[Isaiah] Berlin’s warning would become a prophecy. Ironically, this corruption of negative liberty would begin with the resurgence of positive liberty. In the wake of the Soviet disaster, a new and even more extreme version of positive liberty was about to rise up in the Third World. It would be a revolutionary vision of transforming individuals through violence. It would spread and begin to destabilise the balance of power in the world. In response, the followers of negative liberty in the West would decide that they had to confront and roll back this tide. Out of this would emerge a strange mutant idea. You would use violent revolutionary techniques to create a world of negative freedom. ibid.
[Jean-Paul] Sartre believed … only through revolutionary violence that individuals in the west could free themselves from the controls of bourgeois society. ibid.
The chaos caused by these revolutions also began to destabilise the balance of power in the world. And this would inexorably bring them face to face with America and its global battle against communism. But what this clash was going to lead to was the rise in America of a new militant idea of freedom, and the belief that it was the United States’ duty to spread this freedom around the world by force if necessary. ibid.
And then in 1979 the Iranian revolution showed dramatically America’s policy of backing dictators did not work. The Iranian people rose up and toppled the Shah of Iran. The Shah had one of the largest military forces in the world given to him by the Americans. But it proved helpless in the face of the new Islamist ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini. Many in the West saw Khomeini as the resurgence of a dark almost medieval force. But this was wrong. The Iranian revolution was yet again driven by Western ideas of political freedom. ibid.
The other part of Project Democracy was to use military force in secret operations to overthrow foreign regimes that stood in the way of freedom. The main target was the government of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas were Marxist revolutionaries who had seized power in 1979; but since then they had held elections and had been democratically elected. The Reagan administration dismissed this though as a sham. And an operation was set up to enforce the right kind of democracy by overthrowing the Sandinistas if necessary. The man in charge was a leading Neo-Conservative Elliott Abrams. ibid.
The Americans started funding and training a counter-revolutionary army called the Contras. But there was enormous political opposition in the United States. And to get round it the leaders of Project Democracy set out to frighten the American public. An agency called The Office of Public Diplomacy was set up that disseminated what was called White Propaganda. It produced dossiers and fed stories to journalists that proved that Soviet fighter planes had arrived in Nicaragua to attack America. Another story from ‘intelligence sources’ said that the Soviets had given stockpiles of chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. President Reagan appeared on television with maps to show how quickly such a chemical attack could be launched on America itself. It was only a matter of time. ibid.
The Neo-Conservatives were beginning to believe that their ideal of freedom was an absolute. And that this then justified lying and exaggerating in order to enforce that vision. The end justified the means. Although they portrayed the Contras as freedom fighters, it was well known that they used murder, assassination and torture. And also were allegedly using CIA-supplied planes to smuggle cocaine back into the United States. And to finance the Contras, the Neo-Conservatives were even prepared to deal with America’s enemy – the leaders of the Iranian revolution. In 1985 those running the Nicaragua operation held a series of secret meetings with Iranian leaders in Europe. They arranged to sell the Iranians American weapons; in return the Iranians would release American hostages held in Lebanon. Then the money from these sales would be used by those running Project Democracy to fund the Contras. The only problem was that this was completely illegal. And the President knew it. ibid.
What was beginning to emerge was the problem of spreading freedom around the world. To do it those leading Project Democracy had turned not just to manipulation and violence but were beginning to undermine the ideals of democracy in America. The very thing they were trying to create abroad. It was the corruption of freedom that Isaiah Berlin had warned of. ibid.
In 1989 across eastern Europe the people rose up to overthrow their communist leaders. It was a remarkable series of revolutions. All driven by the desire for freedom and the ending of tyranny. ibid.
A form of order and a new kind of democracy in which the market, not politics, gave people what they wanted. But things didn’t work out how the theory predicted. ibid.
A new elite was beginning to emerge who snapped up vast sections of Russian industry: they became known as the Oligarchs. ibid.
August 1998: Russia’s economy is out of control tonight and it’s causing an international financial crisis. Huge queues in Moscow. There’s a run on the banks. The Rouble’s lost nearly half its value. And prices are soaring. ibid. BBC News
Overnight, the Americans destroyed the civil structure of Iraqi society. But instead of trying to create new institutions ... the country would then be thrown open to international corporations who in return for investing, would take 100% of their profits out of the country untaxed. Only one of Saddam Hussein’s laws remained: the one that restricted trade unions. Out of this was supposed to come spontaneous order. What resulted was chaos. ibid.
What also resulted was corruption on a huge scale: more than $350 billion has been sent to Iraq for reconstruction. ibid.
