To get to the matter we must get past the message. This gnomic statement means that the news we receive is a sort of shadow play, whose real meaning must be interpreted by the light it excludes.
The panic in the news cycle is related to this spectacle, which is all that stands between a stranded elite and the general realisation that no one is in charge.
The performance goes on, but the script has run out.
The French President’s remarkable statement on the Ukraine war is one example. He says NATO must admit it is in a war, and said he did not rule out sending troops to fight in it.
Five years ago, he warned that NATO was becoming “brain dead”.
I think this is a harbinger of the war’s end, and not an escalation. Macron is using the moment to promote himself as the new director of the European show.
It was Macron who suggested two years ago that the Russians should be taken seriously. Europe now has no alternative. His position on sending troops has seen him isolated. He spoke then of the “role of France as a mediator”. Why has he moved from “mediation” to military intervention? Both moved him into the limelight. There was no plan in either case.
A war with Russia is simply not realistic. The brain death he warned of has consumed his own. Like NATO itself, he is desperate to seem relevant, and the use of crisis for political opportunity is a sign of things to come.
The related panic over the levelling-down of NATO is another example of a leaderless void at the centre of the liberal machine.
You can read my interview with the architect of Trump’s “dormant NATO” policy, here:
A further example is the public face of Google, that peeks like a pair of eyes from a darkened closet - a disturbing glimpse of the sinister and chaotic reality behind the bright messaging of technocratic management. I will look at Google, its regime-change role and its dark twin Gemini in part two. Once again, once we see behind the curtain we find no one is in charge.
Politicians, bureaucracies and corporations share the same habits of communication. In recent weeks, they have revealed themselves to share the same projection of purpose and of composure as a response to the crises they have created themselves.
These crises cannot be controlled by the people who set them in motion. What they hope can be controlled is their public perception.
In reaching for the panic button, however, they succeed only in a further act of self harm. The threat to liberal elite power is real, and it is concentrated in the prevention of an apocalyptic revelation. At its centre, there is nothing there.
This is a series about the death spiral of the Liberal elite. It is one which was inevitable, given that an argument with reality can never be won.
One hundred years of propaganda have brought us to a performance now in search of a script, and a vacant seat where once we found a director.
The timescale of its resolution has been shortened by events which have been shaped by the reflex actions of fanatics. Desperate to preserve themselves, they are willing to sacrifice everything else.
Happily, their power to do so is dissolving. What should concern you is what comes after the fall.
Part one begins with the panic at the heart of NATO.
Part two shows how our elite is now reduced to a theatre of the absurd, with no man behind the curtain guiding the machine.
Part three shows how the project of man management began with a dream a century ago, and has resulted in a deserted stage before a disenchanted public.
NATO - The Force of No Alternative
My first piece on this substack was called “No Alternative to Obsolescence”. Immediately prior to the escalation of the Donbass war, I wrote that NATO was obsolete.
The Russians have learned that we cannot react to ambiguity, since our political discourse is broadcast in black and white.
We have begun the conversation. We do not have the capability to respond.
You can read that piece here:
That NATO was finished was obvious, as it is a vehicle of a vanishing US global hegemony. Its purpose as an anti-Russian military alliance is only partially credible given maximal US security guarantees to Europe, which are now going to be withdrawn, exposing a vacuum.
Would the US fully mobilise to lose a war for Estonia? No.
It is pivoting to war with China instead, in a final bid to reassert global dominance which, if undertaken, will probably see the US lose and exit the world stage.
The US security umbrella is closing, leaving Europe naked in the element of international relations - which is power.
Of course, reliance on NATO has permitted Europe and the UK to shrink their own forces to irrelevance.
When the US draws down to a dormant NATO, it is this fact which will be revealed. The leadership of Britain and Europe has managed its military power and the industrial base to sustain it into decline, and it cannot manage it back.
This is the reason it has hit the panic button. Stories of mass conscription and a coming war with Russia are designed to distract the population from the dereliction of duty combined with derangement in place of diplomacy that has manufactured a formidable enemy in Russia from a recent strategic ally.
NATO is in a fight for its own survival - not yours.
Before NATO entered the Ukraine war, Russian military power and production was a fraction of what it is today.
The Russians still believed the West might honour its agreements, such as the two made in Minsk.
With no power and no credibility to persuade, NATO has hit the ball into the court of a game it can neither win nor finish, and which did not have to begin at all.
It insisted there was no alternative to fighting Russia. What alternative has it now that it has lost - not only to its enemy - but also its most important friend?
This friend has turned its attention to another script, leaving the actors in Europe without direction. It was Macron who warned in 2019 that
You have partners together in the same part of the world, and you have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies
Macron is positioning himself as the leader of the new European security order, by proposing a war it cannot win, which no one wants.
This is his bid for the centre of the stage. It is theatre, and it is as absurd as the cry that sees the last of Pirandello’s Six Actors run howling from the stage.
The screams from the the machine are a desperate cry for survival without purpose. It is abandoned on the world stage, an actor with no idea of how to continue its own story, terrified of the end.
Coming in part two: The Dark Twin - Google’s Gemini and the Theatre of the Absurd
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I am thinking of buying some video kit, so I do not look like I am filming my own hostage video.
The idea is to do some chats with paid subscribers, to explain my work, answer your questions, and demonstrate my vow to never purchase a set of American teeth, which for an Englishman is treason.
The most plausible explanation I have yet seen for Macron's bizarre antics. And overall an excellent essay - thank you. I look forward to future parts.
"demonstrate my vow to never purchase a set of American teeth, which for an Englishman is treason" Pity me. I am surrounded by American teeth