DO YOU PONDER WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING IN THIS WORLD?

Posted on November 13, 2021January 31, 2025 by Ray Joseph Cormier

I started this Blog in February 2011 and in 11 months there were 14,131 views on the articles posted up to that Time. In 2012 there were 25,000 views.

Even though people were not looking for my Blog, it turned up in the results of many different Google search terms. I was covering a lot of different subjects.

That all changed in 2013 when Google changed their algorithm and my Blog no longer showed up in Google results. Views plummeted 2/3 and having been going down ever since. To this Day of 2021, there is a total of 1509 views of so many more articles for the whole year.

In my own estimation, one of the most important, significant and informative articles in my Blog is SIGNS OF THE TIMES even though I now realize it’s too long for most people to read, digest and understand all the implications.

Even though Google has the most sophisticated Web Crawler of them all, “SIGNS OF THE TIMES” with quotation marks doesn’t even show up in the search results and that’s unusual.

It’s not that Google hides me. Searching for “ray joseph cormier” with the quotes, turns up over 30 pages of results on my Internet footprint, and that doesn’t include some 10,000 comments and analysis on the unfolding Realities in the rapidly changing News cycle in The Washington Post and other places.

That reality has discouraged me from writing for a while, but that has to change, especially shortening the reports. I haven’t figured out a new format and style yet, but for starters, this is what I see unfolding reading recent news as posted to my Public FaceBook page.

November 11

Video of Pierre Trudeau 53 years ago, saying in Washington, living next door to the US is like sleeping with an elephant. No matter “how friendly and even-tempered” it is, in CanaDa, we feel every twitch and grunt.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1797537698

That was when the US was still friendly and even tempered.

The American Carnage Trump introduced with his 1st Presidential speech, is taking root on American Streets inciting an American MOB Mentality of WE vs THEY at all costs.

It will be much different from the Time when CanaDa sheltered Americans wanting to get away from the American War on Vietnam.

This Time, Americans will be seeking Refugee Status in CanaDa to escape crazy, American Style, Homemade Domestic Terrorism. Almost everybody has guns, many of them made for War.

I’m not the only person that sees it. The government won’t/can’t openly warn and prepare Canadians for that very real possibility until it’s too late and has no choice but to address and deal with it when it will be much more difficult.

Will Canadians be Spiritually, Mentally and Emotionally strengthened to deal with it then?

I’ve often thought if WWIII/Armageddon comes, no one will have to go to it. It will unfold all around us if WE the People, consent to it by our Silence.

In that chaos, The Lord will save only those who call on him, not those who don’t!

Long before I unexpectedly, and to my great Wonder and surprise, came alive to the Christ in me, the fundamental active belief of Christianity itself, I was a labourer for the Foundation Company of CanaDa on the Distant Early Warning line in 1963, when it was the 1st radar warning line of a surprise Soviet attack over the North Pole.

The Foundation is laid, but the Line is no longer Distant, and it’s getting Late!

I knew I wouldn’t have much Time, but these are the choice words interjected into the Official Remembrance Day Ceremonies November 11, 1985, in the hearing of the Governor-General, the Prime Minister, The Military Brass, the Ambassadors of the Nations and the Public. The Americans and Soviets were shouting at each other in PUBLIC.

“Hear O people and Nations, even to the ends of the Earth, the Word of the LORD God, who is, and was, and is to come, The Almighty.The LORD has a controversy with the people.

Do you do well to honour the dead, and yet, deny the God of the Living? Why do you follow the vain traditions of men, and make of no effect, the Principles of God?

You come here for one hour, one day a year, in a great show of Public Patriotism, and then forgetting, go back to work and make the same careless mistakes made by the generations prior to the 1st and 2nd World Wars.

Hitler is dead, but it’s his legacy that remains. A Soviet-American military-industrial complex consuming $trillions of dollars every year, holding the entire World hostage…………

“Hostage” was the last word said perched on a bus shelter roof, as police got up and grabbed the megaphone. I was arrested for shouting, causing a disturbance, convicted and fined $250. I appealed without a lawyer to The Supreme Court of Canada.

The Status Quo hasn’t changed in 36 years except now it’s a Russian-American-Chinese Military-Industrial Complex taking more money away from Civilian NEEDS than ever before. There’s only One Direction that will bring your Children and Grand Children in the FUTURE.

The biggest tragedy I see is, it seems People just don’t care as they escape in their Smart phones while remaining Dumb on what’s really important.

November 13

Beirut Lebanon in the Past, was known as The Paris of the Middle East.

