In his book CIVILIZATION: The West and the Rest (2011), British historian Niall Ferguson says that the West emerged as the predominant world civilization from the sixteenth century onward.
This was because of six complexes of institutions and associated ideas and behaviours which he calls “killer apps”. These were Competition, Science, Property rights, Medicine, the Consumer Society, and the Work Ethic.
A central component running through all of these has been TRUST in institutions, in community and in the rule of law, rather than just family or tribe.
Trust differentiates stable and contented societies from unstable, corrupt and often violent ones.
Today the West is in free fall, with much cultural pessimism (loss of faith in ourselves) and a crisis of trust.
This crisis of trust extends to our political leaders, business leaders, the political and administrative class, the police, regulators, the judiciary, public and private media, the education system, the clergy, many church institutions, international organizations, scientists, banks, non-bank financial systems, the royal family, the democratic system itself, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, and more.
Why is the political establishment now often being referred to as “the swamp”?
Because of its self-seeking corruption and perceived disconnect from the wishes and interests of ordinary people.
The unreflective pursuit of globalism has destroyed both working class and middle class jobs, destroyed national ability to make strategically important things within our own countries, and hugely increased vulnerability of our economies, especially to China.
The political class comprising the swamp has enormous vested interests to protect, and has demonstrated its great power by its relentless campaigning against President Donald Trump and deplatforming of his supporters. This applies not only to the United States.
Mass immigration is pushed by big business because it loves a growing market. Unfortunately, too often this has been in disregard for the social consequences of admitting people with religious and other cultural values incompatible with Western civilization.
Some treasonous European leaders, citing low native birth rates as an excuse, even openly call for population replacement – the destruction of native European cultures.
The political class which enables this does not listen to ordinary people: “we know what’s best for you” when they haven’t a clue.
In a 1925 book, the European-Japanese aristocrat Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi called for the citizens of the future “United States of Europe” to be not the people of the Old Continent.
Instead, he wanted a new mixed breed, the products of thorough and widespread interbreeding to create a multiracial population.
These people would have no clear sense of tradition or identity and would therefore be easily controlled by the ruling elite.
He proclaims the need to abolish the right of nations to self-determination and outlines the break-up of nation states through the use of ethnic separatist movements and the destruction of the nations themselves through mass migration.
Guess what? This is current policy of the EU, pushed especially by Angela Merkel and Emanuel Macron.
The previous Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown deliberately engineered mass immigration from the third world into the UK, to engineer a permanent skew towards Labour in the voting population. This was treason against the British people.
The term “Banksters” was coined to describe corrupt financial operators.
With the exception of Bernie Madoff, most of these, escaped without penalty for their massive thefts and speculations both before and after the financial crisis of 2008 which saw the collapse of Lehmann Brothers and others.
Only Iceland punished its banking executives. Money laundering has been poorly prosecuted by regulators in Australia.
How many Members of Parliament have been caught up in expenses scandals? Is it any wonder then, that the prestige of politicians is at an all time low.
Volkswagen was prosecuted for deliberately falsifying its emission ratings in “Dieselgate.”
Big Pharma is charged with price gouging and seeking profit rather than to cure sick people.
Backers of mass coronavirus vaccination include several with personal financial interests as well as a political agenda of culling the human population.
Monsanto, the chemical giant, is charged with knowingly putting poisons into the environment.
President Biden has appointed Tom Vilsack, “Mr Monsanto,” to head the US Department of Agriculture.
Under Obama, Vilsack brought us cloned farm animals, lab-grown meat and more GMOs than any Agriculture Secretary before or after him.
The standing of religious leaders and a number of churches has been trashed by numerous sex scandals.
The mass media have never been in lower repute. “Fake News” correctly describes the combination of propaganda and infotainment coming out of Australia’s ABC, CNN, the BBC, and much of the private media.
Overwhelmingly leftist opinion is presented as fact, and the publicly funded media (like our ABC) give no balanced reflection of the views of taxpayers.
In preparation for Australia Day (January 26), the ABC has been using the term “Invasion Day.” Taxpayers didn’t sanction this!
Social media, run by Big Tech – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon – is censoring non-left views under the guise of policing “community standards” and “fact checking.”
This extended even to banning messages from the United States President. Meanwhile Big Tech collects masses of private data on its users.
The left media such as the ABC constantly harp on the same political tropes: gender and identity politics, cultural pessimism (Australia Day being referred to as Invasion Day), climate change (“we’re all going to fry or drown, it’s all our fault, and we can fix it by destroying our economy”), open borders (“all asylum seekers are genuine refugees”), embracement of Islam and contempt for Christianity.
