An interesting interview caught my eye in the Financial Times of 19/20th June. It was with Vladislav Surkov, who is the architect of the corrupt democracy that has kept Vladimir Putin in power for 21 years. Surkov is a consummate Kremlin backroom operator who became Putin’s chief ideologist and closest political confidant, carrying out a similar role for Putin as Dominic Cummings did for Boris Johnson or Steve Bannon for Donald Trump. In the same way that Cummings and Bannon were eventually thrown overboard by their political masters, so Surkov has just been ‘let go’ by Putin.
Surkov was a founding father of Putinism and helped to create Russia’s ‘sovereign democracy’, an ostensibly open system with a closed outcome. Elections are called, candidates campaign, votes are cast, ballots are counted and the same man wins, every single time. Its core idea is that the stability of the state is much more important than the freedom of the individual. This leads to the creation of fake opposition parties, rigid control of the media and impossible barriers to entry for political figures not approved of by Putin.
Surkov claims that Putin has not abolished democracy but has married it with the monarchical archetype of Russian governance. “This archetype is working. It is not going anywhere…it has enough freedom and enough order. An overdose of freedom is lethal to a state. Anything that is medicine can be poison. It is all about the dosage.”
This stands of course in complete opposition to ideas of societal freedoms that up until recently were espoused by most governments in the west. Whether these ideas can still hold in the current climate of pandemic-induced fear and panic is now debatable. One can imagine that governments in the west and the kind of people who meet at Davos are questioning whether our ideas of individual freedom and liberty can be sustained during a time of climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly when autocratic regimes such as the governments in China and Russia are claiming that their cultures are superior to ours when dealing with current world crises.
Could it be that our governing elites have in effect seized the opportunity of the pandemic to introduce an experiment to see how far they can go in imposing Chinese or Russian-style social controls on their populations? Have they reached Surkov’s conclusion that “an overdose of freedom is lethal to a state”?
I wonder whether the battle for our freedoms has already been lost. The extraordinary passivity displayed by my fellow citizens in the face of lockdown restrictions and curtailments of liberty, which have been aided by a covert culture of censorship and self-censorship from the media and professional institutions, has been quite unprecedented in my adult experience, which spans the last half-century.
One can only hope that the recent exposure of Matt Hancock as not only a “totally f……… hopeless” secretary of state for health (Boris Johnson’s verdict on Hancock, as quoted by Dominic Cummings in a statement to MPs) but also a nauseating hypocrite, who was filmed groping an aide in his private office while telling everyone else that they can’t even hug their dying relatives, will by his actions have done enough to make even the most passive Brits rise up in revolt against our political masters, who preach one thing for the little people (and set the police on us or threaten us with prosecution for supposed infringements of their rules), while doing quite other things themselves. It would seem so, as Hancock has now been forced to resign, despite Boris Johnson saying that “the matter was closed.”
One of the most powerful comments I have seen on this came from Rachel Taylor, a hospital doctor in Oxford, who tweeted: “It’s not the infidelity, it’s the sacrifices every decent person made because Matt Hancock told them to do so. You do realise we had to tell distraught family members they couldn’t see their dying loved ones in hospital? Over and over again. I can never forgive his hypocrisy.”
Sajid Javid has now been appointed as Hancock’s successor so we shall soon see whether he intends to continue with the government’s Covid restrictions. At present the government’s public case for continuing these restrictions does not stand up to any logical or evidential test. Nor does it take into account the full extent of the negative impact on people’s lives in order (it is claimed) to save the lives of a tiny number of people, many of whom might die anyway from pre-existing conditions and complicating factors, for which Covid might be the final catalyst. In other words, although Covid appears on the death certificate, it may not have been the actual cause of death. This is not a justifiable reason for removing the civil liberties of the entire population, and never could be. There must be a more moderate, middle way of dealing with this situation.
Here are two personal examples of how our freedoms are being eroded: my wife, who is a French national, needed urgently to go to France to see her 89-year-old recently widowed mother. After having to pay £60 for a PCR test taken two days in advance of her flight, she was able to help her mother for a week before returning and being put under quarantine (not unlike house arrest) and then was subjected to three more tests during the 10 days, at a further cost of £299, and being phoned each day to check that she had not absconded. The profiteering by these private testing companies (and how did they get their contracts?) adds injury to insult, especially as the PCR test in France, taken two days before departure, was completely free.
My own experience is potentially more serious: I am now being threatened by the government with the loss of my job unless I have two Covid vaccinations within 16 weeks of new legislation to be introduced in October. I should explain that, at the farm where I work, we have a small residential care home for three adults with learning disabilities. The care home is regulated by the Care Quality Commission, and I am its registered manager. The CQC has rated our care home as ‘Good’ in all five of its inspection categories and I believe that our model of care, which provides a family-style setting on a working farm, is recognised as offering an exceptional quality of life for our residents.
