1. War By Any Other Name
Friends, I am the casualty of a bioweapons attack. We all are—and some are fatalities. We have to stop kidding ourselves that we’re not in a war, or that we’re only in a metaphorical war. This is a real conflict with real casualties. This is millions of people injured in both Europe and the United States, to say nothing of Canada. This is tens of thousands killed by a gene therapy injection meant to ‘save’ them. (According to Steve Kirsch, independent polls show that twice as many people in the US died from the mRNA injections as from Covid-19.)[1] This is the FDA committing scientific fraud in order to license these same dangerous mRNA vaccines for children as young as six months old, who are at zero risk of dying from Covid-19. If that doesn’t describe a war I don’t know what does.
The political philosopher Karl Popper, watching the Nazi tanks roll unhindered across Europe, had the question come to his mind: Are we witnessing the end of democracy? It’s as relevant a question today as it was 80 years ago. As I write in Words from the Dead:
“Karl Popper decided to write The Open Society and its Enemies on the day he received news that the Nazis had invaded (or annexed) Austria, and finished it in 1943. One had to remember that for most of the period while he was working on it Hitler was meeting with success after success, conquering almost the whole of Europe, country by country, and driving deep into Russia. Western civilization was confronted with the immediate threat of a new Dark Age. In these circumstances what Popper was concerned to do was to understand and explain the appeal of totalitarian ideas, and do everything he could to undermine it, and also to promulgate the value and importance of liberty in the widest sense.”[2]
Popper had a lot of thoughts about what democracy really means. He took it to heart as a soul-searching enquiry with a Socratic drive to keep asking penetrating questions until the fallacies fall away and the truth stands in the open. And he came up with some perennial principles that retain the essence of democracy laid down in the 6th century BC by Athenian reformer Cleisthenes.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You can’t seriously talk reform in the middle of a war. The closest historical analogy I can find from the past century is June 1942. The US had recently entered the war with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941—an event with personal resonance for my family. (I wouldn’t be here if my maternal grandfather had been killed when his US Navy ship was torpedoed but fortunately not sunk.) The Battle of Midway in June 1942 was a good showing by the US Navy, but they would endure a bloody three-year battle with appalling casualties to reclaim the islands of the Pacific. And although there is some debate on this point, most historians agree that Stalingrad was the turning point for the war, particularly when the Soviet Army encircled the German Army in November 1942.[3] But again, it took three more bloody years for the Nazis to be pushed all the way back to Berlin.
Fitting—Midway. Midway between war and victory. In many respects, the Freedom or Resistance movement has made by far the most gains up until this moment. The Truckers’ Convoy, even though crushed, was a global inspiration for freedom and democracy. The release of the Pfizer documents, the Bonnie Henry emails and the fact that a judge compelled her to face her accusers in court, all of this has made the authorities nervous, but only slowed them down in their agenda. The World Economic Forum continues its program unabated, although the refusal of the 37 African nations to sign the global pandemic treaty was a serious setback for the WHO. Tamara Lich is re-arrested and Parliament Hill on Canada Day looks less like a festival site than an armed military camp. In the US, Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, is arrested on a minor, probably trumped-up charge related to the January 6. 2021 ‘coup’ attempt and will spend 60 days in jail. So we’re at this push-pull moment very much as the Allies and the Axis powers were in 1942.
And are we still playing “Clue” the board game while the others play for real? Thank God for our whistleblowers: Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Charles Hoffe, Dr. Julie Ponesse, Dr. Byram Bridle, Dr. Naomi Wolf, Dr. Jessica Rose, Del Bigtree…. Heroes all, from their haloes down to their socks, but they’re up against an evil such as the world has never before seen, even worse than Nazism or Stalinism. People so evil they’re willing to shoot dice with the law of unintended consequences—gambling with peoples’ lives—and drop a biological agent on an entire world. As Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins point out: “The coronavirus was somehow ‘optimized’ to infect humans from day one, as you would expect from something that was created in a lab… modern genetic engineering procedures can create new viral constructs while leaving absolutely no trace.”[4] This is biological warfare, nothing less. While I’m grateful to Reiner Fuellmich for his selfless devotion to the cause of universal justice, the fact is that his Peoples’ Grand Jury is a pantomime until it is heard in an official courtroom.
