See also
Spies, Dupes and Charities - Rivals for Power, Part 4. Norman Dodd and the tax-exempt foundations (Aug 7, 2021)
Jan 2, 2022
This crisis is a great opportunity, Prince Charles said in Jun 2020, when the Covid pandemic was not yet three months old.
“You will own nothing and you will be happy,” read the text of a corporatist video, as the face of seemingly-stoned male model broke into a demented grin. [1]
Politicians aspirated beside “Build Back Better” signs, mouthing the slogan, inhaling the intoxication of power.
The political adage says don’t let a crisis go to waste. Was it of their making, this crisis-solution: fight Covid, reset the world? The crisis may be a fluke. The response has been prepared minutely. And not by politicians or anyone you elected.
Forty years ago a Soviet defector warned how crisis could be used to undermine society, using fear and flux to make people plead for the return of some kind… any kind of normal.
G Edward Griffin recalls that interview with Yuri Bezmenov in 1984, in an edition I watched of The Highwire with Del Bigtree. They relate his warning to today’s events. The Soviet Union has gone but not the strategy of international subversion some espoused.
Griffin and others say the USSR was only part of a broader collectivist strategy. The fact that the agenda continues backs this contention.
For decades schools fostered relativism, then collectivism, then critical theory; the same ideas took human shape in street parades and protests; pitting young against old, black against white, rioters against business owners, productive against entitled.
Then jobs and shops closed, isolation replacing holidays. On television dire warnings boosted the uncertainty of virus: the “level of personal threat needs to be increased… using hard-hitting emotional messaging,”officials wrote in memos. [2]
What would Yuri Bezmenov make of Event Covid? A small group of politicians, bankers and corporate executives are using terror and psychological manipulation to force the population to accept a “new normal.” It fits what he called, The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion:
Demoralization - younger generation, led by academia, embraces new values
Destabilization - status quo is overturned, citizen-state relationship becomes more intrusive, dependent
Crisis - cataclysm leads to fear, demand for protection, new power relations
Normalization - the population capitulates to the new normal
How is this possible? Central Bank money printing has resulted in the financialization of anything that moves, including the buying up of food, seeds, water, land and politicians, by an oligarch financier class.
Since the financial crash of 2007-8 we have been forced into a corner: admit everything's FUBAR or pretend that you understand what's going on, however absurdly you twist yourself into knots while insisting it is going to plan!
This makes life hard for a traditional reporter to assess events because political and economic decisions are increasingly divorced from reality. That is why state-corporatist journalists are increasingly no more than repeaters and fact checkers — don’t think that, think this!
Why do we even have a military; wherefore the intelligence agencies? Their absence is explored in the article below (2,500 words, time to read:, five and a bit minutes).
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“History would look at this crisis as a great opportunity… a unique and rapidly-shrinking window of opportunity… to be radical and do things differently… to build back better… I see the need for a Great Reset.” [3]
Have the architects of Covid’s “good crisis” succeeded? "They think it's already over and they're in the mop up phase. It's not really that way. I don't think they anticipated so much push back," says G Edward Griffin on The Highwire with Del Bigtree. [4]
It’s reached the turning point where an obstacle, crisis or tragedy may force people and nations to change direction, to do the impossible, if they rise to the challenge.
The message is upbeat: only 15 per cent of people on each side see what’s going on — those who are promoting totalitarianism and those who perceive the danger. “We only need 15 per cent of the population and I believe we already have that. It’s just they think they’re alone. Our task is to discover each other and come together,” says Griffin.
Although we are entering year three of Event Covid, it took just six weeks to get the world to buy into it. Politicians have been compliant, except for a number of African leaders who fell by the wayside, but Team Reset may now face a challenge inside its own ranks. It may struggle to ensure discipline when officials share the same tragic outcomes as broader society.
