Apocalypse Now Or Nirvana Next Week?

By: Andrew_McKillop

The Theory of Hydra
Dovetailing seamlessly with the unstated political goal of dumbing down society beyond and below the dementia threshold, the cult of Multiple Threats to the economy, society, the environment, the rule of law, the status of western civilization and electric power plant capacity at times of peak demand have at least one common thread. That is downsizing and dumbing down. This affects everything whether it is public knowledge and awareness or the ability to face challenges of any kind - like the shock of finding out that expensive windfarms don't work when the wind doesn't blow “but we didn't know that”.

As a random example of State-run dumbing down, the UK's BBC state propaganda outlet occasionally broadcasts strangely eccentric anti-Islamic State animated cartoon clips at times of peak viewing. Making this offering all the more eccentric, crudely animated images of captured hostages are shown being transported in an armed convoy of cattle trucks among lush green jungle scenery, where some of them escape among the dripping ferns, but the others are of course tortured and shot. The same news outlet showed the real and last British troops leaving Afghanistan's Helmand province and the British Bastion camp of about 10 square kilometres size – in a barren desert. No dripping ferns but Islamic jihadist militants, certainly.

About 68% of 1000 persons polled for the BBC about the Afghan war which cost UK taxpayers around 40 billion pounds, and 453 troop fatalities according to government figures, said they thought it was useless. The majority also said they thought it would do nothing to improve security inside the UK. The Islamic threat therefore lives on, whether in the “jungles” of Syria and Iraq, or in Afghanistan. To date, British politicians have not yet used the costs of Britain's useless war in Afghanistan as an argument why they should not pay-in 2 billion euros to the European Union, of which the war spending by other members of the club was far more modest. British “friends and allies” in the club, like Angela Merkel, have been rather curt about whether the UK should pay or not, saying the EU club is like 'Hotel California' – you can enter but you can never leave, unless you empty your wallet at the check out!

Stress Disorder
It will be surprising if western political leaderships do not press ahead with the cult of threatening, apocalyptic and millennial change oppressing us before the glorious Better Times arrive,  by using End Times doctrine as derived from Timothy, Chapter 4. End Times eschatology says that studying the end of civilizations, empires or the end of an individual's life can help accelerate the arrival of Paradise on Earth. Pursuing this goal requires mass amnesia as a powerful drug for diluting and smothering social perception of change or the perceived threat of history. This threat is basic: If the past changed, the future can also change. Distancing even the recent past is part of the process.

For Britons, the Afghan war is all over and soon it will be “like it never happened”, at least to them, which dovetails with the Hydra Threat, collectively perceived in the western democracies, by 2014, of events “as far back as 2011” and what was then dubbed Arab Spring. Now it is the threat of returning youth-revolt jihadists with a copy of “Islam for Dummies” in the backpack alongside their war trophies such as the scalps of decapitated civilians and a ticket to prison when they get back home.

The “street theater” events of Arab Spring were initially approved by the mass media and political leaders but rather quickly gave way to more proof that western paradigms are collapsing. At first, the mainstream media presented Arab Spring as splendid open air street riots proving that aspirations for western-democracy are everywhere. The riots proved that the west, even in its present weakened state is still the global model or archetype. Bashr al Assad of Syria, although he occasionally runs elections was the symbol of anti-democracy and the rejection of the market economy (and a Qatari gas pipeline across his country). On the other hand the riots were proof that the Arab dictators and tyrants shoehorned into power, or at least tolerated and chaperoned by the west, who served the west for decades such as Hosni Mubarak and Zineddine bin Ali were finished.

While Tunisia's bin Ali was quickly given a safe haven for deposed Arab tyrants in the police state of Saudi Arabia, al Assad of Syria did not flee – his ideal destination for the mainstream media and western politicians would of course have been Putin's Russia, bringing more proof that Putin is (as 'Newsweek' called him) is The Pariah who supplies about 33% of the EU2's oil and gas. Who would need that stuff with winter coming along rather fast?

 By summer 2014, the term “Arab Spring” was as unknown in the west as democracy in the Arab world. This however in no way stopped the Arab Spring riot-process from gaining traction, in fact the rapid way that dictatorships like that of Mubarak or bin Ali in Tunisia, or even Gaddafi in Libya were winkled out of power, with a little NATO military persuasion in Gaddafi's case, was almost certainly and surely an encouragement for other street rioters. The die was cast. The state, at least in an increasing number of cases can be overturned quite fast, un Ukraine also, even if nothing at all happens afterwards – except low level civil war, economic collapse and the return of the generals or in Ukraine's case the Candy Billionaire and his oligarchs.

The street disorder of the now increasingly worldwide “flash mob” revolt became stress disorder for western public opinion – so it was “uninvented”. Who talks about Arab Spring these days? What happens is the flash mob retires to its ghetto high rises and fast food outlets, stays unemployed, downloads atrocity-killing video clips from ISIS on the Internet social networks, and gets back to the business as usual of doing nothing. Political aspirations, as they are called, traced a perfect boom-slump. From nothing back to nothing. This is the real western model.

State Paranoia
Obviously there are Dark Forces at work. That stands to un-reason. How does it feel to live under a government that is getting even more paranoid with each passing day? 

