes to its structure (which is in itself the definition of revolution)”. (1)

A general acceptance of the idea of “progress” is, after all, hardly the basis for a truly radical opposition to the status quo. As Ellul declared: “The myth of Progress has killed the revolutionary spirit”. (2)

Renault factory Ellul was above all a powerful critic of the force which he termed, in French, ‘technique‘. He was referring to what most would call ‘technology’, but insisted that the ‘-ology’ suffix applies to the study of a subject rather than to the subject matter itself.

Because the English word ‘technique’ has other meanings, the German term ‘Technik’, much loved by the industrialist Nazis, better conveys his sense.

Right from the start, Technik’s machines have been about increasing profit, said Ellul. “The more a business is ‘productive’ and competitive the less human labour it employs”. (3)

“Despite attempts to demonstrate otherwise, the ‘new machines’ are machines to economise on the workforce. We see growing investment in capital and decreasing investment in the workforce, at the same time as the number of workers shrinks”. (4)

It was therefore not true to argue that Technik was “neutral” and that its value depended on the use we made of it. (5)

Human interests always came second in a society ruled by Technik. The machine never stopped, Ellul said, and to achieve maximum profitability people had to be organised to work the same way. (6)

He wrote: “The system behind Technik comes equipped with its own agents of adaptation. Advertising, entertainment by mass media, political propaganda, personal and public relationships – all of this, with superficial variations, has just one function, which is to adapt human beings to Technik”. (7)

Shopping mall France

Victims of Technik were “mesmerized by the multiplication of images, the intensity of noise, the dispersal of information” (8) which led them into “a universe of diversion and illusion”. (9).

They were torn from their belonging to the beauty of the natural world (their “withness” (10) in Paul Cudenec’s terminology) and trapped in a dystopia whose surface appearance revealed its inner reality: “Everywhere, Technik creates ugliness”. (11)

The same process lay behind the uniformisation of cultures, including those in the global south which fell prey to industrial Western colonialism.

Technik, according to Ellul, “breaks up sociological forms, destroys moral frameworks, blows apart social and religious taboos, desacralises people and things, reduces the social body to a collection of individuals”. (12)

covid propagande FR

A constant barrage of mendacious propaganda was needed to achieve and maintain this full-spectrum domination and exploitation, he explained: “The technological narrative is above all a narrative of lies”. (13)

According to this narrative, it was simply not possible to question Technik itself. Like the aristocrats of old, today’s technocrats considered themselves above the law, explained Ellul, (14) but also above all criticism.

It was clear that we urgently needed “nothing less than the break-up of Technik’s society” (15) he said, but the industrial system had declared itself “too important to be called into question”. (16) “No judgement is admissible which could risk standing in the way of Science or Technik”. (17)

It was not considered legitimate to counter the machine-logic of Technik with concerns about the ethical value of its activities, since it was regarded as self-evident that technological advance was always a good thing.

CRS Wrote Ellul: “When it’s a question of the dangers, costs, and so on, the scientist or technician, who has run out of arguments, closes down the discussion with ‘In any case, we can’t stand in the way of progress’. There is thus something here which is absolute, unassailable, against which we can do absolutely nothing, which human beings must simply obey”. (18)

We were “indisputably in a society made entirely by and for Technik”, (19) Ellul argued, to which we were forced to submit by what he termed “a sort of state terrorism”. (20)

Ellul pointed out that Technik had always historically led to the centralization and concentration of power and described the resulting contemporary monstrosity variously as “the techno-military-state complex” (21) and “this scientific-state-techno-economical complex”. (22)

Identifying the many contradictions and difficulties involved in maintaining this system, he asked how it could be kept functioning and expanding. He concluded, with foresight which seems uncanny in the 2020s: “In truth, there is one way, but only one: the most totalitarian global dictatorship that could ever exist”. (23)