We shouldn’t be surprised. This is a war and we are in occupied territory. In any wartime situation, governments operate in an ex judicio state, which simply means in Latin, “outside the law.” That means that in wartime, the only law is “Might is Right.” In Canada alone, we’ve seen the Justin Trudeau government repeatedly flout the principles of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as the Biden government has flouted the US Constitution. We’ve seen every international treaty ignored, whether it’s the Nuremberg Code or the Biological Weapons Convention, which “prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological and toxin weapons.”[5]As I write in Words from the Dead:
“Democracy today faces another existential crisis, lending credence to Popper’s wartime conclusion that “…modern totalitarianism is only an episode within the perennial revolt against freedom and reason.” Notice, he didn’t say “a revolt against totalitarianism,” but “against freedom and reason.”[6]
It’s like generations of our veterans have come home, many of them with broken bodies, to remind us: We have to fight, and fight hard, for freedom. Already by July 2020, the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance(IDEA) noted with alarm: “Many governments are restricting human rights and fundamental freedoms, such as the freedom of assembly and movement, under the guise of battling the pandemic.”[7] Well, we saw just how far they were willing to take that one right on Parliament Hill when horse troopers were unleashed against peaceful truckers and their families.
The Truckers’ Convoy was a supreme example of the peoples’ will erupting in a spontaneous, peaceful demonstration. But from the start, one thing worried me: it was like a body with a great big heart full of courage, but with no head—no strategy, no endpoint beyond simply ending vaccine mandates. Generally in a war such counter-insurgency measures come with a distinct set of demands. Remember: we are up against well-funded, well-organized, well-trained organizations like the WEF, the WHO, and the CDC—all of them with access to billions in resources to develop their strategies.
Returning to our World War II analogy, the French Resistance began with publishing their own underground newspapers, which sold in the thousands to French people hungry for something besides Nazi propaganda. The publishing operations were naturally structured with multiple redundancies, so that when the Gestapo busted one press, there was another one across town that could be started up at a moment’s notice. The French underground presses were the first journalists to break the news of the concentration camps. It would be years before they would be believed, just as today’s outsider journalists are disbelieved by the majority of the public. Thankfully today we’ve seen independent journalists, podcasts and websites proliferate like spring dandelions. The French Resistance also sheltered Allied spies and Jewish refugees, but it wasn’t until the Normany landings that they were heavily called upon to disrupt German supply lines by blowing up bridges and railroad lines.
I’ve been speaking lately of what I call our “1946 Moment,” meaning the day when we have the Davos cult on the run, Nuremberg Trials 2.0 has convened and we are finally in a position to begin the arduous process of rebuilding and reform. To me, we’ll be in a situation analogous to the 1946 Nuremberg Trials ONLY when all of the war criminals responsible for engineering and releasing a dangerous bioweapon on the world are in prison, all of those responsible for forcing a dangerous vaccine on people are in prison, all of the government bureaucrats responsible for life-threatening lockdowns—all sentenced to life with NO possibility of parole and the worst mass murderers given the ultimate sentence.
Then and only then can we begin to build a new, more just world.
How exactly we get to our “1946 Moment” remains to be seen. But if we haven’t done so already, we need to start thinking like French Resistance fighters. One of the most moving memoirs I’ve ever read was written by Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light. Lusseyran was a blind French Resistance member who at the tender age of 18 was made head of his resistance cell, because even without eyes, he could spot a Nazi infiltrator with uncanny accuracy. “I could read their voices like a book,” he said.[8] And just like today’s wall-to-wall media, Lusseyran wrote that “What attracted me and terrified me on the German radio was the fact that it was in the process of destroying my childhood.”[9] We need to train our children how to manage the media instead of allowing it to manage them. If they must use these devices, teach them to be researchers, to compare references, to use medical and scientific databases. In a word, teach them critical thinking skills and the principles of Socratic enquiry.