“Some rich people who trusted the banks blindly were pushed to middle class status, while people in the middle class joined the ranks of the working class or the poor. The poor did not lose money in the banks, but living conditions in Lebanon are harder than ever and basic living necessities are more expensive than they have ever been.”

People stand in line at the banks to receive whatever arbitrary and meagre cash amounts the banks allow, and at a great loss to depositors.”

THE ANGRY ARAB: Saudis Provoke Another Lebanese Crisis

Within 2 weeks of 9/11, the US came out with WAR PLANS to change the regimes of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, and at THE END, Iran.

We can see the result. Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Lebanon are now FAILED States, while the nominally Christian Nations that inflicted all the Damage, resent the Refugees from the US led destructive Wars arriving in Europe.

Jesus was crucified for overturning the tables on the Bankers and Merchants working the Shopping Mall in the Temple in a Kosher deal with the Priests.

Since then, under the Establishment Christian Religion, the Bankers and Merchants made such a big comeback in the last 2000 years, their BIGGEST money making Season is Christmas, and no one sees anything wrong with that picture.

Everyone knows the implication in the adage, “The Writing’s on the Wall!”

It comes from the account of ancient Babylon, the 1st Nation to reach Military-Economic Superpower Status, Daniel 5 in his Book in the Book of Books, describes a great feast or State Dinner, the king put on for 1000 of the ELITE of the kingdom and they praised the gods of gold, silver, brass, iron, wood and stone some 2600 years ago.

From THEN to NOW, it’s ‘The Economy, Stupid!’ and the ELITE are still the ELITE.

Ancient Babylon is now called Iraq. The US is this World’s latest, greatest Nation to achieve Military-Economic Superpower status, and also the shortest lived of the Superpowers of History.

The Tail struck the Head, leading to this World’s tightening Economic Straitjacket.

The Lord does work in mysterious ways it is often said. A Fundamental Tenant of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Religions say ‘Vengeance belongs to God, and God will repay.’ What is happening in Lebanon now, will be coming the Christian Economies sooner than most people DARE think!

Still, for those who keep the Faith, they will know the Peace and Joy of the Resurrected Christ, no matter how desperate it becomes on Earth

All who seek You shall exult and rejoice; those who love Your salvation shall constantly say, “May the Lord be magnified.”

BORN AGAIN-77 Going on 46

Posted on February 1, 2021January 31, 2025 by Ray Joseph Cormier

To all the People following this Blog, Peace be with you!

Today is my 46th Birthday, my Spiritual Birthday, the Day I came aware and alive to God living in me.

In practical terms, Born Again means I, and everybody else, has the same chance to start a New Life all over again, learning to identify and grow in the Ways of the Spirit, letting go of the self-centred, money loving and serving ways of this Material World Day by Day, in every Day called Today. It’s a life long Journey leaning, Practising the Faith, making mistakes, but not quitting and enduring to the End!

The last article posted was just over a year ago. I would expect most of the People getting the email notice of this addition probably forgot they were following my Blog. I’m sorry about that. To be honest, I became discouraged in keeping it up. Views were doubling from year to year until Google changed their algorithm and suddenly, views took a 2/3 drop, going down year after year. Before the Google algorithm change, my Blog appeared in the results of so many Google searches where People didn’t know it existed but many clicked on it.

This is a sample of some of those search terms, canada, liberty bell, armageddon, angels of god, gulf war, eisenhower, venice beach, skies, angel with sword, damascus, pope paul vi, jesus, calgary, all you need is love, st. john’s newfoudland, marijuana, 1st gulf war, sodom, montreal, revelation, papal crown, jewish temple, mother teresa, hot sun, 1973 oil crisis, predator drone, cold war weapons, military industrial complex, antichrist vs jesus, and so many other Google search terms. That doesn’t happen anymore.

As an example, in my own estimation, one of the most significant of my posts is the article SIGNS OF THE TIMES. If you search Google for those terms, with their advanced search engine, it doesn’t even show up in the results. Searching for “rayjc signs of the times” it’s the 1st result. It’s not that Google banned me. Anyone knowing my name and searching for “ray joseph cormier” with the quotes, will find 30 pages of results exclusively on my Internet footprint, and that’s only half of the places where I commented.

It’s not that I’ve given up the struggle. I’ve made over 8000 comments in The Washington Post alone, analyzing significant unfolding News events, and with the passage of Time, on average, my analysis was more accurate and prescient than many paid Professionals. I comment in many other News sites Daily.

