World Alternative Movement 1
In the Eye of the Storm
“We may well be in the eye of a storm.” — Lord Rothschild, Letter to Investors, December 2015
Almost 20 years into the new millenium, humanity is facing one of the most critical times in its history. Our numbers are rapidly approaching 8 billion individuals, and per-capita energy consumption is still on the rise everywhere.
For the last half a century we’ve been extracting natural resources faster than the Earth can provide, and now we’re starting to feel the dire consequences: climate change, devastation of the natural environment, loss of bio-diversity, water shortages, along with the social unrest and geopolitical turmoil that inevitably follows.
The recent wave of terrorist attacks and the ongoing radicalization of the political discourse (see Trump) are only symptoms of a disease that is tormenting mankind from the dawn of civilization:
the Capitalistic system,
the worship of the Golden Calf,
the Will to Power of our collective Ego, now threatening to lead us collectively into extinction.
As Pope Francis recently stated: “Terrorism grows when there is no other option, and as long as the world economy has at its center the god of money and not the person. […] We are living under the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. This — said Francis — is fundamental terrorism against all humanity.”
The sad truth is we are hostage of a profit-obsessed system that is mocking our democratically-elected governments and laws, abusing human rights and trashing our common planet. A suicidal system that is actually dooming us all in a mindless pursuit of growth.
This system is like the elephant in the room. We cannot ignore it or hope it will disappear by itself since it’s not going to stop growing until it pops, taking us and our future down the flush of evolution. As we speak, the wealthy nations are spending trillions of dollars to show off with high-tech weapons while billions of human beings in the developing world are still struggling for basic food and shelter. And every passing day the industrial, chemical and nuclear plants keep polluting the Earth’s oceans, soil and atmosphere as if there’s no tomorrow, even if the catastrophic ecological effects are now evident to all and threaten the quality of life of each and every one of us.
Today even mainstream scientific data confirms unequivocally that a common future in this world is possible only if humanity moves onto a radically new economic model the very short term (our lifetime!). If capitalism still appears to be the best choice available it’s because the states and the civic institutions have betrayed their people, sold themselves to the rule of the market and turned into efficiency-driven machines whose main role is to mask and contain the negative effects that the system produces.
In our times, the primal occupation of the state is the concealment of the truth, and its key institution is no more the army, but the secret services.
The first fact they want to hide from us is that most national governments on the planet today are formed by representatives of the global financial lobby, the leading group of investment bankers who’ve been continously dominating the world’s financial scene since earlier than Napoleon.
And there’s no need of ‘conspiracy theories’ to explain this. It’s a process that has been happening for thousands of years.
Wealth aggregates and becomes political power:
that is the essence of capitalism.
Simple as that. ‘Corporation’ is just the most recent name for it. Earlier ones were the Church, or the Empire. The rulers never wanted the serfs to become self-reliant. You hear how democracies are all over the place, but that isn’t really true: They call it democracy. They use the vocabulary, the props, but it’s just theater. We did have a few attempts of true democracy in history, but the problem with democracies is they’re hard to maintain, especially in the face of rapid economic growth and technological progress.
Right now — literally hiding everywhere around us — the invisible ears of governmental agencies and private corporations are spying on every action we take, and recording them in a big central server. Before the leaks of recent years, no one really knew how extended were mass surveillance operations. Now we do. We know this system is highly invasive and totally disrespectful of personal privacy and freedom.
And there’s more: up from their ivory towers, the elites who’re running the show have long since developed their own strategy to deal with the current crisis.
Their agenda includes a worldwide tension-strategy orchestrated directly by the media, plus financial and military schemes designed to definitively lock humanity and the world into a technocratic orwellian dictatorship.
Media
Film-industries, televisions, news agencies, record labels, you name it: all is in the hands of a few media conglomerates that serve the interest of the elites.
News and entertainment are both produced — with the supervision of the intelligence services — to subconsciously manipulate the masses according to the needs of the ruling class (as Eduard Bernays, the father of Public Relations, had revealed in his influential book Propaganda, back in 1928). Today, we live in a world where it’s becoming almost impossible to distinguish truth from fiction. Media analysts are already talking about a post-truth era..
What is really going on?
The elites, with their News/Entertainment complex, control the flux of information and want to make it impossible for any subversive idea to emerge, by direct censorship on the traditional media or, when the channels of information cannot be completely closed as in the case of the Internet, by flooding them with “false information aimed to deceive the public opinion” — or disinformation — thus “effectively lowering their signal-to-noise ratio and discrediting the opposition by association with many easily disproved false claims.”
Any attempt to set up an alternative, independent media outlet is thus immediately infiltrated by the establishment’s shills and trolls, whose job is to destroy personal reputations and intentionally spread fake news to deceive the audience: their tactics include “mixing some truth and observation with false conclusions and lies, or revealing only one part of the truth while presenting it as the whole.”