In accord with their families’ wishes, our three residents have each had both jabs of the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine, and so can be considered safe. They also have one PCR test each week. Our staff have three tests a week (1 PCR test and 2 lateral flow device tests), so we know that we, too, are free from infection and that our residents are safe. My strong personal conviction is that I do not wish to have the experimental Covid jabs on offer (from Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford Astra Zeneca) until there is more data and all four phases of the vaccine trials have been completed (we are currently in Phase 3). This conviction of mine is only reinforced by the hitherto-suppressed stories that are beginning to emerge of unexplained deaths and serious illnesses following the Covid-19 vaccinations (examples here and here).
I also believe that to insist I have the vaccine or lose my job is to go against the principle of ‘informed consent’ prior to vaccination which is enshrined in UK law and international human rights law. These vaccines were introduced under emergency conditions to deal with the pandemic. It would normally take 10 to 15 years to develop a vaccine from inception to licencing, yet the Covid-19 vaccines data was collected over two months. I cannot be informed properly about possible adverse consequences of these vaccines until all 4 phases of these trials have been completed. To threaten me with the loss of my job before all the trial data is available is fundamentally unjust, and unworthy of a free country.
For any government minister to change my terms and conditions of employment and thus require me to have the vaccination or face the sack is not to get my informed consent but to obtain consent by coercion. And this from the government which decided to send elderly NHS patients back to the care homes without testing them for Covid-19 “so as not to overwhelm the NHS” and thus condemned many tens of thousands of other care home residents to death.
Although most political leaders and those powerful people who consider themselves ‘masters of the universe’ haven’t yet got the true message of our times, I wish to finish on a more uplifting note and quote instead the ‘masters of wisdom’, as channelled by a dear friend, Annie Davison. I commend these thoughts to any politician who is tempted to tell the rest of us to “Do as I say, not as I do.”
“The most important thing for us right now is to know and recognise that all humanity is spiritual in origin. Therefore, all humanity is equal in the eyes of universal understanding. Throughout its history, humanity has been unable to perceive equality. Until now, life has been about fight and flight, about dominance and servility. About reaching for the stars no matter whom you tread on along the way.”
“But over these last years, more and more people have recognised that there is more to their inner world than this mighty, greedy, trampling attitude that has evolved to its zenith. Slowly but surely, they have understood, worked hard, and moved through the history mankind has created – life after life, death after death.”
“They have reached the knowledge that life itself can be spiritualised and that if you treat your life gently, with intention, with respect, then you can treat others gently with respect. Life itself, on earth, is where life can be lived within a spiritualised worldview.” (…)
“It is as simple as that. All beings are equal.”
anthropopper 
Hello Jeremy!
The most frightening aspect about this pandemic is not the disease itself but how easy it apparently was to scare people into silently and obediently accepting almost anything — including the most absurd restrictions and rules, many of which were probably utterly useless in saving lives. We’ve had a few of them over here too, but overall I’m happy to have lived in Sweden over the past year and a half. I mean, I can accept, for example, that the number of shoppers in a store is limited (in practice, it’s never a problem because the limit is high enough), but I can’t accept that anyone else but me should decide if I can go out for a walk anywhere I please or who or how many people I meet with in my own home, and so on. Face masks are optional, too. I’ve only used a mask twice: at a doctor’s appointment and when getting the covid jab. Also you can’t lose your job if you don’t get the jab. The vast majority of people want it anyway. This time we were lucky and had strong-willed, independently thinking people in charge of the strategy and the path we took, but I fear that with current international trends and fashions, next time around — or rather in the next crisis, whatever its nature — reasoning will be different and we will also be swept along with the tide of repression. This because leaders and politicians everywhere in the world around us will be very busy justifying the idea that repression worked this time, even if it really didn’t. They just have to, because regardless of success or failure, they will want to defend the choices made, choices that had such severe and probably long-lasting impact on people’s lives, especially perhaps on children’s lives.
Wishing you a great summer!
Alicia
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My wife follows and is extremely “in tune” with what is going on in our world today i.e. I empathize with your predicament. Hang in there, Jeremy. Do not give in or give up.
Each morning – and throughout the day – my wife and I “compare notes.” She is more “boots on the ground” and I am very spiritually centered in my views (on all of life – I am an anthroposophist, but not only that).
What you quote from Annie Davison is square on point. What I firmly believe and state, over and over, is that we MUST approach our world today from this simple, yet powerful, premise: Everything is Spiritual. If we can grasp that Truth, then mark our every approach to “what is happening in the world,” then we might, just might “turn this thing around.” Barring that, however, I fear the worst for so many…..
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Hello Jeremy, well written. As yet nobody has managed to explain to me why the un-vaccinated put the vaccinated at risk! If you have been vaccinated then does it not follow that you are protected and will not catch the virus even if you are in proximity to some-one who has it. So why the fear? And why the coercion that everyone has to be vaccinated? If I choose to not be vaccinated I am taking that risk that I may catch the virus! But that is my choice.
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I empathise with your dilemma. I used to work in a Care Home – not any more. I refused to sign my new contract that required me to agree to any vaccination the government recommended. NO! So out the door I go. I foresee that almost no employer will now take me as a worker. I foresee that my rights to State benefits that I have paid for all my working life will be denied me. What the future holds I cannot say. Steiner tells us to allow the future to approach us with equanimity. I find that difficult to do. The legal position is so tenuous for both employers and governments adopting these positions of coercion, and yet no protests seem to be effective. Without media cooperation, we dissenters are not able to get our message out, argue our point. We are in a totalitarian regime and it happened in a blink. I always wondered how it was that a nation could be overtaken by Hitler’s ranting form of government. Now I know.