Where I think this world is at in General Terms by the Revelation in the details, is described by these words in the Revelation,

And the NATIONS WERE ANGRY AND YOUR WRATH is come, and the TIME of the dead, (spiritually dead) that they should be judged, and that you should give reward to your servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear your name, small and great; and should destroy them which destroy the earth. Revelation 11:18

Therefore rejoice, you heavens, and you that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having GREAT WRATH, because he knows that he has but a short time. Revelation 12:12
Everyone can see the WRATH and ANGER growing and unfolding in our World, especially in the US, but who can discern WHICH WRATH IS WHICH?

For Today, this is what I see that concerns me.

The Israeli Star of David is on the back of EVERY American Dollar.

The Bible warns, ‘Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watches, and keeps his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.’

Is there is any significance to the fact, Jews hold all the Top National Security Positions in the Biden Cabinet?
My Faith in Jesus, King of the Jews, makes me a Jew.
Still, I have to be mindful of Revelation 2:9 & 3:9.

This is at a Time when Israel wants the US to fight it’s War with Iran, and told Biden, if he returns to the Iran Nuclear Deal, Israel will attack Iran without the US, blowing up the recent Trump-Arab-Israeli Peace Treaties/Arms Deals, and the entire Middle East, as the Revelation of Jesus Christ records will happen during the Revelation, ‘And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.’

Armageddon was derived from Har Megiddo located in Occupied Palestine when Jesus walked throughout the Land.
Israel disappeared as a kingdom some 700 years earlier.

Armageddon/Har Megiddo still exists but is now under the control of Israel re-created from the Bible, and 2000 years later, the Occupation of Palestine is still an unresolved open wound in the Middle East and the World.

Biden already laid down the gauntlet with Putin, by appointing Victoria Nuland to his Cabinet in the Position of Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

Americans have short memories with the rapidly changing News Cycle.

It was the Obama/Biden/Clinton/ Nuland regime that orchestrated the 2014 Coup
d’Etat in Ukraine, changing the Russian friendly government the majority Russian speaking Ukrainians in Crimea and East Ukraine VOTED FOR, for a Neo-Nazi anti-Russian government.

It was that US aggression that precipitated the rebellion in the East, and moved Russia to annex Crimea that was part of Russia from 1778 to 1954, when it was turned over to Ukraine Administration as an Autonomous Region, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.
The Russian annexation of Crimea is more Legitimate than the US approved Israeli annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights.

The US has made regime change of governments it can’t control as American as Apple Pie.

The 2014 US orchestrated Coup in Ukraine was the FINAL STRAW for Putin, waking him up to realize it was futile trying to appease the US and the West for better Relations, when Russia would not be assimilated into the Western Orbit, unless it was willing to abandon it’s National Sovereignty, and become just another US Vassal State.

Then the US led Arms Race supplying more Weapons of War, Death and Destruction than Russia and China combined, would have no further Justification.

There’s no Justification for it anyway!
Fresh off his experience as Supreme Military Commander in WWII. General-President Eisenhower, the LAST Real Commander-in-Chief, at the Beginning of his Presidency in 1953 said,
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a Cross of Iron.

General-President Eisenhower Cross of Iron speech, April 16, 1953

Those costs were when the US Defence Budget was only $60 BILLION. TODAY, it’s $740 BILLION!

After 8 years as President, Eisenhower had the same warning in his 1961 Military-Industrial Complex retirement speech,

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

Who listens anymore?

Now even more will be required as Americans will have to face Joint Russia-China
retaliation against any US aggression pushing to that point of no return.
That RUDE awakening for Putin was what motivated him to enter the 2011 Syrian World War a year later, in 2015, and along with his Allies Assad and General Soleimani, STOPPED the 2001 US WAR PLAN in it’s tracks, to change the Assad government.

The US NEVER Learns from it’s delusions and mistakes.

Trump, the Law and Order Man, used US Troops like Common Thieves and a
Criminal Gang, already being in Syria in violation of International Law, and using them to STEAL Syria’s oil. Americans don’t care. The Biden Administration has not changed that.

They can’t see, if Trump can STEAL outright in a Foreign Land Americans don’t give attention to, it’s not beyond him to STEAL the US Election after the majority of American Voters fired him.

According to the whistle-blower, US General Wesley Clark revealed in 2007, BEFORE the demise of Libya and Syria in 2011, the US came out with WAR PLANS within 2 weeks of 9/11 to changing the regimes of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and at THE END, Iran.
Lebanon is now the latest failed State because of that 2001 US WAR PLAN.

