The New Dark Age

How can I put this? We live in a gaudy, sometimes, bubble, insulated from the world, fed an illusion that strokes our vanity, our egos, our presumptions but especially our fears. A world, so complete, so walled off from the real world and for so long that it’s impossible to see beyond the Lie. Out of it as if we live in a walled city. It consumes us all, even questions are prepared for us as are the answers.

The Lie feeds our vanities and our fears, our assumptions. Everything we think we know is a lie, so complete, down to the tiniest detail. In every direction when, if, we care to look we see, the Lie, a lie that’s impossible to challenge because it’s impossible to recognise it as a lie. The Lie consumes everything. The Lie is ancient, embedded in the ruins of our memories.

Oh it’s a clever lie, cleverly constructed. It’s deep, it has many levels, many layers like an onion. Peeling back a lie reveals another lie. It’s the Lie that preserves the status quo, that’s stops the questions. That permits no questioning.

The Lie is rooted in privilege and power, power accumulated, stolen over the centuries, sucked from the earth, the sky, the water, our bodies, our minds. Transported, the Lie feeds the privileged. In turn, that privilege is used to perpetuate the Lie.

I’m struck by the history of racism (and its brother, sexism) and the role both have played in creating the Lie. Both are, of course the progeny of a class society, specifically that of European capitalism. One could say that it’s an historical accident, I mean, why Western Europe and white people and specifically, Christianity and its progeny, slavery, the fuel of the industrial revolution and again, its brother patriarchy, the rationale that justified Western industrial capitalism? Paradoxically, it’s the so-called Age of Enlightenment that rationalised the rise of industrial capitalism. It was, after all, the philosopher Hobbes, who described the human body as if it were nothing more than a machine:

“Life is but a motion of limbs… For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body.” — Hobbes, Leviathan, 1650)

And in the 17^th century, far from being the Age of Enlightenment, Hobbes’ contemporaries described their time as the Iron Century and with good reason. The rise of mercantile capitalism, the suppression of women’s role in the economy and in society that, along with slavery, literally supplied the wealth that powered the Industrial and Scientific Revolution that in turn, made possible the rise of the Royal Navy and we know what that led to, or do we? It’s during this time we see the conscious suppression/revision of Europe’s organic connection to Africa and Asia and the knowledge those Ancient civilisations bequeathed to Europe, stolen by Europe. This disconnect enabled European capitalism to begin the task of rewriting the history of humanity, supplanting, especially the so-called Middle East and North Africa, with Greece as the source of European civilisation. By the time of the 19^th century, the European colonial powers of England, France, Holland, Spain, Germany and Portugal had, between them, conquered Africa, Asia and the Americas and literally sucked them dry of the resources, both material and human, that built the European industrial powerhouse. So the Lie was built not only on the theft of land and resources but on the appropriation of the knowledge of our collective past by rewriting our history in its entirety.

“If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the Revised Ancient one, it will be necessary to not only rethink the fundamental bases of ‘Western Civilisation’ but also to recognise the penetration of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history. The Ancient Model had no major ‘internal’ deficiencies, or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was overthrown for external reasons. For 18^th– and 19^th century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as it pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable.”

‘Black Athena The Afroasiatic roots of European Civilisation Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985’, by Martin Bernal

Bernal’s superb history took an age to get published, because, as he says, the idea that Africans and Asians could be the source of European ‘civilisation’ was just too much to swallow, not only for 19^th century racists but also for 20^th century racist publishers. As is the case today, the role of academics in the revision of history is central to the Lie and what could be further proof of this than the role of universities in the suppression of the revulsion felt by their students (and some staff) over the slaughter of Palestinians by the Zionist imperialists? Furthermore, the perpetuation of the myth of Zionism as some kind of ‘saviour’ of the Jewish ‘race’ and the role the media plays in promoting this myth, is only possible because the history of Zionism as its perceived by the majority of the public, is a total fabrication and especially the role of British imperialism in the Lie, a role that has been entirely suppressed in the public discourse. This is of course, just the tip of the iceberg. When one digs deeper into this created reality, we find that nothing escapes the Lie and I mean nothing! But how is this possible? We live in a culture saturated in data, coming at us 24/7, it’s like trying to walk on quicksand, it sucks you in. Perhaps this is why. We’re blinded by information, we’re drowning in data! Discriminating between truth and falsehood becomes virtually impossible, it’s as if our world has been dropped into a giant blender. In the process, critical thinking is homogenised into a soup of non-sense. Everything is everything and everything is nothing. Is it any wonder therefore, that the ruling class shit a brick when the Worldwide Web came along? The potential of the Web to blow the entire fantasy apart eventually sank into the power-crazed brains of the ruling class, they had to repossess it! Such power in the hands of the ‘Great Unwashed’ was unthinkable. Today, I came across this:

“During a vitriolic rant about university demonstrators at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security on Tuesday, Palantir CEO Alex Karp came right out and said that if those on the side of the protesters win the debate on this issue, the west will lose the ability to wage wars.” – ‘

Empire Managers Explain Why This New Protest Movement Scares Them’ – Caitlin Johnstone, 9 May, 2024

Karp didn’t mince his words:

“We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show.”

“If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”

#Palantir CEO Alex Karp at #SCSPAIExpo2024 pic.twitter.com/MwQoDlSMFw

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Palantir (@PalantirTech) May 8, 2024

Note Karp’s reference to “los[ing the] intellectual debate”, the ruling class always speak the truth (as they see it) when talking amongst themselves. It’s the difference between reading the Financial Times and reading the Daily Mail, or in the US between the Wall Street Journal and the Daily News. One of the central objectives of neoliberalism has been to transform education into a tool, not only to supply the brains to run their Empire for them but to ensure that real, critical thinking is snuffed out. Clearly, at least in the US, they have failed dismally in achieving the latter. In turn it explains the vicious crackdown by the Security State, not only in the US but across the entire ‘Collective West’ on all opposition to its wars of conquest disguised as ‘defending human rights’. It seems that the proxy war launched against Russia in the Ukraine and the genocidal holocaust launched against the Palestinian people, has exposed the vulnerable underbelly of the Empire. It reveals that the ruling class of the West doesn’t have it all its own way. That change is possible. The Lie does have its limits.