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Hello, Jupiter.
Thank you for expressing yourself. I will add that in some way we must hold that equanimity for the future; it is not going to be nice, and global warming will stir the pot yet more. Remember that your equanimity is where your guardian angel has a space in your life, and those who do not possess this cannot have a relationship with theirs.
The matter of protesting is a very British matter. The Brown government (as I recall) put up the pension age, and there was barely a flutter from the dispossessed of Britain. When right-wing Macron tried to pull this prank in France (they dared not try this in Germany) the reaction was full and final. We do not have a British government because the British want a democracy.
I would like to mention that the repressive regime you mention in Germany was funded by the US through London’s banks. When Chamberlain returned from Munich in 1938 declaring peace in our time, he meant it because he’d been consorting with his best buddy. When Hitler started invading other countries – an exclusive purview of the Anglo-Americans – only then did their relationship turn sour.
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When Bismarck introduced OAP in Germany (in an attempt to short circuit socialists!) pension age was set at 65, an age that only 10% of population reached. And those that did, mostly did not claim for long.
Thus the small number of pensioners could well be afforded by the large number of workers.
The pension problem is that now, I think, there are only 2 workers to support each pensioner. Raising the pension age by a couple of years gives temporary relief to the system but no a solution.
So, Silver Moon, what is YOUR solution to the demographic change?
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Dear Jeremy, I think you will find this interview helpful…
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A video shared online claimed that because antibodies produced as a result of the vaccine are in the blood, they don’t protect against Covid infection. This is false.
https://www.thejournal.ie/claims-about-vaccines-working-with-respiratory-illness-5468645-Jun2021/
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I can’t speak for that particular
We’re all very familiar here with this publication and it’s methods, it’s very heavily censorious of contrary opinions (eg, it deleted factual statements concerning the infamous Tavistock clinic’s practices in Ireland, and last summer deleted the entire comment history from its covid-related ‘check’ pieces, and turned off the feature altogether as it was getting torn apart in the commentary – if you compare other articles with their ‘factcheck’ pieces you can confirm this. )
There are indeed other liars out there than those in Putin’s regime.
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Video is censored
And in a very cruel way
Allowing the questions to be clearly heard and the Dr. is deliberately censored responding to questions.
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You may know of this or not. But here is a link to an important video interview with a well known and qualified, conventional, American doctor and research professor. In it he claims that 85% of the people who died in the US of Covid-19 could have been saved with early treatment of conventional medicines by their family doctors before ever having to go to a hospital – but for some reason everyone was made to stay home without treatment until a small percent (over 600,000! in the US) got so sick they had to go to the hospital and by then it was too late for most of them – and all they were told was to wait for a vaccine. Unfortunately the video is way too long – so if one just listens to 1:07:00 to about 1:15:00, one can see if it is worth it for them to listen to the rest – because he has a lot to say about treatments, who created such a situation. Also about vaccinations, which he is usually not against if used properly on high risk people if they want it, but he is angry and can’t understand why most of the world’s governments and international medical bodies conspired to make, to force, this to happen in order to force worldwide mass vaccinations of untested drugs on otherwise healthy people, especially now those under 50. I think it’s obvious from this, whichever side of the argument one is on, that this is not about a conspiracy theory but about the fact of a conspiracy – for whatever reason.
https://vimeo.com/553518199
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Consent by coercion isn’t just, indeed. On the other hand, paraphrasing Surkov: an overdose of (absolute) freedom is lethal to a state. The state can’t protect public health, when too many people hesitate to get vaccinated (herd immunity). The public has to weigh rare adverse effects (even some deaths) and proven vaccine protection.
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“Trust has been a problem for Putin at home, too. The lack of it, more precisely, has contributed to a new COVID wave driven in part by hesitancy among tens of millions of Russians to get vaccinated.”
https://www.rferl.org/a/week-in-russia-insecurity-insincerity-distrust/31325618.html
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Even with regard to people in full health? Children ?
If you agree that these should be vaccinated, some part of you has acceded – with whatever degree of consciousness & volition only you can answer – to a lie.
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A very disturbing post. When you say, “To threaten me with the loss of my job before all the trial data is available is fundamentally unjust, and unworthy of a free country.” I have to ask in the light of current and past events if this is – in honesty – a ‘free country’. Because I have genuine concerns that it is not. Boris does not need an outright majority in the house – he got 59% of the seats with 42% of the vote, outrageously undemocratic even by Russian standards – because he is a free thinking individual. He needs an outright majority because he is a political and intellectual vacuum: the majority means he can do what he likes, when he likes and nobody can stop him.
Hittler needed an outright majority in the Reiichstag for precisely the same reasons.