Video link: The Betrayal by Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul (54 mins)

jacques ellul2

1. Jean-Luc Porquet, ‘Jacques Ellul: La Démesure Technicienne’, Radicalité: 20 Penseurs vraiment critiques, coordonné par Cédric Biagini, Guillaume Carnino et Patrick Marcolini (Montreuil: L’Échappée, 2013).
2. Jacques Ellul, <em>De la Révolution aux révoltes</em> (Paris: Editions de la Table Ronde, 2011), cit. José Ardillo, La Liberté dans un monde fragile : Écologie et pensée libertaire (Paris: L’Échappée, 2018), p. 167.
3. Jacques Ellul, Le bluff technologique (Paris: Hachette, 2004), p. 38.
4. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 36.
5. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 90.
6. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 104.
7. Jacques Ellul, Le Système technicien (Paris: Le Cherche-Midi, 2004), cit. Ardillo, p.157.
8. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 393.
9. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 27.
10. See Paul Cudenec, The Withway (2022).
11. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 98.
12. Jacques Ellul, La Technique ou l’Enjeu du siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1954), cit. Porquet, p. 13. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 667.
14. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 74.
15. Jacques Ellul, ‘Autopsie de la révolution’, Serge Latouche présente Jacques Ellul, Contre le totalitarisme technique (Neuvy-En-Champagne: Editions le passager clandestin, 2013), p. 99.
16. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 149.
17. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 414.
18. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 402.
19. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 51.
20. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 181.
21. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 160.
22. Ellul, Le bluff technologique, p. 552.
23. Jacques Ellul, Le système technicien (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1977), p. 287, cit. Serge Latouche présente Jacques Ellul, Contre le totalitarisme technique, pp. 33-34.

Source: organic radicals

"This tiny island nation proves that the West only believes in its own ‘spheres of influence’" by Timur Fomenko

This tiny island nation proves that the West only believes in its own ‘spheres of influence’

Australia and the US believe the Solomon Islands must not be allowed to partner up with China, showing a selective respect for self-determination

By Timur Fomenko, a political analyst

This tiny island nation proves that the West only believes in its own ‘spheres of influence’

Russia is bad. There is no excuse for attacking Ukraine, and the argument that it was a strategic imperative to stop NATO’s encroachment is just propaganda, right? That’s what every source in the mainstream media will tell you. But oddly enough, that logic never seems to apply when western countries perceive rival states to be encroaching on their own peripheries, and there’s been no bigger example of that than as to how American and Australian political classes have reacted to the now signed “Bilateral security agreement” between China and the Solomon Islands, a small archipelago which exists not far from Papua New Guinea.

The deal was confirmed this week, despite Australia and the US having piled on scores of official visits in a bid to try and halt it. This has been combined with a media narrative of extreme paranoia claiming, without due evidence, that China is set to build a naval base on the islands and poses a direct military threat to Australia in turn. This has produced some hysterical commentaries, with a founder of The Diplomat Magazine even literally calling for bombing and regime change in the island nation.

Australian PM explains refusal to meet China’s envoy

It seems strange that the same countries who said that Ukraine has a right to “choose” its allies, or in other words self-determination, do not seem to apply that logic to countries who choose to tilt towards perceived rival states, and there’s plenty of historical examples to back it up with. The consensus is, whether expressed in moderate or explicit terms, that more must be done to “remove” the influence of China from the Solomon Islands, with the assumption that only the US and its allies act in the true interests of the state and its people. It’s as if there is no comprehension whatsoever as to why the Solomon Islands may not consent to be under the hegemony of Australia and the United States, and why it is obviously going to prefer a strategy of “hedging” to maximize political space and opportunity for itself, rather than being forced to exclusively pick one side. This is demonstrative of the elitist mindset which dominates these countries.

Butter wouldn’t melt in Australia’s own mouth. Canberra presents itself as a benevolent and exceptionalist country that serves only the best interests of the island nations of the Pacific, and not the American empire. In reality, this is a de-facto presumption that it has the right to permanently dominate these countries and shape their politics. At no point does it understand that, as a colonial state, one which for most of its existence espoused openly racist policies against non-whites and decimated its indigenous population, why the island nations of the Pacific may actually not really want to be under their “benevolent hug” after all. Rather, Canberra is lost in the discourse of its own longstanding “Yellow Peril” legacy racism concerning China, its obsession with following US policy at all costs, and in turn projects this as somehow standing to protect these islands, branding China as the threat to the region and itself as the hero.

Australia accuses China of ‘intimidation’ attempt

But again, countries like the Solomon Islands have no reason to see it this way. Being very small in size and population, they are very vulnerable to external political interference and compromising their national sovereignty. Take, for example, the island of Nauru. Because its economy collapsed as its mining resources were exhausted, it has become a de-facto Australian client state which is forced to use its currency and host illegal immigrants turned away by Australia. As a result, it is obvious why other island countries would want to preserve themselves by seeking multiple economic and political partners.