There can be NO DOUBT Trump was following that 2001 US WAR PLAN, leading to THE END with IRAN. With Biden’s Jewish Dominated Cabinet, he will likely continue to follow that 2001 US WAR PLAN.

The Husband of the Vice-President is Jewish as are these People,
Secretary of the Treasury
Attorney General
Secretary of Homeland Security
Director of National Intelligence Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Secretary of State
Deputy Secretary of State
Secretary of State for Political Affairs
Office of Science and Technology Policy White House Chief of Staff

I just read about this 2nd tier staffing,
On Wednesday, Mother Jones and NBC News reported that a top Biden national security aide who is an expert on Russian cyber had given over half a million dollars to AIPAC in recent years through a family foundation. And the aide’s husband is on the AIPAC executive council in Baltimore.

AIPAC is of course the leading Israel lobby group, which supports everything the right wing Israeli government does, from persecuting Palestinians to threatening Iran.

AIPAC demands NBC retract report on NSC aide who’s a big donor to lobby group– and NBC complies!

The Destructive Plan Behind the Biden Russia Agenda

A Sorry Solipsistic Siren Song
Around him in his court some scribes he kept
Who with informal nicknames proved adept
At not reporting all the times he slept
Or all the tasks at which he proved inept
As war up on our napping nation crept

Our vain imposter in a bubble ruled
A people often and completely fooled
Rejoicing in a leader so unschooled
That when he tried to speak he merely drooled
While in Iraq blood splattered, spread, and pooled

He felt no urgent need to change or tack
Because his troops, not he, absorbed the flak
He vowed to never waver or turn back
His yokel yodel, yammering, and yak
Left no doubt that his skull contained a crack

He found the country’s magic credit card
Left lying in the country’s open yard
Which meant he’d caught the country off its guard
Which others, too, found scarcely very hard:
A haughty herd hoist by its own petard

For who had placed such emptiness on top?
Who harvested this hollow, stunted crop?
Who let an addict start who couldn’t stop?
Who’d rather drink a river than a drop
Who needed babysitters as a prop

It doesn’t look too good for Uncle Sam
Whose credit rating just received a slam
For gambling debts from gamblers on the lam
Most notably the chief commanding sham
Who has a brain that doesn’t weigh a gram

Now trapped within the web of lies he spun
More dangerous than Cheney with a gun
(Who, when he aims at quail, the lawyers run)
His bloody mess he aims to leave undone
Few lesser “leaders” breathe beneath the sun

The nightlight shining softly by his bed
Illuminates an empty sleeping head
His dreams result in many people dead
His ancestors now hide in shameful dread
Embarrassed by the fool their genes have bred

Yet no one seems to know just what to do
About a man who governs for the few
Who takes a jaunty jaded jaundiced view
Of those he sees as subjects he can screw
Or troops that he can bleed till they turn blue

His party and his pundits say they see
Some pants invisible to you and me
Which only those with his same pedigree
Would witness by imperial decree
Or, when so ordered, drop their own and pee

Not much is left of that proud liberty
That once Americans considered free
Now stolen by this spawn of larceny
Who stamps as “secret” his known perfidy
Who cannot face the truth, his enemy

He says we can’t be trusted if we know
What he has done and how he plans to blow
More billions causing needless blood to flow
With nothing ever offered up to show
Why he should not up on the scaffold go

A necktie party, yes, might do the trick
Some tar and feathers, too, for George and Dick
Who’ve earned their names: the Codpiece and the Prick
Who sold some snake oil to the deathly sick
Who ordered much but never served a lick

Ulysses chained himself but not his crew
Their ears he stopped against the sounds that slew
And thus they rowed through waves and winds that grew
While he strove with the only gods he knew
So he could pass, yet hear their music, too

But our King George the Worst stays on the docks
And waves “goodbye” as troopships leave the locks
His motto: “After You!” no longer shocks
As he hires other men to tend his flocks
While carpetbagger cronies hump their stocks

Which leads us to Barack Obama, known
For making Dubya’s wars his very own
And adding to them others which have grown
(Through profligate employment of the drone)
Into the body-count and free-fire zone

Which our lost War on Southeast Asia taught
Us to regard as sure-fire proof of naught
But only bogus bullshit numbers fraught
With lies our “leaders” sold themselves, then bought
Which only left them on the hook and caught

So Dimwit Dubya has a dark-skinned clone:
Obama, whose failed wars have only shown
That no amount of more war can atone
For waging stupid murder from the throne
Of presidential twerp testosterone

A sorry solipsistic siren song
A darkness deeper than the night is long
In their mad minds no right can do a wrong
And fatal weakness only signals strong
A blind man would have seen it all along

STATE OF THE WORLD

Posted on September 13, 2018March 17, 2024 by Ray Joseph Cormier

Jonathan Cook is an Independent British Journalist living in Arab Nazareth of Occupied Palestine, the place where Jesus was raised up. He is published frequently in the Middle East but he is avoided like the plague by US and Western MSM because he gets what Palestinians have to go through with the Israeli Occupation/Military Dictatorship over Palestinians, and writes clearly and succinctly about it.