Perfidious Albion has never enacted such perfidy as it has this year and I am truly sorry that you are one of those put into such an invidious position; it is an almost uniquely British thing to do. Nor are you the only one being crucified in this manner; I have a friend who is a nurse and does not wish to be vaccinated – and as a union member, is prepared to go to court or leave her post in order to show the government in its true light. Further to this, how on earth will the government make up the shortfall in the NHS if it carries on in this way? Will it break its Brexit pledge and allow foreign workers back in? It would not surprise me if they did. Do they care for their promises? Putin has no choice, but then, whatever his faults, he is Russian and is working for Russia and not Amerrica. But that is the key to the problem. What I find baffling is that you started by making assertions about Putin, and end by stating that the UK government is acting in a manner that Putin could only ever dream of.
As to the vaccine, I also have tales. Personal ones that have affected me directly – and I have (and will not be) vaccinated with something that clearly has side-effects. A friend of mine voluntarily accepted a jab only to find herself with terrible shaking and nausea that lasted several days and still keep her from work two weeks later. I will discuss my own reaction when the panic is over.
However, there are more subtle elements to the British government’s malfeasance than you describe. They would be sufficient, but it is the matter of the second wave that engulfed Europe with such fearful results. Because 94% of the entire second wave in Europe was due to the Kent strain of the virus. And all because Mr Johnson, who ought have been acting in our favour, was doing nothing. Nothing whatsoever. He had no PPE, he did not close the airports or do anything else, come to that. As you mention, the things he did do only made things worse! A very British way of doing things.
The result of this inaction meant that London had high percentages of French, Italian and Spanish variants – and, of course, the Chinese variant. Naturally, given such conditions, the Kent variant came about and struck Europe when Europe had thought it was all over. Had Boris DONE HIS JOB and not – as is usual for a Prime Minister – been asleep at the wheel, the second wave would not have happened. Now to be fair, France had the French and Chinese variants; the Italians the Italian and Chinese variants and the Spanish the Spanish and Chinese variants. Only Britain had all four of them. Only Britain’s lax governmental system allowed the foetid mingling that made for the Kent strain.
When the day of judgement comes, Boris has half a million lives to account for.
To be fair though, ‘lax’ is not a word that should be associated with a British government. Usually they are utterly supine. When they are not, they are actively desttroying the economy – Thatcher desttroyed the steel industry, coal industry and the council housing that our country was in such need of. The Red Tories under Blair and Brown went after the social side of matters, as befits their pseudo-lefty stance, raising the pension age being one, and – vastly worse – in refusing to implement the terms of the Maastricht Treaty they overtly flouted internattional law in a manner all too typical of the British. Boris has been doing his best to desttroy whatever they left…
In short, a British government will do everything it can to avoid meeting the challenges it ought be meeting in our Fifth Epoch. We are no longer the vanguard, we were given no choice to cede that to the Ammericans after WW2, and they subesequently ceded it to a different country that knows what moral duties are – and are tarred and feathered by the mediia for being such. only the British and American citizens are now so inured to these thoughts that they can think of nothing else. That does not stop the truth from coming out, as certain European countries are all too well aware. It is interesting that they have the lowest rates of mortality. But having a keen awareness for the truth is what governance is all about.
Now, as to Mr Surkov: is he following the Japanese warning ‘tell the Americans what they want to hear. Because if you are stupid enough to tell them the truth, they will brand you a liar because you are not telling them what they want to hear.’ What Surkov is telling us is uncannily close to the kinds of pranks pulled by our closest ally in upsetting the democratic will of various foreign democracies.
As to what our closest ally would have done to our economy had we gone against the mediia barrage and voted Corbyn into office in the last election is a matter for conjecture. But they did it in the 1960s when we voted the wrong way… they are not very imaginative in their retributions and it makes it all the easier to spot. This begs the question: what Russia is truly up to? That is the real issue, and our closest ally would not have much interest because it is not what they want to hear.
But Britain is still somewhere special despite the political abyss at its centre. A friend of mine likened the song of the blackbird to a mountain stream tinkling over pebbles. Such originality and creativity is what Britain is all about and it was a conscious gift from her to me and in honesty, no gift could have been as lovely or be as enduring. Tell me, is it 30% of all pop songs in Europe are written in Britain? There are limits to the things a British government can desttroy, because there is an element of British society that the British government simply cannot comprehend… like those who will be out later collecting elderflowers.
***
[Mis-spellings are deliberate as WordPress has botts that cennsor certain words and I have fallen foul of this on several occasions.]
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Hi Silver Moon, I am not quite clear whether you are saying that UK is not a ‘free country’ because of Covid restrictions or that BoJo was not strict enough in applying restrictive measures? – Hence 2nd Wave and more deaths and variants?
You clearly have deep questions and or opinions on many aspects of the world. So have I! Great to see Margaret Thatcher and 5th epoch together.
However, I did see a report that recently most people dying with ( the ‘of’ is always a big ?) Covid had been double vaccinated. The report did NOT specify AGE of threshold crossers. Because oldest were vaccinated first, they were most likely to die anyway. But it does suggest that vaccine does not necessarily interfere with Karma. When you’ve got to go , you’ve got to go.
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In November 1918 Steiner wrote: “…it is simply impossible for effectual, fruitful social ideas to be discovered in the future by any other path than the one that leads to the search for truths beyond the threshold of ordinary physical consciousness…it will not do to shrink back in future from acquainting oneself, so far as this is possible for each person, with the real nature of the threshold of the spiritual world”.
