The Lights Have Gone Out Again

Time to Cancel Remembrance Day and Instead, Remember.

Remembrance Day is coming around again. I still see those ridiculous cheap poppy pins on people, but fewer of them now. They have no clasp, which makes them a good way to stick yourself.

I do not see anyone wearing a white poppy. I cannot get one anywhere. I do not think many people recall, or ever knew, what that was about.

The white poppy was a thing a few years ago. Some people were perturbed by the increasingly blatant use of remembrance day to promote militarism. They thought a white poppy would be a way of remembering ‘the fallen’ without supporting war.

Of course, the war mongers got a campaign going to shut that down. The wars must be remembered their way. From that, what ‘remembering’ is about needs to be made clear.

Also relating to that, it is salient that remembrance day coincides with holocaust remembrance week. I do not know why the holocaust rememberers chose this particular week. Few people notice the irony that poppies are also a Palestinian symbol.

Demanding that a trauma be constantly remembered over generations is toxic. In the case of Israel it has helped to create a really dysfunctional society. Several generations there are now convinced that they are a uniquely persecuted people, thus entitled to do anything against any threat, real or imagined.

We see in the present day West Asia how that is working. The Israelis, remembering their holocaust, have inflicted a new holocaust on everyone around them, and ultimately on themselves.

In Canada, remembrance day has been connected with attempts to revive militarism. This seems to have been cranked up particularly since Harper was prime minister. Our armed forces became ‘royal’ again.

Military graveyards in Europe began to be spruced up. This despite no one being alive anymore who remembers the people in the graves. No one visits the graves anymore.

There are vanishingly few living veterans of the world wars. The real point to remembering them is to prevent people from remembering, if they ever knew, or from learning anew, why these wars happened. This is to try to insure support for future military adventures, and a supply of recruits.

I am not antimilitary. The country needs an army. The one Canada has now is almost useless because our overlords south of the border do not want us to have any sort of national defense.

We are supposed to provide a legitimation for NORAD; a few people to hang around for show, on the American bases on our territory. We are also expected to provide a certain number of special operations troops for American and NATO adventures.

What we have always needed is a citizen army modeled on the Swiss, to insure our independence from American intimidation. But that was never allowed. The British transferred suzerainty over us to the Americans at Ogdensburg in 1940.

It is an important point of this essay that the only thing that can insure peace in the world is independent countries which are able and willing to defend themselves. Government cannot be run for the benefit of a local oligarchy or for foreign interests. Government must govern in the nation’s interest.

Many people these days feel that democracy is overrated. But many will still throw conniptions when I say that it is better to have a tyranny which defends the country and its interests, than a western style ‘democracy’. I do not believe we have any truly democratic countries in the world, but that is a topic for a future blog post.

What I will get to is what really needs to be remembered. That is, what the original ‘poppy war’ was really about. Also, what the ‘lights have gone out’ reference is about.

Since Hiroshima, there have been pessimistic people who have suggested that the next time the lights go out, in will not be for a lifetime. It will be nuclear extinction.

There is a hysterical view that this is inevitable, sooner or later. However, that famous nuclear clock has been at about two minutes to midnight for sixty years and this event has not happened yet, despite some dire situations.

If we die out this way, then we can say as we go out that we were nature’s mistake. But what scares me a lot more is the thought of a limited nuclear war; one that does not wipe us out but severely reduces the capacity of mother earth to sustain us. To roll out yet another cultural meme, this would make life “nasty, poor, brutish, and short” for some time, perhaps generations.

However, I do not think these scenarios are as probable as the people in charge of the said clock believe. So I will look past the idea of a nuclear war. The present situation indicates that what is more likely is a very long drawn out contest with advanced conventional weapons. The western powers will fail miserably at it.

We are in a new period where the lights are not just going out, they have gone out. The war mongers are in control in the west. There is no way to stop them or remove them except their total defeat.

They are fighting to reassert their global control. They cannot conceive of giving up on global domination. Diplomacy has been reduced to deception to buy time, or to dictation of surrender terms.

Communications between the public of the western countries and the ‘adversary’ states has been cut off. All opinion contrary to the official narrative is being suppressed. It is lights out.

After a period of stability from 1945 to about 2020, we are in a new interregnum, like the period 1914 to 1945. As old Gramsci put it, sitting in Mussolini’s jails in the last interregnum; “the old is dying, the new cannot be born”. This period is going to go on for awhile, beyond the lifetimes of many people reading this.

“The lamps are going out all over Europe. We will not see them lit again in our lifetimes.” Over generations this has become a kind of cultural meme in the history of the “great war” and of great power conflicts; the dark side of history generally. Most people educated in history and geopolitics know what these words refer to.

They were spoken by Sir Edward Grey, foreign secretary of the British Empire during the “July crisis” or “twelve days” of 1914 leading up to the first world war. In his memoir he recalled saying this to his friend standing beside him as they looked out of his office in the foreign ministry building in London as the gas lamps were being lit on St. James square.