It is therefore lost on Australia why the Solomon Islands, a non-white former British protectorate (the British Queen is, to this day, also the Queen of the Solomon Islands, for that matter), might not want to be completely dominated by Canberra, and by extension, the US. This is why scores and scores of US and Australian officials visiting the island and mounting diplomatic pressure haven’t been able to change the mind of the Islands’ government. The sentiment of Anglophone exceptionalism has become a self-affirming feedback loop to the point they have completely lost touch with other countries. The same principle applies to the Western powers’ insincere concern for Ukraine and their hypocrisy in believing that only they themselves are entitled to “spheres of influence” and they must have an infinite right to encircle rival countries without any right of reply. Russia’s narrative about the threat emanating from Ukraine is simply “propaganda,” we are told, yet China making an ambiguous deal with a tiny island nation of just 700,000 or so is somehow deemed an imminent and escalatory threat to Australia itself. Is it not time we started to question this narrative?

Source: RT

Friday, April 22, 2022

"Daddies in Mommie-land" by James Howard Kunstler

Daddies in Mommie-land

America is a drama queen, like the Queen Bee in one of those Real Housewives shows on cable TV, whose entire purpose in life is creating colorful conflicts within her circle of sisters….

Welcome to the season of everything losing ground, at least for Western Civ. Sore-beset with idiots and scoundrels running things, the West stumbles backwards into neo-medieval darkness and superstition, hurling garlic bombs of objurgation against the supposedly wicked Putin along the way.

Your “trusted news sources” in our corner of the world will not tell you this, but the mythologized golem of the West’s collective sick mind, The Putin, mounted Operation Z in Ukraine at our country’s foolish behest. It was a twisted variation of the old head-trip Let’s You and Him Fight — described so well in psychologist Eric Berne’s classic book Games People Play. It’s a game instigated generally by women. The West detests the actual Mr. Putin for systemically and doggedly having to correct the mischief that the USA set in motion there in 2014 — putting out a dumpster fire we kept feeding for eight years.

Mainly we hate the Russian president for doing what he said he would do, acting like a man, literally having to set boundaries for the unruly children, like Daddy used to do. America hates daddies. To America, all daddies are monsters (rapists!). That’s why America wants to turn all daddies into mommies. Anyway, we barely remember what daddies used to do. The context for daddies — the family — has been obliterated in America by every agency and institution in the land. The only role available these days is the chimerical creature known as a “baby daddy,” which is as much a baby as a daddy, developmentally speaking. Real daddies are men, which is to say: not babies. Mr. Putin acts like a man, especially having to do a dirty job that needs doing, without complaint. America can’t stand that.

If the USA and its NATO allies actually cared about Ukraine, we would have just left the place alone to slowly settle into the de-industrialized agricultural backwater it was becoming. And if we wanted to prevent widespread devastation once Operation Z got underway, we would have promoted peace talks, with an emphasis on our previous declaration that Ukraine would not be a candidate to join NATO. Instead, we set up Ukraine as a launching pad for annoying Russia (while also using Ukraine as a money laundromat for public officials and arms-makers).

America is a drama queen, like the Queen Bee in one of those Real Housewives shows on cable TV, whose entire purpose in life is creating colorful conflicts within her circle of sisters. Daddy is not needed around that house, except offstage maybe as the wide-receiver for a multi-million-dollar paycheck courtesy of the NFL (a rival entertainment). When one of America’s drama queen stunts goes wrong, the Queen Bee melts into a puddle of tears — boo hoo — tripping the empathy toggle.The sisters cluster around her, beating their wings. Somebody, please, help her feel better… fetch her a glass of pino grigio or a Xanax!

Drama Queen Bee America does not like how the Ukraine drama is playing out. The mean old Daddy Putin is rocking the joint, cleaning out the place like Gary Cooper in some Long Branch Saloon of the Eurasian steppe — heaving all those Azov Nazis through the swinging doors out into the dusty street. The other sisters in the NATO circle were induced to acting as cheerleaders for the Azov boys, and now Mr. Putin has gone and turned off Europe’s gas. Western Civ is about to be sent to bed without dinner — the ultimate daddy trick. Now the sisters are all going boo hoo. Nothing is working for the sisterhood.