This is his latest publication appearing Today and while he writes in non-religious terms, he is basically articulating what I see unfolding in this Material World through a Biblical perspective, and agree with this analysis.

Our broken system has no ‘moderate’ devotees

13 September 2018

Western politics is tearing itself apart, polarising into two camps – or at least, it is in the official narrative we are being fed by our corporate media. The warring camps are presented as “moderate centrists”, on one side, and the “extreme right”, on the other. The question is framed as a choice about where one stands in relation to this fundamental political divide.

But what if none of this is true? What if this isn’t a feud between two opposed ideological camps but rather two differing – and irrational – reactions to the breakdown of late-stage capitalism as an economic model, a system that can no longer offer plausible solutions to the problems of our age?

Neighbouring news headlines this week offered a neat illustration of the media’s framing of the current situation. Representing the “moderates”, German chancellor Angela Merkel made a “passionate address” in which she denounced the outbreak of far-right protests in east Germany and reports of the “hunting down” of “foreigners” – asylum seekers and immigrants.

She observed: “There is no excuse or explanation for rabble-rousing, in some cases the use of violence, Nazi slogans, hostility towards people who look different, to the owner of a Jewish restaurant, attacking police.”

Ostensibly pitted against Merkel, is Viktor Orban, Hungary’s “extreme right” prime minister. Hungary risks being stripped of its voting rights in the European Union because of Orban’s “rabble-rousing” policies and his anti-migrant agenda.

Shortly before the European parliament voted against Hungary, accusing its government of posing a “systematic threat” to democracy and the rule of law, Orban argued that his country was being targeted for preferring not to be “a country of migrants”.

He is far from an outlier. Several other EU states, from Italy to Poland, are close behind Orban in pursuing populist, anti-immigrant agendas.

Family feud

But does this civil war in Europe really reflect a divide between good and bad politics, between moderates and extremists? Are we not witnessing something else: the internal contradictions brought to the fore by a turbo-charged neoliberalism that is now so ideologically entrenched that no one dares question its suitability, let alone its morality?

In truth, the row between Merkel and Orban is a family feud, between sister and brother wedded to the same self-destructive ideology but in profound disagreement about which placebo should be administered to make them feel better.

What do I mean?

Merkel and the mainstream neoliberal elite are committed to an ever-more deregulated world because that is imperative for a globalised economic elite searching to accrue ever more wealth and power. That elite needs open borders and a lack of significant regulation so that it can plunder unrestricted the Earth’s resources – human and material – while dumping the toxic waste byproducts wherever is most profitable and convenient.

In practice, that means creating maximum damage in places and against life-forms that have the least capacity to defend themselves: the poorest countries, the animal kingdom, the forests and oceans, the weather system – and, of course, against future generations that have no voice. There is a reason why the deepest seabeds are now awash with our plastic debris, poisoning and killing marine life for decades, maybe centuries, to come.

Interestingly, this global elite makes a few exceptions to its policy of entirely open borders and sweeping deregulation. Through its pawns in the world’s leading capitals – the people we mistakenly think of as our political representatives – it has created small islands of opacity in which it can stash away its wealth. These “offshore tax havens” are highly regulated so we cannot see what goes on inside them. While the elite wants borders erased and the free movement of workers to set one against the other, the borders of these offshore “safe deposit boxes” are stringently preserved to protect the elite’s wealth.

International order

Meanwhile, the global elite has created international or trans-national structures and institutions precisely to remove the power of nation-states to regulate and dominate the business environment. The political class in the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Mexico or Brazil do not control the corporations. These corporations control even the biggest states. The banks are too big to fail, the arms manufacturers too committed to permanent war to rein in, the largely uniform narratives of the corporate media too powerful to dissent from.

Instead, global or trans-national institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, NATO, BRICS and many others, remake our world to promote the globalised profits of the corporations.