At this time, I see us collectively engaged in a threshold experience. One by one, everything we have coveted, denied, trashed and taken for granted is presenting itself to us. We have stressed habitat so that plagues from the animal kingdom spreading. They will continue to produce deadly variants no matter how many of us obsess over our personal rights and freedoms. We have reduced the polar icecaps so the earth’s tectonic plates are undergoing a new state of freedom. Earthquakes are increasing in number and intensity. Volcanoes are coming alive. World-wide famine and catastrophic population dislocation is gearing up.
The Davison quote mirrors Steiner’s: “The most important thing for us right now is to know and recognize that all humanity is spiritual in origin.” This is the fundamental teaching of the Guardian. But while we separate from each other with theories and conspiracies and violence we cannot endure that teaching. We will only be able to meet this trial if we redeem our personal Ahrimanic Double – otherwise we will continue to run in terror from the threshold of the Spiritual World and take each other down.
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With her abstract thinking, humanity is crossing the threshold of the spiritual world collectively and unconsciously:
“While man has been approaching the newer phases of his evolution in recent times, he has, as it were, entered the sphere on the other side of the Threshold without having the consciousness that the world is permeated by Spirit. Etc.” GA0203/19210206
Cf. https://en.anthro.wiki/Guardian_of_the_Threshold
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Resist their coercion, get a lawyer if you must. I have compiled a meta-analysis that includes some helpful references to protect yourself if you must get the jab. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ymF-bZ_VHFtB1j-LOR8sBSOwFDvdSAFJ5dikewQPPbY/edit?usp=sharing
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Thank you for sharing your research with us, Miriah.
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The first two links in the document concern swprs and off-guardian, that is: Russian propaganda sites.
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Thanks for keeping an eye on these things, Ton!
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Ton Majoor,
are you suggesting that any website that does not obey the immediate demands of the US-UK Axis is automatically a Russian propaganda site?
I thought that in a pluralistic democracy, alternative views are tolerated, if not openly welcomed.
After all, one cannot improve something with praise; it is to raise awareness of the faults in the system that allow for improvement. What Jeremy has highlighted is the lack of such awareness in the British administration.
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Not automatically, but OffGuardian was identified in 2016 as a source of Russian disinformation. It reprints many articles from New Eastern Outlook (NEO) authors.
Click to access Pillars-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf
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Thanks Ton, I will look into that, I didn’t get any red flags initially and it swpr cross referenced with many other sources I found. I chose them specifically because they cited scientific journals for much of their resources. I’m willing to do my own research to look into it but also welcome any resources you’re willing to share for how you came upon that information.
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For OffGuardian, see pdf ‘Pillars-of-Russia’s-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem’ (2020). Pro-Kremlin propaganda isn’t massive anymore, but “allows for varied and overlapping approaches that reinforce each other even when individual messages within the system appear contradictory.”
Swiss Policy Research (swprs, 2016) seems to be connected with the Swiss historian and conspiracy theorist Dr. Daniele Ganser.
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Ton Majoor,
when you say, “but OffGuardian was identified in 2016 as a source of Russian disinformation” – who is it that is saying this, and what makes you believe it to be true?
Is “disinformation” always from Russia, and why has it been classified as disinformation at all? Just because it goes against the things the US want you to grasp does not mean that it has anything to do with the truth.
It is worth thinking about because blaming Russia for the things the US and UK do so routinely was discussed by Rudolf Steiner when speaking about the Karma of Untruthfulness where the British blamed Germany for things that Britain did.
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With ‘Russian disinformation’, I mean pro-Kremlin disinformation by swprs and OffGuardian, e.g. on Ukraine or Covid-19.
Steiner (1916) discussed imperialistic ‘Russianism’ in Karma of Untruthfulness (CW 173, google BSq5byop0rwC, p.62) in connection with the so called Testament of Peter the Great.
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I am glad to read comments by Ton Majoor on this page. He maintains a sober judgement.
Indeed, losing one’s job for not getting vaccinated is one thing.
The eternal repetition of conspiracy stories is another.
Of course, Hitler always provides a good projection surface for conspiracy theories. I would like to add one from Germany that people in the English-speaking world probably don’t like to spread. The Hiroshima bomb was made in Germany and then stolen and used by the Americans in the war. No doubt Hitler would have dropped the bomb on London if he had had it. But sober reflection is not the business of conspiracy thinkers.
Another side of conspiracy theorists today is that they like to portray themselves as victims, victims of the evil media and now victims of the vaccinated passing the disease on to vaccine refusers. But more difficult than dealing with total nonsense is dealing with disinformation, that is, half-truths or truths mixed with lies.
This Sucharit Bhakdi is one of the heroes of the Corona conspirators. Very early on, in the spring of 2020, errors and falsehoods were pointed out in his claims. He has never corrected himself. (I see a parallel with Helmut Zander: he was shown to have false facts but never corrected himself. The intention to personally disavow Rudolf Steiner is more important than truthful facts. So Bhakdi! And Bhakdi feels victimised because he is not received and heard by Angela Merkel and leading virologists).