In the ancient classic, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, the I Ching informs Sun Tzu’s top-level strategy: “The best way to win a battle is not to fight it.”[10] However, if you’re backed into a corner and must fight, Sun Tzu and his sages advise: “The best policy is to use strategy, influence and the trend of events… carry out operations only after having first determined your strategy. Carefully examine the patterns of the climate and terrain, and look into the hearts of the people… observe the strategy of opponents… distinguish places of safety and danger, find out the conditions of both sides, be aware of when to advance and when to withdraw…”[11] Don’t forget for a minute that every command-level graduate of any military academy knows this book intimately. And don’t think for a second there aren’t infiltrators in every major resistance group. This doesn’t mean cultivating paranoia but perhaps a little hyper-vigilance.
2. Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up
Jesus once said you can’t sew a new patch on an old garment because it won’t hold together. While I respect and admire Brian Peckford and his proposed new Magna Carta for the Canadian constitution, I think the party system is corrupt beyond repair. Jesus’ principle applies to our broken democracies: tinkering with them won’t solve the problem. They must be rebuilt from the ground up. This is a battle between the Davos cult with its One World government run by technocrats and billionaires on the one hand; and on the other, the vision of democracy that began in ancient Athens and had its greatest philosophers in John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine and other 18th and 19th century thinkers. We can thank them and the founders of liberal democracies for our unprecedented recent history of individual rights and freedoms, not to mention historical highs of cultural and economic prosperity. Remember that for most of human history, the concept of the individual did not exist except as it applied to members of the ruling classes. Everyone else was chattel—indentured servants or slaves—and this is the model that the Davos cult would see re-instituted in its ‘Great Reset.’
British historian Aubrey de Selincourt explains how democracy under Cleisthenes (570–500 BCE) provides the blueprint that could solve most of today’s political corruption. First of all, the representatives of the people in Athens were chosen by sortition—by drawing random lots. This eliminated the bitter, expensive and often deceptive politics we see in today’s political campaigns, as de Selincourt explains:
“The Council consisted of five hundred annually elected members, fifty from each tribe; it was divided into ten committees... From these committees a president was chosen by lot each day, and to him, as acting head of the government, were entrusted the state archives, the keys of the Acropolis and the state seal. He was not eligible for re-election.”[12] None of today’s political careerism: “The Athenian ideal was government by intelligent amateurs, none of whom should hold office long enough to make them feel like professionals. The people were the supreme authority.”[13]
Secondly, Cleisthenes established the Boule or Council, which again was composed of people drawn by random selection. The Boule’s job was to propose legislation or law; the Ecclesia or Assembly would then debate the proposed laws and vote on their implementation. In some respects it’s like Canada’s Senate—that much maligned “house of sober second thought” that proved its worth when it stopped Justin Trudeau in his tank tracks with the Emergency Act.
