*Originally published on grandtheftworld.com.
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
-C.S. Lewis
For context, I thought it might be helpful to start this post by letting you know that it is being written in the hours following the Canadian government’s militarized response to the trucker protest in Ottawa on February 18, 2022. While I am not necessarily in the habit of writing editorial pieces, I think it’s important to capture as many of the thoughts and insights of this moment as we possibly can, and submit them to the time capsule for posterity – at least for that reason, if for no other. I will still endeavor to provide relevant historical context where applicable, though at the moment, I find myself struggling to find apt comparisons in my own memory. We’ll see how that situation ultimately shakes out.
This will be a qualitatively different composition from what some readers may have come to expect, but my hope is that it will provoke thought about these events that slants a little more critically and a little less emotionally than what may happen otherwise.
That Day In February
Like I imagine most of us were doing, I was busy working on Friday afternoon when the headlines started popping up all over the place. News aggregators, social media, mobile notifications… everywhere – except in the mainstream media outlets, I would wager. No doubt they were doing their level best to keep any and all coverage of the events off of their audience’s radar, as seems to be their custom. I honestly don’t know what the CNNs and NY Times of the world were reporting; I stopped paying them any attention a long time ago.
As the hours progressed through the afternoon, and more and more livestreams from downtown Ottawa began to proliferate on the various platforms, it began to dawn on me what was actually taking place. This was not meant be a localized event, where the Canadian government was simply dispersing a political demonstration by some of its disgruntled citizens. The tension of the standoff between the truckers and the state had obviously been building the entire week, evidenced by the invoking of the Emergency Powers Act by Prime Minister Trudeau and the complete indifference of government officials to even attempt to engage the protest organizers in meaningful discourse. No, what we were bearing witness to was the response of the state to those it considers to be its vassals; a peasant uprising of the crudest manner necessitating a response that illustrates the full strength and power of the ruling class to anyone willing to bear witness.
As tends to happen at these moments in history, time became very elastic – with minutes stretching into hours and hours condensing into moments. I don’t even remember the specific livestream that I settled on to watch the events unfold. I didn’t bookmark it or share it out to any of the social ghettos. I knew there were hundreds – if not thousands – of other streams broadcasting at the same time, documenting the scene that was unfolding in downtown Ottawa. As cliched as it sounds, I had a sense even at that time that the whole world was watching the same picture that was flickering on my screen. Indeed, the stream that my attention was transfixed to reached almost 10,000 concurrent viewers at one point, according to the counter. I have no doubt there were others that exceeded that count by magnitudes.
Maybe that was exactly the point. Maybe the intent behind this display of power by the state was to draw as many eyes to it as possible; to show everyone willing to watch what happens to those who stand in defiance of the all-powerful democratic government of Canada, and their allies in other nations all around the world. “We’ve been lenient with you so far, but when it really matters we will impose our will and you are powerless to stop it.” That is the message that came through loud and clear as I sat at my desk watching the livestream from downtown Ottawa, now completely incapable of anything resembling productivity as that message was being transmitted. The message that we are allowed to peacefully protest and raise our voices only until such time as the state decides that freedom of expression is no longer in the interest of the greater good – which, of course, means no longer in the interest of the state. I mean, if you were witnessing the events in real time like I was, did you receive a different message?
But I think there was an even deeper strategy being employed here, and we are supposed to focus our attention on the events themselves as the main point of emphasis. We are supposed to be outraged by the brutality exercised by the state enforcing its will on the peasants through violent action, or the petulance and selfishness of the protestors disrupting life for everyone. We are supposed to occupy a position on one side of the fence or the other. We are supposed to become more polarized according to our own values and beliefs. And we are supposed to view those members of our society who hold the viewpoint opposing ours as horrible, thoughtless, and dangerous. This is all a part of the process of “othering,” and it has been refined to an exact science over the course of many decades.
Different Day, Duplicate Damage
As the gravity of what had happened in Ottawa on Friday afternoon – and continued into the early evening hours – started to really sink in, it began to occur to me this was the perfect type of traumatic event that could be employed in the service of mass mind control programming. And not even so much for the people who were physically in attendance, but more for those of us who might be watching along at home or maybe even at work – like I was. Not to mention the millions of people around the world who not even become aware of what had happened until hours – or maybe even days – later.
One of the things that I became particularly aware of after I had be able to calm my own response of anger and outrage later in the evening was the story of the elderly woman with a walker who had been trampled by horses. This story stuck out like a sore thumb for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the details of the incident would vary wildly depending upon which source you were receiving those details from. To be clear – I am not questioning whether or not this incident happened. Photographic and documentary evidence indicate that it very clearly did. What I am questioning, though, is the manner in which it is being presented to the public at large.