The Americans began to turn to violence and torture to enforce their kind of freedom. ibid.
Positive liberty is driven by a vision that freedom is for something. The freedom to do or become something new. Out of which a better world would come. Negative liberty has no such vision. It isn’t for anything. At its heart it has no purpose other than to keep us free from unnecessary constraint or harm. And in using force to create a world based on negative liberty, the democratic revolutionaries have actually led millions of people abroad into a world without purpose or meaning. This idea of freedom is still portrayed by many politicians and influential commentators as a universal absolute. They assume it is only a matter of time before it spreads throughout the world. But this may not be true. ibid.
The idea of freedom that we live with today is a narrow and limiting one; it was born out of a specific and dangerous time: the Cold War. It may have had meaning and purpose then as an alternative to communist tyranny but now has become a dangerous trap. Our government relies on a simplistic economic model of human beings that allows inequality to grow and offers nothing positive in the face of reactionary forces they have helped awake around the world. ibid.
Isaiah Berlin was wrong: not all attempts to change the world for the better lead to tyranny. ibid.
Politicians in the West had given large parts of their power away. What had begun with Bill Clinton in the early 1990s had spread. When Tony Blair came to power he had immediately given control over much of the economy to the Bank of the England. But in 1998 the global financial system showed how unstable it could be. An economic crisis that begun in Russia and then spread to Asia had consequences throughout the world. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head IV: But What if the People are Stupid? BBC 2021
What the Chinese were doing was using their money to create a safe bubble wrapped around the United States that would stabilise the system and so keep China safe. But in the process the Chinese money would create the biggest consumer and property boom ever in history. And lead America into a protected dreamworld that was increasingly detached from the reality outside. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head V: The Lordly Ones ***** BBC 2021
It is most bizarre, a king of wilful ignorance, to make believe that the Soviet Union, for that matter the People’s Republic of China, haven’t succeeded at economic growth. Richard Wolff, The Empire Files: Abby Martin & Richard Wolff Discuss Socialism in 2019, Abby Martin online, Youtube 2019
Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive director of the World Economic Forum, who announced the Great Reset initiative from the World Economic Forum in June of this year. The Corbett Report: Your Guide to the Great Reset, James Corbett online 2020
The Great Reset is nothing more and nothing less a great propaganda rollout campaign for a new brand that the would-be global elite are trying to shove down the public’s throats. ibid.
Things get pretty weird pretty quick here. ibid.
This has nothing to do with a virus. ibid.
This is a coordinated agenda that has been years in the making. ibid.
This is the New World Order redefined. ibid.
This is not the end of globalisation. ibid.
There has to be one unitary power enforcing order. ibid.
This process isn’t meant to end. ibid.
And open conspiracy to bring about this transformation of humanity. ibid.
The truth is that this highly influential figure, at the centre of the new global order currently being established, is an out and out transhumanist who dreams of an end to natural healthy human life and community. ibid.
Every part of this new normal Build Back Better agenda that this playing out right now bears the hallmarks and the fingerprints of the World Economic Forum and its associated cronies. The Corbett Report: Meet the World Economic Forum, James Corbett online 2021
The World Economic Forum rebranding of that very old idea for a New World Order – the Great Reset. ibid.
The nexus of private/public cooperation = Fascism. ibid.
Presenter: Simply flooded the system with money?
Jerome Powell: Yes, we did. The Great Reset & the Rise of Bitcoin, 60 Minutes interview, 2022
Which means you need to print money to solve that debt. ibid. Greg Foss
And with each cycle, our economy continues accumulating debt indefinitely because we prefer borrowing to repaying debt. ibid. commentary
Governments will never show us the true inflation numbers, and they will not attribute it: 356% as share of GDP. ibid.
We can see the sharp increase of the global debt even in just the most recent years. ibid.
These solutions are not necessarity in the best interests of citizens and their personal freedom … The Great Reset … Part of their plan is the creation of central bank currencies – CBDCs. This would allow central banks to have a new monetary system that they could detach from the present one. ibid.
Decentralisation in Bitcoin is the fact that no-one controls the network. It is an open, secure network. ibid.
No other assets in the world provides this level of security. ibid.
The reason they want to ban Bitcoin is they know the power that it has. ibid.
‘It is important to understand that the fiat system was not a carefully, consciously, or deliberately designed financial operating system like Bitcoin; rather, it evolved through a complex process of compromise between political constraints and expedience.’ ibid. Saifedean Ammous, The Fiat Standard
Bitcoin is a real asset and it’s here to stay. ibid.