America’s president, “Joe Biden,” suits the current national script perfectly. He’s a mere prop for the drama queens. No one mistakes him for “Daddy.” He’s the old, impotent, intemperate, often confused “Grampy,” a figure of bathos and derision, a shell of a man who, in his prime, lived just to work his official positions for millions in grift. How, otherwise, do you account for his fortune? The Ukraine money laundromat was one of his favorite stops, managed carefully by cheerleaders Victoria Nuland, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and NSC official Fiona Hill, America’s foreign policy establishment there back in the day.

But who, exactly, is managing Grampy now backstage in the White House? My guess would be Susan Rice because you never hear anything about Susan Rice or her role there: Director of the Domestic Policy Council of the United States. Wow! Sounds weighty. When was the last time you saw her name in The New York Times or cable TV news? You’d think they’d be interested in her doings. Yet I doubt that one-in-a-hundred US citizens could tell you who Susan Rice is and what she does. (Was that her the other day in a bunny suit at the White House Easter Egg Roll, assisting a confused Grampy offstage?)

Somewhere in the White House there must be phone logs that record how many times a day Ms. Rice makes and receives phone calls across town to and from the Kalorama neighborhood of DC. Does that make Barack Obama America’s secret daddy? Or is he playing a somewhat different role… like, head of a cartel?

Source: Clusterfuck Nation

Thursday, April 21, 2022

"What Happened to Gonzalo Lira?" by The Good Citizen

What Happened to Gonzalo Lira?

American in Ukraine missing for a week and feared dead.

An American citizen has gone missing in Ukraine, and the western media is silent simply because he had the wrong views of Zelensky and the war.

Full Disclosure: Gonzalo Lira is/was my cousin. Coming from large families with lots of cousins, we’d met maybe once or twice but hadn’t seen each other in twenty-five years or more. I reached out to him last week by email and politely asked if he’d answer some questions on Russia/NATO/Putin for a Substack piece. I didn’t expect to hear back right away since we weren’t close but never thought it could be forever and for the worst possible reasons.

I hesitated to write about this last weekend when I first noticed it had been 24 and then 48 hours since Gonzalo had posted anything to any social media, though the early rumors were already circulating. He had been pretty consistent with his Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube activity since the start of the war, earning hundreds of thousands of followers for his honest and accurate reporting on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Gonzalo Lira was a writer, filmmaker, life coach, and more recently war reporter who had lived in Ukraine for years. He was the father of two children. He graduated with honors from Dartmouth and got a million-dollar advance for his first novel Counterparts at a young age.

He first began reporting on the Russian invasion from a luxury hotel in Kiev in late February before his videos went viral and made it onto Russian state TV. The next day hotel management, probably on orders from the government, kicked him out of the hotel and he took a train back to his residence city of Kharkov.

Why he didn’t take that as a sign to leave Ukraine entirely was curious, but he stayed and streamed his opposition opinions daily from his home in Kharkov. He knew he was taking a risk but perhaps didn’t take it seriously enough. One cannot beam from a digital device on this planet and not have NSA, CIA, and then SBU or Kraken Nazis track down that device to a specific location.

The Nazi assigned to go after him, nicknamed “Chille”.

Internet Archive revealed this tweet from the same profile that was deleted. Image linked.

Gonzalo had to know this, right? His motivations still seem baffling, still seem very naive. He was doing well, gaining followers and making good money, but the danger just doesn’t go away.

My first instinct was to assume the worst given Gonzalo’s own videos and tweets where he admitted his life was potentially in danger.

Three weeks ago the Daily Beast did a hit piece on him. The Daily Beast is a wholly controlled digital printer of CIA-Psyop-USA. The propaganda rag smeared him throughout using the usual panty melt editorializing of unserious Brooklynite soyisms and identitarian jargon like “manosphere” and “toxic masculinity”.

Trashy hit piece from CIA propaganda rag.

The entire piece was a slanderous work of fiction, mostly laughable if one knew who Gonzalo was, but it quickly turned dangerous when the propaganda rag contacted the Ukrainian government and alerted them to Gonzalo’s location, perhaps with the help of their betters at the CIA? Why would a “news organization” do this if not to maliciously endanger that person?