Grey, as he stood looking out at the street lamps, could not have guessed at the kind of world that would emerge from the war that was about to start. The lights really did not come on again during his lifetime. They came on again after 1945, after decades of war, depression, and social disruption had weakened the hold of the oligarchs.

He did not want the war and actually did more that anyone else in any high government position to try stop it from happening. But he was a very consensus based politician. When the Kaiser went back on his agreement with the British, and instead sent his army into Belgium, Grey gave up and went along with the declaration of war.

No one wanted that war except the banking families, who funded the secret network of Cecil Rhodes type operators to carry out their dirty work. But these people and their agents engineered conditions where it was almost impossible to avoid a war. The literal descendants of these people are still at this behavior.

Fortunately, they have never achieved the global control they have been trying for. The history of the past century is largely the history of their attempts. They seem to be fading out again and this time it seems to be for good.

In 1914 these financial capitalists thought they were going to finally subdue the last nations which were refusing to join their system of privately run central banks. These nations were harder to defeat in war than they had expected. The financialist’s power was weakened at the end of it.

They ended up with new rivals, also resisting their global control. Often, these were their own monsters who turned on them; the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan. Their heavy handed effort to slow down the rapid industrialization of the 1920s led to the depression of the 1930’s which weakened them even further.

Finally, they got what they wanted; their enemies fighting each other. However, they were surprised when the Soviet Union prevailed over Nazi Germany. Their power was greatly reduced after the war and they had to make some concessions to civil society.

A new period of stability developed, much like the period from the ‘Napoleonic’ wars up to the world wars. Most of the world prospered in the ‘golden thirty’ after the war. Things became harder again as the ‘neoliberal’ age set in and the Soviet Union fell.

What has finally brought this age to an end has been the rise of China. This has enabled other counter hegemonic power centres to become established. This would be the basis for a new stability, but an old hegemony never goes out without a fight to the end.

In this essay I am not going to sing praises to the coming order, or make predictions about it. I am concerned about the present interregnum period. The nuclear menace makes it especially important to prevent this situation from breaking into direct war between nuclear powers.

Toward that, we need to push back seriously against the growing militarism. However, as people discovered in 1914, that is hard to do when the war mongers put the lights out. Even in Canada, people are ending up in court for merely speaking against involvement in the Atlantic empire’s wars.

We need to forget remembrance day and remember who really rules over us. That is what people keep forgetting. We need to remember how the last period of major wars got going.

The whole story of how the 1914 conflict got going still needs to be better known and understood by the publics of all nations. I have not detailed it here. I say only that people need to understand how easy it would be for something like that to get going again.

Yet a look at the present international situation calls to mind another old cultural meme, from Hegel; “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” We need to learn from history. The leaders of most countries, especially the ones targeted by the Atlanticist empire, seem to have learned something from history.

Whatever you want to call it; the Atlanticist bloc, “the west”, the “Washington Consensus” or the “rules based order”, the leaders of this opaque entity seem unable to learn anything or forget anything. They cannot believe that they no longer have the power they once had. If they start one more world war to try to restabilize their power, they are going to lose it badly.

The western armies have been rotted out by the same economic and political forces that have wrecked their domestic economies and societies. They are obsolete in all ways. Russia and China have all the capacities to prevail in a war with the Atlantic powers.

A problem is that the present state of technology makes attack in warfare very difficult. So, modern wars are like the 1914 war; attrition battle which takes time. This is why the inferiority of the Atlantic powers is not apparent yet.

These people may not be able to start or fight another world war, but they are capable of creating havoc as they lash out to try to reverse their decline. They could keep the lights dim for some time. In such unstable times, almost anything could happen.

The lights are not coming on again until these people are defeated totally. That is, to be taken out in their home countries, their systems dismantled, themselves under arrest or monitoring. The populations of their home countries will not be able to do this by themselves.

This power must be defeated militarily, economically, and politically; first worldwide, then in their own home territories. This will take awhile. Only this will bring the lights back on in our western countries.

The lights will come on to a much different world. However, we will have before us a new era of stability, peace, and progress.

One thing which will help us get to a better place are fewer people like Sir Edward Grey in important positions. That is, people with a deep commitment to preserving the set order, who cannot question the real foundations of that order. The big difference between these times and now is that a lot more people realize that what is, is wrong, and must change.

People’s thinking must change. That involves invalidating and removing a lot of bad cultural memes. Symbols and memes have effects on people’s minds and do matter.

Thus, doing away with remembrance day would be a thing to do as we try to hold back the darkness. We cannot be accused of insulting all the old vets. They are long gone now.

No one actually attends remembrance day ceremonies except a few functionaries. Most politicians do not want to be slanged as being soft on national defense, but increasingly they do not care about that. There is no national defense, anyway.

The monuments need to be torn down. The space could be put to better use. “Lest we forget”; do we have to remember forever?

They are really monuments to Canada’s shame. All these wars, right up to the present, were wars of empire which we should have wanted nothing to do with. The only exception was the Hitler war and there are many caveats on that.

It is time to forget bad memes which are intended to make us forget that the war whose end we remember on November eleventh never should have been fought.

Enough said.