However, once the Boule and the Ecclesia performed their specific legislative task, unlike today’s set-in-stone bureaucracies, they were disbanded. This reminds me of the 2003 documentary The Corporation, where author Joel Bakan tells us that originally corporations were temporary entities formed the specific purpose of building a bridge, a ship, or a hospital. Funds were subscribed to that particular corporation for that particular job, similar to today’s charity drives. When the job was done, the corporation was disbanded. None of us are under any illusions today: Corporations are the de facto governments in the world. When we finally get to our “1946 Moment,” we need to write a new Corporate Accountability Act that makes them 100% responsible for all their actions. No more limited liability corporations. Further, there should be a clause that allows for temporary corporations that MUST be disbanded once their chartered purpose is achieved. As Karl Popper wrote in The Open Society and its Enemies:
“Economic power must not be permitted to dominate political power; if necessary, it must be fought and brought under control by political power.” AND: “…the old question, ‘Who shall be the rulers?’ must be superseded by the more real one, ‘How can we tame them?’”[14]
But what about justice, you might ask? No justice, no democracy. Not an easy one to sort out, but the ancient Greeks gave us some excellent clues. As British author Iain Davis writes: “Sortition was also used to form the juries, whose citizen members sat in the Dikasteria (courts). The jury in the Dikasteria represented the highest law in the land. It could overturn the enactments of the Ecclesia.” This political system enabled the people to create both statute and case law. But here’s the really critical part of the Athenian justice system under Cleisthenes: “Cleisthenes empowered the Dikasteria (the law courts) to overrule (annul) any law that was found in a trial by jury to be unjust. There were no judges. Magistrates were merely administrators for the court. If the defendant was found guilty, both the judgement (ruling) and the nature of the punishment (sentence) were decided by the citizen jurors.”[15]
However, only when we get to today’s equivalent of 1945 and 1946 can we start enacting plans for judiciary reform. Constitutions that have become decadent need to be revived or reformed in just the way Popper advised. As I write in Words from the Dead: “In Popper’s view, a truly liberal democracy should have the capacity to dismiss from office at any time political leaders who fail to meet the needs of the electorate,”[16] as I’m sure Cleisthenes would have agreed. Two of the key pillars of genuine liberal democracy outlined by Popper are that, 1) “…it should be the task and the purpose of the state to protect the freedom of its citizens,” [17] similar to the signatories to the American Constitution, who saw that the individual needed to be protected from the state; and 2) that the one change that would NOT be allowed is anything that would make a constitution less democratic. Similar principles are enshrined in the Victoria Declaration[18] formulated by Dr. Chris Shaw and Ted Kuntz of Vaccine Choice Canada, a declaration that really just echoes the inalienable rights all humans are born with. Human rights are not the property of governments to grant or take away. They exist independent of sovereign power because they are the sovereign power of the individual over his or her own body.
3. Local Does it Best
A dear friend of mine, Norbert Deurichen, was born in Austria in the final year of World War II. His family farm there was devastated twice: first by the Nazis supplying their troops and again by the liberating Russians. The Deurichen family was able to emigrate to Canada a few years after the war and adopted the principles of Rudolf Steiner’s ‘biodynamic farming’ in BC’s Bulkley Valley. Norbert told me: “Food is the basis of everything. If you have no food, you have no economy, nothing.” Vandana Shiva has said the same thing many times in her interviews.
My grandparents told me that during the Great Depression era of the 1930s, no one in the Kootenays had two nickels to rub together. But no one went hungry either. Everyone had eggs, beef, pork, vegetables, cheese, or just labour to trade. No one went hungry, and life was good. I had grandparents and great-grandparents who lived into their 90s—one of them to 101. All of them grew their own food. Call it 100 Mile Diet, call it back-to-the-landers, whatever brand you put on it, it’s that simple thing that humans have done from the beginning: trading food, goods and services with their neighbours. [19] One of the best uses of paper I’ve seen in my community in recent years is a pamphlet showing where all the organic farms and garden centres can be found in the Slocan Valley. This is the pure gold that is going to outshine any kind of cash or currency. Who needs insect burgers or non-meat GMO patties?
A recent historical precedent for us is what dissidents living under Czechoslovakia’s repressive Communist regime did in the 1980s. The idea was conceived by poet and rock musician Ivan Jirous to build a parallel network. “Jirous called on the community of Czech artists to create music labels, publishing houses, concert halls, (and) art expositions… that existed independently of mainstream society and outside the grasp of the communist State.” If enough infrastructure were created an independent society would spontaneously form and function as a pocket of creative freedom in a highly oppressed society. As Jirous explained “…the ‘independent society’ does not compete for power. Its aim is not to replace the powers that be with power of another kind, but rather under this power—or besideit… in which the voice of the ruling power is heard only as an insignificant echo from a world that is organized in an entirely different way.”[20] Simply voting in a new ruler or party as we’ve been doing is a proven failure. Like the famous line in The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.”