Ottmar
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Some against the vaccine are using the Nuremberg Code. Perhaps this will help you. Here in the US there is an interview with Dr. Peter McCullough by John Leake. I had no words after listening to him. You can find the interview on Attack On Liberty.com. Will need to scroll to the next page. You may like some of the other post as well.
Oh Man Know Thyself
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I listened to an interview with Dr. Bhakdi also. He states that the PCR test was not even calibrated, so to speak, with Covid 19. That the test will show positive if you have had a cold or such.
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Jeremy,
I agree entirely with you about this, if anything I have an even harder stance against this vaccine.
There are inadequate and contradictory statements regarding the infectiousnes of the vaccinated, the asymptomatic, the efficacy of the vaccine on ‘variants’, etc., to see ourselves as vectors of disease to others – the lies told with regard to these have been so convoluted they couldn’t be knit together credibly.
Those – like my parents (70s) – who are at risk are poised with a choice one way or another. If this scenario were painted for us, say, a mere eighteen or so months ago we would hqve rationally assumed, as we have always done, that the decision to accede to vaccines, medicines or treatments is the sovereign right of the individual. Indeed, it is enshrined in international law, and in many Constitutions (including my own, Irish).
My parents have refused, I have refused, and the parents of the children in our families refuse to allow this to be done to them (the age-threshold for vaccination is, like the UK, lowering every couple of weeks).
We are seeing the beginning, this past couple of days, of the introduction of internal ‘covid vaccines’ for indoor activities – businesses are being ‘bribed’ with permission to reopen if they comply with introducing these measures (and thus threatened if they refuse). There is talk of denying third-level students access to their colleges without this passport.
The constitutional situation is that no-one in the nation can be forced to undergo this without consent, and duress and denying of service is explicitly forbidden in this regard.
The Constitution, though, has been effectively suspended under ‘temporary’ (a year-and-a-half by now) emergency powers the government granted themselves. This has been pressed legally a couple of times – once in relation to the right to freedom to worship (Churches had been forced to close), the Judge delayed repeatedly as it began to look like the foundation of the basis of government itself was in question, till a panicked government released the pressure by restoring freedom of religious gathering (allowing the craven judge, who only then permitted the challenge to be heard, to give no decision as “the matter is moot”)
I don’t doubt that this is entirely orchestrated from outside the country. The idiots here could neither come up with it nor would they be brave enough to implement such an assault without an outside strength lent them. And the same situation is closely paralleled with only slightly differing details & tempos across much of Europe, North America, NZ & Australia.
I don’t think it can be doubted that the foundations of our nations – their laws and Constitutions – are being eclipsed, and those entrusted with upholding them are working with whatever ’cause’ is at the root of it all.
But more than half of the country seems to be welcoming what is happening. The voices that , only a few months ago, were insisting that they would never comply with these things are now sounding more and more like the ideologues of the Cultural Revolution. They talk about their neighbours as if they were subversives & criminals for holding on to the beliefs they themselves swore they held – long-ago, in 2019.
What on earth has happened ? Is it the outsourcing of our cognition to political & media eddies; has technology become a prosthesis in place of conscience?
I really, genuinely fear that before two or three years have passed large numbers of ordinary men and women will be either jailed or living as a sub-class in society, and children taken from the care of their own families.
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The Religious Freedom point is interesting. In Lower Saxony in Germany there were cases during the first wave when a large proportion of specific congregations became ill with Covid after well attended services. Subsequent restrictions on religious gatherings seemed to avoid ‘super spreading’. Funny how God did not seem to look after his own.
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One among numerous instances of the spread of the virus in various kinds of indoor settings.
On what basis can something be called essential ? Factories, warehouses, etc. had mostly uninterupted (by comparison) operations, yet the meeting of households was repeatedly prohibited. We can be economic realists and still recognise that Amazon is a lesser thing to Family, friendship & faith.
During ‘interregnums’ between the more absolute versions of the lockdown, religious gatherings/services had been permitted with reduced numbers. Very easy to safely accomodate smaller numbers in these high-ceilinged buildings, spread the number of celebrants across an increases number of services, etc. I personally have no problem with sensible precautions or minor inconveniences (like the kind described in the shops in the top comment, above.)
They could always have been allowed proceed – and in a way more safely than other (mostly political or economic) activities that weren’t correspondingly halted.
So at what point could it reasonably said that the prayer serices and rituals of our religions were more dangerous (or less important) than, say, the production of catfood ?
I’d hazard a guess that certain types of gatherings, both sacred and secular, that lend the participants spiritual (in all senses – from prayer to meeting friends) strength, invigorate us, add social cohesion, etc., were targeted.
(The masks, of course, are an absurdity – witness the on-again/off-again parliamentary charades, not to mention the G7 meetings
[ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=enqd-I-U0JQ ]
– and for many an impediment or even an undermining of participation in religious services [I’m sure this holds true across faiths], but for prolonged periods even masked attendance was forbidden. )
I’m not sure if your last sentence was meant in a wry, tragi-comic sense ?