The above images have now made their way around the world – several times over, I’m sure – and have most likely been burned into the memories of many. Just like the photo of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square. Just like the images of the smoking World Trade Center towers on that day in September. Just like the footage of the Zapruder film at the moment of impact in Dealey Plaza. Images are powerful memetic devices, and are often utilized to convey much more than just a graphic depiction of something that happened. They can be employed to not only direct our attention and focus, but also to trigger emotional responses to a subject that we might remain otherwise indifferent toward. After all – as Richard and Tony have pointed out on numerous occasions – if an emotional response is being elicited, then the likelihood of your critical thinking faculties being engaged for the purpose of problem solving and sense-making decreases.
“A dangerous meme is basically a trigger that sets off something inside of you that you may or may have not been aware of. What would your knee jerk reaction be to knowing that your rival is sleeping with your one true love? How would you react if you were to unwittingly catch them in the act? That kind of sudden revelation can make a mild mannered citizen into a killer, so don’t be surprised that there are other strange bits of information out there that can break the human mind in different yet equally drastic ways.”
-from Understanding Memetics, SCP Foundation
Even though this quote was lifted from an admitted work of fiction that does not automatically mean the information it conveys is false. As many academic studies have shown us, the average human is capable of being psychologically programmed through a variety of techniques – some of them effective even without the conscious agreement of the subject. The Predator Class understands these processes much better than the rest of us, and they weaponize them and use them against us whenever those opportunities presents themselves. They have spent decades in time and millions upon millions in dollars on the research of these techniques. I have written about this before, as have many others.
Contrary to some arguments I have heard, it is not necessary to completely control every aspect of an event in order to produce the desired outcome. Sometimes all that is necessary is to curate the perception of that event, and perhaps only the perception of a minority of the population. In these cases, the details themselves become meaningless because they will be lost to the noise of the information landscape anyway. Two people who witness the exact same series of events will never completely agree with each other on exactly what happened, especially when that succession of events takes place over an extremely condensed amount of time. Add some emotion, ideological flavoring and other personal biases to the proceedings and the accounts of multiple people will begin to differ wildly from one another.
And for those who may have been wondering, it looks like the woman in red from Friday afternoon will be ok. No thanks to Prime Minister Black Face Hitler.
https://twitter.com/CandySero_/status/1495987159383347201 (Unfortunately this link was scrubbed from Twitter, and now leads only to a blank page. An archived version can be found here:)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220222052704/https://twitter.com/CandySero_/status/1495987159383347201
Tyranny Is A Question
The way I see it, it doesn’t really matter what side of the ideological fence you find yourself on. What was on display in Ottawa was just the beginning of the authoritarianism that will be rolled out to the rest of what we call the Western world in the near future. The state does not care whether you choose to stand with them or against them. The state will always seek to preserve itself and its functions first; every other concern is a distant second. They will trample you whether you wave their flag or that of their enemy.
I don’t have a happy ending or a silver lining to present to you to wrap this up, either. Whatever we think we know about what happened in Ottawa is nowhere near the actual reality of what took place. The people who suffered on that day – and continue to suffer, and will continue to suffer – will fade into the dust of memory. Six months from now the majority of the population won’t even remember what happened. I have no doubt there will be an abundance of traumatic events between now and then, both in Canada and in other nations. Even if some people do remember, those memories will be a vague recollection lacking context and most of the details will be blurry.
But I do know that events such as these will continue as long as we continue to fight the state – and the parasites that control it – on its own terms. We will all continue to be used as pawns in the control game because that is what we allow to be done. The state – and the system it perpetuates – needs your energy in order to keep functioning. But more importantly than that, it needs your attention. Without those currencies, it would collapse under the weight of its own corruption. We are the ones that keep it going, and it has always been that way.
This is just the first domino in the line of state-directed domestic violence to fall. Each succeeding domino will impact with a little more force to continue the cascade. What is happening in Canada and Australia and Germany and Italy and France and Austria – do I really need to keep calling out names – is going to continue to spread until it consumes every developed nation in the world, and all of the inhabitants of those nations. But this has been part of the plan all along, hasn’t it? Keep the people distracted so they don’t realize they are building their own prison cells and mindlessly stumbling straight into them?
They need you to choose a side in order for the game to continue. Or more specifically, they need you to choose one of the sides that they present to you. I mean – the dialectic just doesn’t work unless you feed your energy into it. At this particular point in our history, R. Buckminster Fuller’s words ring truer in my ears than ever before. And the only way to release ourselves from the bondage of the current system – and the one we seem to be building – is to build the alternative system that makes the one the Predator Class wants to create obsolete, and thereby find our exit from it.
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