The pat excuse for the guilty – the governments – is that we live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable, and that anybody next to you in the street or subway train or airplane seat is a “potential threat” to the government if not to you – because you don't know them but the state has “tabs” on them – and you. Western governments not only feel the need to raise taxes and whine about “the recovery” but also the need to intercept our emails, record our phone calls and track our spending, and this paranoia doesn't stop there. Thousands of organizations all over the planet need to be spied on, whether they are “real enemies or potential friends”. From Big Aunty and her Nanny State, governments have moved on to Big Brother.

 The peepul are told that the emerging Big Brother police state is for their safety, and this safety starts with the government feeling safe. For paranoids, feeling safe is a 24/7 job and there are only false friends plus real enemies to keep an eye on. The Fourth Estate, for example, the press and media can no longer be trusted despite its servile and unquestioning support of Big Brother, leading to the rout of Official News and Views due to editorial and news manager trying to outguess the government and go further with their lie-riddled patriotic pap that the public laughs at and dismisses out of hand – when they bother to read, view or listen to it.

Certainly accelerated and intensified by the USA's descent into a soup of official paranoia, its western allies have also moved far down the trail of the Permanent Emergency – whether its the war on terror or the fight against non-existent global warming and the mortal threat of carbon.   Countries like the UK, whose immigration laws and controls are so sloppy that around 50 000 illegal immigrants “have gone missing” and can't be traced, is considering a carbon copy Terror Tracing process like that of the US, where purchasing Amtrak train tickets with cash is considered to be “suspicious activity” and must be reported to national security authorities.

Domestic security hysteria is a communicable disease shown by the US-led cult of “special forces” charged with domestic security control and threat prevention. Showing the paranoiac obsession of this quest, paid officials even exist, go to work and earn their living with a remit of chcking and controlling the loyalty and patriotism of national football team owners, managers and players – including female football players!

The External Threat
This is the Big One. Former allies are now False Friends. Former enemies are now deadly enemies. All of them must be spied on. Tens of thousand of new government employees “struggling against the enemy” have to justify their existence, naturally leading to them inventing threats or exaggerating any threats they don't have to invent while they ignore “past and controlled” threats they decided to forget all about, and “new threats” they didn't personally invent, like Youth Jihadists.

Likewise, beefed-up existing security agencies, and new ones created since the millennium and its 9 / 11 terror cult feel the need to boast, to justify their high costs and lack of results. In the US, the NSA is now probably better known than either the FBI or CIA. In the UK, the GCHQ has a higher profile for prying into the lives of average citizens, than MI5 or MI6. In both cases these security agencies stock their supercomputers with billions of phone calls and Google searches, and the mostly useless contents from hundreds of thousands of seized PC hard drives.

Paranoia feeds on useless information when it is not information that is purely invented to justify cowardice, confusion, inaction and incompetence.
When it concerns real information this is another pair of kippers. Western interest in the flash mob rebellions flagged very fast, the subject got too complex and too real and this rejection was certainly intensified by the “failed uprising” in Syria which became the cancer of an evil and barbaric civil war sucking in “the jihadis”, armed by the west and paid for by KSA and Qatar, from as many as 25 countries, including an estimated 3500 young European male (and a few female) converts to Islamic extremism, or more exactly Crony Islam.

This external threat was just what the psychologist ordered for the paranoiacs who think they run western society. The public is inundated with clips of open air street killings, crucifixions and beheadings. The now forgotten Arab Spring street demonstrations overthrowing the “sitting regime” were de-learned and replaced by paranoid gore. 

Roots of the Paranoid State
The roots of mass schizophrenia in western society are deeply-entrenched. We might for example believe that what we can call The Great Unknowing is only a periodic and massive upsurge of individual and collective madness, but the evidence suggests otherwise. It suggests that a wide-area or nearly total process of de-learning, cultural amnesia, denial and rejection of even the basic concept of society emerged through the past 30-odd years. All has been swept away, even “free market capitalism” and other supposed traditional attributes of western society, because the rational bases of society “as we knew it” have been distorted, damaged or destroyed.

Fear-motivated rejection of menacing change - paranoia - can become systematic or even pre-emptive, which spurs the Baby and the Bathwater syndrome for treating anything new or different. In western society of today this is given the “homely” label of dumbing down. Knowing nothing and keeping your nose down is always better. News managers and opinion manipulators respond to this by accelerating the general social rejection of any news – unless it is morbid and threatening or can be spun that way. Individuals, social groups, even entire political parties or political movements become “vaccinated” against reality and unable (as well as unwilling) to reason. This is much further along and deeper in the danger zone than simply denying reality.

Aldous Huxley painted an image of democracy and then civilization defeated and destroyed by a surfeit of useless information, soft drugs, mindless music and sexual frivolity among other methods used, or to be used by the dictators he thought would soon control western society. George Orwell argued that Stalinist and Hitlerian police state  propaganda and ruthless control of the media, alongside State terrorist repression of any challenge to the New Dictators would be the dominant process. These were however only two different strategies for achieving the same goal – the nihilist or apocalyptic destruction of western civilization and the perversion of its values.

We have massive evidence of that being the case today in almost all western societies, but due to a process we cannot exactly define. We could say it was “part-Huxley” and “part-Orwell” and converged in a state of official paranoia and non-politics, still passing itself off as politics. State paranoia is light years away from innocence – the paranoia is rational because crony government has sealed its fate.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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