“There are people in the other camp who don’t want to be there. There will be defectors like Yuri Bezmenov,” says Griffin. “When they see the outcome of this tragedy in their own friends and family, maybe their own children, they cannot continue the way they are, they have to see the light: 'Do we continue to pay allegiance to evil or do we stand against it.' We’re coming to that point in history and it’s scary but I look forward to it because after that point is reached, that’s when we start to build a greater future.”
Traitors and realists
Griffin parsed each of The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion, relating Bezmenov’s account of the KGB strategy to what we’ve seen in the four decades since, and to Event Covid now. [5]
At the time, military and intelligence officials ignored Bezmenov’s warning. They knew they were compromised. His was an inconvenient truth.
Bezmenov had risked his life to defect to Canada and then journeyed to the U.S. thinking his information would be welcomed. Instead the agencies shunned him, would not pay for his visit and suggested he return to Canada. “He was crushed. He had no idea that his testimony would not be welcomed by the intelligence agencies. Looking back it’s because they already knew: he wasn’t saying anything that the CIA and the FBI didn’t know.” Bezmenov died in Canada a few years later.
Time capsule
One thing Griffin says the interview could have made clearer back in 1984 is that the purpose of all these movements, whatever they’re labeled, is destruction. “They are trying to change society in favour of a collectivist beehive. You cannot do it if there is any remnant of the old system left in place.”
Any cause can be used — a virus, climate, drugs or crime — so long as it makes people fearful and willing to accept whatever they’re offered.
“The funny thing is it’s been the idea all along. I discovered this idea in 1960 and its hasn’t changed one bit since then… I’m just taking it from the oppressors, they talk about it: it’s their language.”
Bigtree accurately calls the interview a time capsule — we can’t deny we were warned of the path we were on. How far are we?
If the pandemic is a chance to overthrow, disrupt, crash and replace the system, how does one guard against subversion?
If constitutional checks and balances are suspended on the pretext of emergency, who speaks for the civic interest and who restores them?
If nation states open themselves to external control and coordination, what is the appropriate response of the military and intelligence?
If governments manipulate public behavioue, on whose behalf do they change the perception of every person?
Who watches the watchers?
Checklist
Our military and intelligence were asleep on the job, or compromised while working for private financial interests who have a different agenda.
Most of what Bezmenov warned has already happened. It’s almost too late to turn back — but there’s a chance if we comprehend their game.
In Event Covid, friends and families inhabit parallel worlds: couples split, unable to share reality. Even if we use strict logic not emotion, we must answer why:
capitalists financed fascists and communists, transferring technology, loans, and food and weapons.
universities and corporations train cadres in the opposite of the meritocratic, competitive, diverse society they claim to espouse
intelligence agencies open the door to infiltration, knowing they face subversion
police and military now target the domestic population as the enemy
Censors and three-letter agencies intercept bloggers and soccer moms, parents protesting school curricula, those who argue for bodily integrity, for the right to gather in their religion or share views online with those of like belief.
It is only confusing until you realize that the universities, corporations, intelligence agencies and military are answering not to the people but to a shadow government: a group of bankers and investors who think they own the nation — or whatever they plan to replace it with.
Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy
Who is the enemy, and where? The military’s current fashion is hybrid war in which conflict is eternal and the enemy everywhere — including hearth and home.
Granted, the military does not pick the enemy but if the military has bowed to the communitarian ideal that the individual must always submit to the whole, then any individualist is an enemy of the people -- just as in Cambodia of the 1970s.
A reading of The Great Reset shows there is no mechanism for the people to express collective will: it is vested in the Stakeholders, the law givers, the owners. The military in such a context can only be the hired muscle of the elite.
The military is gripped by the concept of hybrid threats — in which enemies “exploit vulnerabilities across the whole of society to undermine the functioning, unity or will of their targets, while degrading and subverting the status quo.” [6]
The status quo is precisely what’s being subverted but the military does not ask by whom and points vaguely in the direction of Russia.