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Hello
In lecture 10 The Influences of Spiritual Beings on Man there are some references by Rudolf Steiner to the creation of elemental beings through lies, bad laws and coercion. Below are some passengers from his lecture. I mention them because they seem to have a direct bearing on the development, use and consequences of the Covid – 19 vaccinations. Although the creation of these elementals seems to apply to many things going on in modern life.
https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA102/English/AP1961/19080604p01.html
The uttering of lies and untruthfulness, untruth even in the affairs of life, has a definite effect on the human physical body. Let us suppose this person is altogether un-truthful, piling up lies, then he will have many such effects in his physical body. All this hardens, as it were, in the night, and then something very important happens. These hardenings, these “enclosures,” in the physical body are not at all agreeable to the beings who from higher worlds must take possession of the physical body in the night and carry out the functions otherwise exercised by the astral body and ego. The result is that in the course of life and by reason of a body diseased — one might say — through lies, portions of those beings who descend into man at night become detached. Here we have again detachment processes and they lead to the fact that when a man dies his physical body does not merely follow the paths which it would normally take. Certain beings are left behind, beings which have been created in the physical body through the effect of lying and slander and have been detached from the spiritual world. Such beings, detached in this circuitous way, now flit and whir about in our world and belong to the class that we call “phantoms.” They form a certain group of elemental beings related to our physical body and invisible to physical sight. They multiply through lies and calumnies, and these in actual fact populate our earthly globe with phantoms. In this way we learn to know a new class of elemental beings.
Other things again work in a similar way on the etheric body. Matters, for example, which have a harmful result on the etheric body are bad laws, or bad social measures prevailing in a community. All that leads to want of harmony, all that makes for bad adjustments between man and man, works in such a way through the feeling which it creates in the common life that the effect is continued into the etheric body. The accumulation in the etheric body caused through these experiences of the soul brings about again detachments from the beings working in from the spiritual worlds and these likewise are now to be found in our environment — they are “spectres” or “ghosts.” Thus, these beings that exist in the etheric world, the life world, we see grow out of the life of men. Many a man can go about amongst us and for one who is able to see these things spiritually, his physical body is crammed, one might say, with phantoms, his etheric body crammed with spectres, and as a rule after a man’s death or shortly afterwards all this rises and disperses and populates the world.
. Think only how the modern man for the most part wants to over-rule the mind of another, how he cannot bear someone else to think and like differently, how he wants to work upon the other’s soul. In all that works from soul to soul in our world, from the giving of unjustifiable advice to all those methods which men employ in order to overwhelm others, in every act that does not allow the free soul to confront the free soul, but employs, even in the slightest degree, forcible means of convincing and persuasion, in all this, forces are working from soul to soul which again so influence these souls that it is expressed in the night in the astral body. The astral body gets those “enclosures” and thereby beings are detached from other worlds and whir through our world again as elemental beings. They belong to the class of demons. Their existence is solely due to the fact that intolerance and oppression of thought have in various ways been used in our world. That is how these hosts of demons have arisen in our world.
Humanity would have advanced quite differently if intolerance had not created the demons which pervade our world, influencing people continually. They are at the same time spirits of prejudice. One understands the intricacies of life when one learns about these entanglements between the spiritual world in the higher sense and our human world. All these beings, as we have said, are there, and they whiz and whir through the world in which we live.
But all the concepts he absorbs of the artistic, the beautiful, the religious — and everything can be immersed in the sphere of wisdom, art, religion — all this endows man’s etheric body with the capability and possibility of being organized independently.
But if man does not absorb the Whitsuntide spirit, then the etheric body goes out of the physical body and is far too weak to overcome what has already been created, those worlds of spectres, phantoms, demons, which the world creates as phenomena existing at its side.
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Hello Jeremy
Thank you for this post which highlights crucial areas of concern in the political and social domains. You make a number of important points. The following comments relate to the UK situation.
One might say that politicians function at their best at a local constituency level, where they can meet those they represent face-to-face and deal with local issues. Once they step through the gates of Westminster, their role becomes more ambiguous and conflicted. The meeting between one individual and another is left in the constituency and replaced by the expectation of adherence to the party political group. In their decision-making, whose interests are they truly representing? Is their allegiance to their constituents or to the party whip? Are they really acting in accordance with the oath they swore to the Crown? How does it come about that these actually remain open questions in the 21st century?
If Brexit taught us anything, it was that the already degenerate UK party political system was crumbling; indeed that had been obvious for a long time. How often has the cry been heard that ‘politics is broken’ – acknowledged even by those within the halls of Westminster? Yet the warning signs have not been heeded and the state/establishment clings on to a structure which is way out of its time. The pledge of the Blair Government in the late nineties to remove all hereditary peers from the House of Lords initially offered the beginnings of parliamentary reform. That pledge was broken by a secret deal to permit ninety-two to remain, thus allowing the principle of privilege by blood relationship to continue in an age where it does not belong. Twenty years on, it seems now that the window of opportunity to consciously change the system for the better has passed, and as a result, a counter-image of what political life might have become in the UK has been unleashed, sweeping away any semblance of a parliamentary democracy, which was anyway something of an illusion. A little democracy every few years at election time, but otherwise a system designed by the few to ensure its continuity and to perpetuate the dominance of the few over the many.