Finance
Another powerful lever in the hands of the establishment is its ability to hyper-inflate the money supply by persuading the nation states to borrow huge amounts of credit (fiat money)from their central banks.
Of course there’s a hidden cost:
The states have then to pay an interest on their loan and become indebted with the central banks, which contrary to popular belief are not “public institutions” but private conglomerates controlled by the usual cartel of multinational banking corporations. From this position of power, the financial lobby can rig the interest rates at will and decide the fortune or demise of any country on the face of Earth.
That’s how, after the uprisings of the 1970's, the elite was able to flood the developed world with an artificial wave of cheap credit that lasted over 30 years, thus corrupting the populace with easily-available consumer goods and setting the stage for the massive debt bubble that today burdens most nations, families and individuals on the planet.
As the national debts kept growing and the states became increasingly tied to the banking system, the governments were then forced to deregulate the financial markets, opening the door to reckless speculation by part of a large number of investment groups, hedge funds and mortgage companies: the so-called shadow market. This huge speculative black hole that formed right at the heart of the global market revealed itself — after the Lehman crack — to be the real invisible engine of our economic growth. We must awaken to the shocking reality that our collective wealth is in the hands of a network of supercomputers gambling indiscriminately on our common future, and the only ones profiting from this are of course the money-makers themselves, whose latest strategy (called QE) is basically trying to solve the debt problem by injecting an even greater amount of debt-backed currency into the system (Since 2007, the national debt of the US alone has grown by a staggering 25 trillion dollars!).
Of course the central bankers know this craziness can’t go on forever, and are just waiting for the right moment to stop. When the time is ripe, they can turn off the taps of credit, raise the interest rates and plunder the world into financial panic, subsequent social tensions and, eventually, war.
Military
The new millennium was inaugurated with the shocking broadcast of a terrorist attack at the very heart of the West:
World Trade Centre, Manhattan, New York,
11 September 2001.
This event was only the first of a long series of coordinated terrorist attacks to western capitals attributed by the mainstream media to Islamic terrorist groups (Al-Qaida, ISIS), who are really the own creation of the CIA and served as a pretext for a number of military and counter-intelligence operations operated by NATO and regional allies in the resource-rich Middle East and Africa.
On the geopolitical chessboard, the recent years saw an increasing tension in the Russia-West relations, with the Syrian and Ukrainian crisis, and in Asia, an escalation between China and other regional players such as Japan, with the wild card of North Korea.
All major powers are currently involved in an epic arms race to renovate their arsenals with the latest military technologies, including unmanned killer robots, genetically enhanced bio-weapons and next-generation computer viruses such as Stuxnet and WannaCry.
An intricate web of alliances has been woven under the scenes, with two main centers of gravity:
1. The neo-liberal West (blue) comprising the US, Europe, Japan (and India?).
2. The autoritharian East (red), comprising Russia, China and the Middle East.
The situation appears remarkably similar to the 1930's, and many analysts and politicians are already evoking the spectre of a Third World War.
The Alternative
And yet, right in the eye of the storm,
many of us have already started walking a new way.
In the midst of this epochal confusion, a group of pioneers have started to look for an alternative by going back to nature, both locally, by rediscovering our native roots, and globally, by forging new cultural values and practices based on mutual cooperation and ecological sustainability.
“Think global, act local”.
A grassroots movement of intentional communities inspired by the common need of a radical lifestyle transition started to emerge worldwide, operating simultaneously on the local level in the form of resilient eco-villages and on the global level in the form of distributed internet networks.
What this newborn world alternative movement envisions is the only real alternative to systemic collapse: a decentralized, ecological world society, able to maintain peace between men, harmony within nature, and sustainability for the future generations.
It is more or less what Arnold Toynbee affirms at the conclusion of his long reconstruction of human history:
“The present day global set of sovereign states is not capable of keeping peace, and it is not capable of saving the biosphere’s non-replaceable natural resources. What has been needed for the last 5,000 years, has become technologically feasible in the last 100, but not yet politically, is a global body composed of cells on the scale of the Neolithic-Age village community — a scale on which participants could be personally acquainted with each other, while each of them would also be a member of a world society.”
If you resonate with this vision, I’m talking to you:
“We are the living seeds of the new world, germinating from the ashes of the post-nuclear age, right under the eyes of a distracted mass of civilized zombies, marching unaware towards self-destruction.”
It is time for the seeds to generate around them a rhizomatic infrastructure on which to sustain their growth into a fruit-bearing plant.
The World Alternative Movement has to become the conscious creator of a robust, decentralized alternative to the industrial civilization-model, and lead the world towards a better future.