The United Nations – a rival international project – is more problematic. It was created immediately after the Second World War with the aim of imposing a law-based international order, premised on respect for human rights, to prevent future large-scale wars and genocide. In practice, however, it chiefly serves the interests of the dominant western states through their capture of the Security Council, effectively the UN’s executive.

A few UN institutions – those in charge of human rights and prosecuting war crimes – that have the potential to restrain the power of the global elite find themselves ever more marginalised and undermined. Both the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court have been under sustained assault from US officials, both before and after Donald Trump became president.

Towards the abyss

The internal contradictions of this globalised system – between the unfettered enrichment of the elite and the endless resource depletion of the Earth and its weakest inhabitants – are becoming ever more apparent. Historically, the toxic waste from this system was inflicted on the poorest regions first, like puddles forming in depressions in the ground during a rainstorm.

As the planet has warmed, crops have failed, the poor have gone hungry, wars have broken out. All of this has been an entirely predictable outcome of the current economics of endless, carbon-based growth, coupled with resource theft. But unlike puddles, the human collateral damage of this economic system can get up and move elsewhere. We have seen massive population displacements caused by famines and wars, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. These migrations are not about to stop. They are going to intensify as neoliberalism hurtles us towards the economic and climate abyss.

The political class in the west are now experiencing profound cognitive dissonance. Merkel and the “moderates” want endless growth and a world without borders that is bringing gradual ruination on their economies and their privileges. They have no answers for the “extremists” on the right, who acknowledge this ruination and say something needs to be done urgently about it.

Orban and the far-right want to fiercely resurrect the borders that globalisation erased, to build barriers that will stop the puddles merging and inundating their higher ground. This is why the right is resurgent. They, far more than the moderates, can describe our current predicament – even if they offer solutions that are positively harmful. They want solid walls, national sovereignty, blocks on immigrants, as well as racism and violence against the “foreigners” already inside their borders.

The system is broken

We have to stop thinking of these political debates as between the good “moderates” and the nasty “extreme right”. This is a fundamental misconception.

The deluded “moderates” want to continue with a highly unsustainable form of capitalism premised on an impossible endless growth. It should be obvious that a planet with finite resources cannot sustain infinite growth, and that the toxic waste of our ever-greater consumption will poison the well we all depend on.

The west’s deluded far-right, on the other hand, believe that they can stand guard and protect their small pile of privilege against the rising tide of migrants and warming oceans caused by western policies of resource theft, labour exploitation and climate destruction. The far-right’s views are no more grounded in reality than King Canute’s.

Both sides are failing to grasp the central problem: that the western-imposed global economic system is broken. It is gradually being destroyed from within by its own contradictions. The “moderates” are doubly blind: they refuse to acknowledge either the symptoms or the cause of the disease. The “extremists” are as oblivious to the causes of the illness besetting their societies as the “moderates”, but they do at least recognise the symptoms as a sign of malaise, even if their solutions are entirely self-serving.

Squaring the circle

This can be seen in stark fashion in the deep divide over Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, so-called Brexit, which has cut across the usual left-right agendas.

The Remain crowd, who want to stay in Europe, believe Britain’s future lies in upholding the failed status quo: of a turbo-charged neoliberalism, of diminishing borders and the free movement of labour, of distant, faceless technocrats making decisions in their name.

Like a child pulling up the blanket to her chin in the hope it will protect her from the monsters lurking in the darkness of the bedroom, the “moderates” assume European bureaucrats will protect them from economic collapse and climate breakdown. The reality, however, is that the EU is one of the trans-national institutions whose chief rationale is accelerating our rush to the abyss.

Meanwhile, the Brexit crowd think that, once out of the EU, a small island adrift in a globalised world will be able to reclaim its sovereignty and greatness. They too are going to find reality a terrifying disappointment. Alone, Britain will not be stronger. It will simply be easier prey for the US-headquartered global elite. Britain will be jumping out of the EU frying pan into the flames of the Atlanticists’ stove.

What is needed is not the “moderates” or the “extreme right”, not Brexit or Remain, but an entirely new kind of politics, which is prepared to shift the paradigm.

The new paradigm must accept that we live in a world that requires global solutions and regulations to prevent climate breakdown. But it must also understand that people are rightly distrustful of distant, unaccountable institutions that are easily captured by the most powerful and the most pitiless. People want to feel part of communities they know, to have a degree of control over their lives and decisions, to find common bonds and to work collaboratively from the bottom-up.

The challenge ahead is to discard our current self-destructive illusions and urgently find a way to solve this conundrum – to square the circle.

————————–

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.