An impotent Parliament has largely been displaced by an authoritarian, anti-human system of Government by decree. To the plutocrats and oligarchs have been added the technocrats and pseudo-scientists, effectively presenting an inversion of what a democratic state should be in its natural form. In this looming scenario, human freedoms in political and social life are replaced by coercion, compulsion and condemnation, a transformation which seems to be escaping a largely soporific, acquiescent public. It may well be the case that many were prepared to temporarily sacrifice their freedoms on moral grounds, truly believing the Government’s public health emergency narrative and lending their support to the measures subsequently taken. Compromising one’s freedoms in a true emergency is one thing; blindly believing the overt propaganda of a tiny cabal of unscrupulous ministers, backed by dubious behavioural and medical science is quite another.
I suspect there is a growing number of politicians and voters nervously looking ahead to the next General Election. If these current circumstances do not change for the better, what kind of election will it be (if indeed there is one)? And for whom? Who will be permitted to stand for election or vote? Only those with vaccine/digital identity passports and the right credit score? No dissidents or heretics allowed?
The question of whether the Government has taken advantage of the situation to introduce experimental social controls might best be answered by looking to its public statements on technology and climate. What infrastructure would need to be installed to bring about its vision of the world in 2030? One might then conclude that the move to introduce authoritarian social controls was no chance event.
Vladislav Surkov’s statement that “an overdose of freedom is lethal to a state” throws into sharp relief the eastern attitude of soul compared to that of the west (speaking generally). As I recall, Rudolf Steiner mentioned that certain countries needed their own particular system of government to accord with the soul disposition of its people, with the political system evolving to match the people’s evolving soul nature. Under normal circumstances, Surkov’s metaphor simply could not apply in the UK, either as a natural law of human rights, which is anyway a universal law, or as an ‘Act’ of the state. The state does not grant freedom to living individual human beings; freedom is, and is recognized in law as, a God-given inalienable human right. The state cannot return to you, or regulate, something that does not belong to it – an ‘overdose’ is therefore not possible. By surreptitious means however, the state attempts (quite successfully) to trick people into believing it grants them freedom and that it may therefore remove or regulate it.
As for the impending Care Home vaccine legislation, it may well be the case that the Government is ‘testing the water’ to determine the level of opposition, both from the public and from the legal profession. As others have alluded to, I believe a number of legal actions are currently before the courts, backed by national and international law on bio-ethics, unlicensed medical interventions and informed consent.
Usually moderate and tolerant by nature, the British public rarely resort to active protest or civil disobedience unless they sense a real threat to their freedoms and values. It’s refreshing to observe an increasing wakefulness amongst the public, as evidenced for example by the hundreds of thousands who have been protesting recently on the streets of London. The more discreet, but increasingly visible reaction coming from a growing number of medical professionals and lawyers is also good to see.
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I totally agree with Richard Philips that freedom is not something states can or are entitled to give us, it is an intrinsic quality of human beings, both in terms of rights as well as in terms of responsibilities and choices we are left to take. In the first part of another lucid post of Jeremy he describes the ethical dilemmas we are confronted with in this covid crisis. Are we urged to engage in national unity Churchill style? Or are we forced to bow to a Hitler like regime?
What puzzles me is that I think it is the first ever post where Jeremy does not quote Rufolf Steiner extensively. And that he concludes his post with a seemingly unrelated beautiful quote of Annie Davison who emphasizes universality and equality of all people.
In the first part Jeremy makes us aware that our freedom seems to be increasingly in the firm grip of the government. That’s what Vladislav Surkov may like to see in order to strengthen the stability of the state. But it seems he does not realize that our freedom has been hijacked already near completely by the corporate sector. The freedom this sector is granted in the mantle of neo-liberalism allows it to even become more powerful than the state. Ultimately all politicians become entrepreneurs and run the state as an enterprise with most profit for the rich and powerful.
Here I start understanding why the message of Annie Davison is invited in. Our awakening to a new sense of universality will be needed to re-claim the freedom stolen from us by the state and the corporate sector. How I try to interprete the message of Steiner for the 21st century here (instead of going into paranoid conspiracy theories) is that this sense of unity attributing equal freedom to us all, may sound very abstract but is directly accessable through interconnectedness in the etheric realm. Here I understand the Christ was reborn as Mother Earth.
As far as this is still too “etherial” and a-political: we can get concrete access to this interconnectedness via “global citizenship” and subsequently through what I call “Earth Trusteeship”: all global citizens are equal trustees of the Earth for the wellbeing of future generations. That may be the new mode of citizenship which can override corporate domination. It gives us back our stolen freedom.
PS under the unavoidable social pressure of my lovely family here in Thailand I am booked for the earliest possible opportunity for foreigners to be vaccinated: October 2021, Moderna with full mRNA technology. Enough time to escape?
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Large protests like those that have happened in London, and the enormous ones happening all across France today, are downplayed in various ways (eg, scale, niche or fringe participation, etc), obscured and even ignored.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AmyMek/status/1416444474683625472
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The escalation here from how things stood just a few weeks ago when the post was published is unbelievable.
A story told in three short videos:
https://mobile.twitter.com/efenigson/status/1418566035809079299
https://mobile.twitter.com/GalG____/status/1418623576756850698
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