Gonzalo was making the rounds the past two months on dozens of popular YouTube channels that were dedicated to objectively discussing the war and not just lathering themselves up with Zelensky hero-worship porn and Ghost of Kyiv propaganda.

I first got a glimpse of his astute observations when he was in that hotel room in Kiev and said some obvious but insightful things about Russia’s strategy to move cautiously and avoid civilian casualties compared to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which commenced six weeks of indiscriminate bombing and civilian deaths.

I sent that video to some family with the words: “Check out what this guy is saying from his hotel room in Kiev. He’s spot on about Russia’s strategy.”

Less than ten minutes later they replied: “You know that’s your cousin Gonzalo, right?”

It had been a long time and I didn’t recognize him.

Here we are eight weeks later and all those musings in live streams about kidnappings and hit squads coming for him, and the Daily Beast intentionally putting his life in danger, and well, he’s been missing for almost a week and it’s hard not to fear the worst has happened.

Some of his YouTube videos that he streamed still show his location at the time of streaming as Kharkov, so it was not a mystery where he was but it’s the second-largest city in Ukraine. Tracking him down to a specific residence would have required very advanced digital tracing capabilities that the SBU and Ukrainian government probably do not have. It doesn’t appear that he used TOR or a VPN or any kind of technology to hide his exact location. I do not recall him talking about it, though he may have.

Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb

Gonzalo Lira is trending on Chilean twitter, but Chilean media/govt has been largely silent on his disappearance. Is it because he had a different view on Ukraine than the @gabrielboric -led govt ? Looks like Boric's commitment to "human rights" doesn't extend to all Chileans ...

The Chilean state department is aware and has confirmed his disappearance but the government hasn’t said much of anything. No word from his birth country, the United States. Presumably, their response will be feigned ignorance and silence. Maybe they’ll pin a medal on that Nazi who claims to know where Gonzalo is.

An American citizen with the wrong views of Zelensky and the U.S. empire goes missing and they couldn’t care less. What’s the point of citizenship, of paying taxes if your government will collude with Nazis to kill you if you dissent against their illegal coups and wars? The bare minimum contract of citizenship and holding a US passport around the world was once protection. Apparently, this only applies if you have the correct views now. Or maybe that all ended years ago when Obama drone bombed American teenager Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen while he was eating at an outdoor restaurant, all for the crimes of his father.

We can’t expect much from the U.S. government. Their response to Gonzalo’s disappearance will simply be another half a billion taxpayer dollars for more war, more dead Ukrainians, more dangerous weapons that will be bombed by Russia, or end up on the black market when Ukraine is an ash heap and failed state split in two.

They’re celebrating on the Ukrainian Borg twitter holes. The fake propaganda journalists embedded with Nazis are celebrating too because that’s what real intrepid journalism is all about - getting those critical of the regime whose boots you can’t stop licking abducted and killed.

There is no shortage of speculators on YouTube, Telegram, and impersonators on Twitter trying to build up their clout on his name. Some of the takes reveal people who hadn’t been paying any attention to Gonzalo until he went missing and are using his disappearance to build their channels. Stop posting or resharing their trash. Stop feeding the morons.

What to do?

It always feels like something needs to be done. Perhaps setting up a crowdfund (Not those sites!) to potentially higher International human rights attorneys to push for an investigation, or even force comment from the Ukrainian and U.S. governments on what they know regarding his disappearance. This is after all about the potential kidnapping, torture, and murder of an American citizen in Ukraine by Ukrainian Nazis who have openly bragged about getting Gonzalo on social media.

Any crowdfund would have to be through an attorney or platform that’s not tied to western countries where they’ll shut it down or seize the funds as they did with the Canadian truckers, twice.

If his family decides on something related to fundraising and taking some kind of legal/diplomatic action, or raising money for his two young children I’ll be sure to post it here.

In the meantime all we can do is ignore the gossip, hope he went to seek political asylum in Russia instead of the west, and that the worst fears and speculations aren’t true.

And maybe that too is naive.

Maybe he flew too close to the sun. If so, he did it with bravery, fearlessness, and the fundamental belief that in a world drowning in propaganda and psychological manipulation, above all things, the truth still matters.

And we know Gonzalo told the truth about the vile Ukrainian regime.

His disappearance is merely the latest evidence.