“By their fruits ye shall know them” — the very techniques being used to usher in The Great Reset tell us much about noxious character of those with whom military and intelligence cast their lot. Nothing benign or virtuous is born of subterfuge.
The watchers sleep
Military and intelligence have failed to identify the origin of this hybrid threat and done little to counter it in the four decades since Bezemenov’s warning. One can only conclude they answer to a higher authority — because it is not the people or nation.
Britain’s head of the Army until Nov 2021, Gen Sir Nick Carter, warned that “political warfare has returned… a strategy that is designed to undermine cohesion, erode economic, political and social resilience.”
Did it escape his notice that The Great Reset ushers in precisely that: a governance system that in which “governancers” are unaccountable, elected leaders are shoved aside and decision making is opaque and corrupted. [7]
Britain’s Integrated Operating Concept “challenges norms of civil-military relations and the dynamics of Westminster agencies: The old distinction between foreign and domestic defence is increasingly irrelevant.” [8]
As the militaries of European nations and the U.S. weaponize Covid as a pretext for The Great Reset one must ask whom the British, Canadian and American generals are working for.
Even in Bezmenov’s day he may have walked into a nest of vipers. We know former FBI director James Comey was a voting communist and Obama’s CIA director James Brennan may have been a party comrade. But it goes deeper than reds and blues.
Modern intelligence agencies were set up by private and commercial interests: the OSS-CIA by lawyers working out of the Rockefeller’s law firm Sullivan and Cromwell — and that was before the CIA merged with Reinhard Gehlen’s SS.
British intelligence officials, especially Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, have long regarded political allegiances as irrelevant so long as the outcome suits national or commercial interests. The closest parallel is sex: it doesn’t matter how a target is entrapped — by male or female — and perhaps you’ll have more success with some “third way.”
This makes for painful coverups. Kim Philby who supposedly betrayed his country to the Soviets was the grandson of a proto-Bolshevik conspirator and the son of a socialist muslim convert who helped the Saud family gain ascendancy. Lord Palmerston’s dictum comes to mind: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
Corruption and ideology are the inescapable conclusion — or ideology in service of corruption and enrichment. It is hard not to see institutionalised organized crime.
The paymasters
As we enter year three of Event Covid the response evolves. The pandemic preparedness teams war-gamed different scenarios — Event 201, and in the SPARS 2025-2028 and the Rockefeller Lockstep documents. They are strategising two laps ahead of the crisis… not to let it go to waste.
It’s become cliché to say that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was meant to be a warning not a blueprint. In many ways the alarums of Griffin and Bezmenov were even more timely. We ignored them, too.
Don’t sweat the details. No plan survives first contact with the enemy, to paraphrase Prussian commander Helmuth von Moltke. The tactics envisaged by any particular scenario are outdated.
Look at the bigger picture: governments, corporations, and international bodies have teams of experts. The nature of advice and which wins the day, depends on the hierarchy and that comes down to money — profits earned or costs saved. Tax-exempt foundations have deeper pockets than any government, and the corporations behind the foundations have products to sell.
A cynic would note that for every official who identifies a need, there is a “solution” waiting to fill it, and a job on the board for said official: from drugs and digital passports, online schooling to telemedicine, defunded police to military contractors.
Take an even more lofty perch — “look down there: would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving?” [9]
Costs and profits are the banal, every-day tokens in the transaction of power in comparison with “the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale… tidal gravity!”
“You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.
And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that... perfect world... in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.” [10]
The dialectic
Griffin argues that the USSR was created as a bogeyman to push the world towards a one-world government. The Cold War was a pretext for arms control treaties and intergovernmental institutions that would, they planned, replace the Western states.
Nowadays we are instructed to rail against China — while central bankers and billionaires invest in the communist regimes of their supposed arch enemies.