The left has hijacked Amnesty International, Oxfam and other Non-Government Organizations with an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian bias and a blindness to the outrages perpetrated by Islam, such as by Boko Haram in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa.
Conservation groups like Greenpeace and others exaggerate, or outright lie, about alleged environmental crises (for example with the Great Barrier Reef) and propose prescriptions out of touch with reality.
Michael Shellenberger’s excellent 2020 book APOCALYPSE NEVER: Why environmental alarmism hurts us all exposes much of this.
Many mainstream churches have been captured by leftist Social Justice Warriors and have embraced progressive theology which conforms to prevailing secular values but abandons Biblical ones.
The Vatican’s move to the far Left under Pope Francis is unprecedented.
Parts of the political, administrative and business class have enmired themselves in colossal corruption and callous behaviour, including widely alleged pedophilia – reportedly well documented on seized laptops.
Many individuals have become willing tools of the Chinese Communist Party, in universities, business (particularly major exporters to China) and within the major parties on both sides of politics.
The Chinese government itself has brought lying back to the abusive art form we thought had been perfected previously by Stalin but then abandoned by post-communist Russia.
While Queen Elizabeth II has been exemplary in embodying non-partisan unity above politics, her son Charles and grandson Harry have done much to bring the monarchy into disrepute by embracing virtue-signalling and divisive issues.
International organizations, especially the United Nations and its many subsidiary bodies, have been catastrophically compromised by socialist bias and Islamic influence.
The European Union has morphed from a project initially about stopping wars in Europe, and then building free trade between member states, into an overbearing monster that seeks to destroy national sovereignty, most dangerously in issues of immigration and protection of national identity.
The World Economic Forum (the Davos annual talkfests) and the benighted Prince Charles are now focused on a planned Great Reset.
This will destroy individual freedoms and national sovereignty reinforcing the totalitarian excesses of the UN’s Agenda 2030 (formerly Agenda 21).
It would also outlaw cash transactions, giving more surveillance power over us through banking records.
Faith in democracy itself is being destroyed in much of the West through the power of big media, big social media, big business, and big entertainment.
Enormous numbers of Americans and others believe that the election of Biden as president was fraudulent.
How many ordinary people now trust politicians, compared with several decades ago? Many people now believe that there are few differences between the political parties and that the majors are much the same. They think that the whole system is corrupt.
While many of the problems come down to the ancient tendency of individual people to total depravity, the political problem comes down to the powerlessness of ordinary citizens to overcome the power of elites who say “we know what’s best for you” (when they mean “for ourselves”), and refuse to LISTEN.
The West is currently enduring the worst crisis of self-confidence, and of trust, in centuries.
Direct Democracy
An important part of any solution to the issues concerning ordinary people – immigration, foreign investment, the excesses of “woke” politics – is the adoption of DIRECT DEMOCRACY.
We need to bring in citizen-initiated referendums and the ability of ordinary citizens to recall elected representatives, officials and governments, and to give voters the ability to decide key issues instead of being powerless as within existing structures.
Direct Democracy means that individuals control the processes and powers of their government.
Direct Democracy empowers the citizens regardless of the wishes of either government or parliament.
Direct Democracy is NOT the same thing as a popular vote or plebiscite. Plebiscites are tools used by those in power to exercise their power over electorates.
Citizens operate their Direct Democracy powers from the local town, to region, to national levels.
Direct Democracy cannot be controlled or manipulated to suit party-political or other vested interests from the government or parliament.
Switzerland already has Direct Democracy. The Swiss model has three main procedures:
- First – if parliament wishes to touch the constitution, any such draft amendment or supplement must be approved or rejected in a national referendum vote.
- Second – the optional or facultative referendum ensures that parliament’s new laws or changes to laws are exposed to citizens, to receive final approval or rejection – if 50,000 voters support such a demand.
- Thirdly – Citizen’s Referenda: citizens have the right to make legislative proposals to be decided in a referendum vote, if the proposal gains support of 100,000 voters.
Professional politicians will reject the citizen’s right to Direct Democracy, until the citizens powerfully assert that right and change the system.
In New Zealand, a Direct Democracy party has already started campaigning. The website is here and a detailed explanation of the concept is here.
https://medium.com/a-passion-to-evolve/who-do-you-trust-ddc2a7d902ff