I conclude with the words of the late historian Howard Zinn: “Our problem is not one of civil disobedience. Our problem is civil obedience.” He was summing up a principle of anarchism: what we need more of is NOT obedience to a central authority but to the principle of mutually respected autonomy and freedom. For most anarchists of whatever stripe, it’s local governance that is their most cherished principle. This is how Reiner Fuellmich puts it: “We’re going to have to start from scratch, build up our own supply systems as far as energy, as far as food systems are concerned—in our regions, and then connect with each other, exchange ideas. But never again will we allow people to rule from above, from very far away.”[21]
Then and only then can any genuine democracy be attempted.
[1] Steve Kirsch, “Our latest polls show twice as many people died from the vaccine as from COVID,” Substack, July 4, 2022:
[2] Sean Arthur Joyce, Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, Ekstasis Editions, 2022, p. 80.
[3] Laurence Rees, “What Was the Turning Point of World War II,” HistoryNet, June 1, 2010: https://www.historynet.com/what-was-the-turning-point-of-world-war-ii/
[4] Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronnie Cummins, The Truth About Covid-19, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont, 2021, pp. 25, 26.
[5] United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, Biological Weapons Convention: https://www.un.org/disarmament/biological-weapons NOTE that this convention “was the first multilateral disarmament treaty banning an entire category of weapons of mass destruction.”
[6] Sean Arthur Joyce, Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, ibid., p. 81.
[7] Sean Arthur Joyce, Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, ibid., p. 81.
[8] Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light, New World Library, Novato, California, 1963 (2006 ed.), p. 63.
[9] Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light, ibid. (2006 ed.), p. 99.
[10] The Art of War, Sun Tzu, Translated by Thomas Cleary, ibid., Translator’s Introduction, p. xxxix.
[11] The Art of War, Sun Tzu, Translated by Thomas Cleary, Translator’s Introduction, ibid., p. xxv.
[12] Aubrey de Selincourt, The World of Herodotus, The Folio Society, London, 1962 (2015 ed.), with an introduction by Paul Cartledge, p. 359.
[13] Aubrey de Selincourt, The World of Herodotus, The Folio Society, London, 1962 (2015 ed.), ibid., pp. 359–60 (emphasis mine).
[14] Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Volumes 1 & 2, Princeton Classics edition (2020 ed.), pp. 335, 341.
[15] Iain Davis, “Democracy Is Dead… Long Live Democracy,” Off-Guardian, April 15, 2022.
[16] Sean Arthur Joyce, Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, ibid., p. 91.
[17] Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Volume 1: The Spell of Plato, Princeton University Press, 1962 (1971 ed.), p. 94.
[18] Victoria Declaration text: https://librti.com/view-file/victoria-declaration-english-pdf
[19] Colin Todhunter, “Localization: An Alternative to the New Normal,” Off-Guardian, April 29, 2022: https://off-guardian.org/2022/04/29/localization-an-alternative-to-the-new-normal/
[20] “The Parallel Society vs Totalitarianism / How to Create a Free World,” Academy of Ideas: https://academyofideas.com/2022/02/parallel-society-vs-totalitarianism-how-to-create-a-free-world/#more
[21] Quoted in Words from the Dead: Relevant Readings in the Covid Age, ibid., p. 279.
Another great piece of writing and research Art, thank you for the effort you put in to share these valuable insights.
A fine article, Sean Arthur Joyce. I learned a number of things that I was quite unaware of. I have reposted on GETTR and Twitter, https://gettr.com/post/p1h40dadc76 https://twitter.com/mikezimmer_gmz/status/1544167857704935429?s=20&t=qK8eMhenrU3qmoybTUcvLA