“It is not that they want to aid communism. They want to create forces that destroy us. When everything collapses it won’t be the communists that take over: it’ll be that other group of people that are causing us to aid these countries. We call it the Deep State but it’s more than that. These are the supra financial forces in the globe. They call it the new world order but it won’t be fascist or communist. It will be collectivist.”
During those communist and fascist experiments much was learned. Techniques of surveillance and psychological warfare used in Vietnam to counter guerilla tactics were repatriated.
This became the fusion doctine that is integral to domestic government stratgegy: the blending of information, public services, law enforcement and military into an umbrella system of government. The people are to be manipulated by carrot stick, fed information real and misleading, nudged by psychologists, bullied by police, and asked to inform on others — submission in return for a quiet life.
How the West was won
The university curricula were soon captured by financing professorships. Charlotte Iserbyt and John Taylor Gatto have shown how education was hijacked to push the collectivist agenda. There is no need to retell it here. Norman Dodd, chief investigator to the Reece Committee of 1954 exposed how the tax-evading foundations took over education in the first half of the last century.
See my story Spies, Dupes and Charities — Rivals for Power, Part 4. Norman Dodd and the tax-exempt foundations.
The Rockefellers, Carnegies and Guggenheims among others sought to change American life and values towards collectivism by financing academia, medicine and the print and broadcast media. Bill Gates continues the process today in those same key sectors — plus Common Core at high school level.
Collectivism, especially the communitarian variant, sees the individual as a threat. Individual values do not exist alongside the community but must be subordinated.
“Being rich doesn’t make someone a capitalist,” says Griffin. The robber barons of America were quick to import ideas from the old world, especially Britain, like the chartered corporation operating with permission from the Crown. These are anti-competitive institutions operating by hierarchy, favouritism and sinecure.
See my article The Great Reset Is Complete — A future retrospective
[1] World Economic Forum, 2016 — "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy."
[2] Memo, UK Gov, Mar 22, 2020 — “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent' by ‘using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”
[3] Jun 2020 — Klaus Schwab, Kristalina Georgieva, Prince Charles, Boris Johnson.
[4] The Highwire, Dec 30, 2021 — Del Bigtree with G Edward Griffin
[5] Yuri Bezmenov — The Four Stages of Ideological Subversion
[6] Sean Monaghan, Prism, Oct 2019 — Countering Hybrid Warfare (PDF)
[7] Gen Sir Nick Carter, Dec 2019 — Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter's annual RUSI speech
[8] Australian Army Research Centre, Oct 2020 — Emerging Threats and Opportunities (The UK Integrated Operating Concept)
[9] The Third Man, 1949 — Orson Welles ferris wheel speech.
[10] Network, 1976 — Ned Beatty “primal forces” speech
Gee, thanks. I think. That is, yes, of course, this is "it is what it is," indeed.
Hmm, now what shall I do with the few remaining hours of daylight---actual and metaphorical here @ 1430 hrs in south central Alaska. I know! I'll brush old Boogs the cat. It is his eighteenth birthday, making him almost 90 human years old. Perhaps a candle in his canned cat food. But don't you worry, I'll think of something to stem all of these tides of impending darkness---or my name ain't King Canute!!
Happy New Year? Anyway, keep scribbling. It is a treat to see certain others come to my self-same conclusions by individual expression and interpretation. Especially as mine in my infinitesimal reach and grasp are "much ado about nothing" anyway.....
Bezmenov's interview, Count Kalergi's plan, Agenda 21 and 2030, The Great Reset etc - they all lay out 'their' plan clearly. I do think one of the most interesting phenomena of our world is how works like these can be published openly and yet, if you mention their contents to most people, they think you're the mad one.
When I look back on the post-war years and the early days of mass media I find it interesting that people seemed to have more critical thinking skills and more fight. The interviewers/reporters would ask intelligent questions and listed to the (often) intelligent answers. I'm struck by just how passive educated people seem to have become. This just confirms Gatto et al's observations to me.
Great article, thanks MC.