Permanent Counterrevolution, Technocracy, and World War III

Abstract

An undeclared global class war was initiated in 2020, whose aim is the controlled demolition of liberal democracy and the institution of global technocracy—a novel, biodigital form of totalitarianism that threatens to lead to the irreversible enslavement of humanity. World War III looks nothing like its two predecessors and is waged by the transnational deep state against populations using the novel methods of Omniwar, i.e. war waged in every domain, but clandestinely, so that the public does not recognise it as such. The opening campaign of World War III involved the largest psychological warfare operation in history, which I refer to as the “‘Covid-19’ operation.” This was intended to demoralise, disorientate, and debilitate the public, thus weakening its resistance to the intended transition to technocracy. Historically, psychological warfare has served as the prelude to physical war, raising the alarm concerning what is to come.

An undeclared global class war was initiated in 2020, whose aim is the controlled demolition of liberal democracy and the institution of global technocracy—a novel, biodigital form of totalitarianism that threatens to lead to the irreversible enslavement of humanity. World War III looks nothing like its two predecessors and is waged by the transnational deep state against populations using the novel methods of Omniwar, i.e. war waged in every domain, but clandestinely, so that the public does not recognise it as such. The opening campaign of World War III involved the largest psychological warfare operation in history, which I call the “‘Covid-19’ operation.” This was intended to demoralise, disorientate, and debilitate the public, thus weakening its resistance to the intended transition to technocracy. Historically, psychological warfare has served as the prelude to physical war, raising the alarm concerning what is to come.

Introduction

With the World Health Organization’s declaration of the “Covid-19 pandemic” on March 11, 2020, an undeclared global class war was initiated, aimed at the controlled demolition of liberal democracy and the institution of global technocracy, a novel, biodigital form of totalitarianism. The largest psychological warfare operation in history was waged transnationally against unwitting populations to cripple their resistance to the intended transition to technocracy. That psychological operation, which I refer to as the “’Covid-19” operation, is the subject of the two volumes of this book. This volume explores various techniques for attacking the mind and psychologically breaking down the victim—“menticide,” to borrow the term coined by Joost Meerloo in The Rape of the Mind. The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (1956). Volume 2 deals with the “brainwashing” part of Meerloo’s title, i.e. means of reprogramming the mind with desired thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours.

If successfully implemented, technocracy will be worse than anything imaginable by Hitler or Stalin, because it amounts to the biodigital enslavement of humanity through biometric technologies, the “Internet of Bodies,” constant surveillance and monitoring, central bank digital currencies, and a Chinese-style social credit system (Davis, 2022; Broudy & Kyrie, 2021; Wood, 2022). Moreover, if allowed to happen, such a control system could prove irreversible. Technocracy has been incubated for decades in China with the support of the Rockefellers and various technology transfers, and, with proof of concept having been established, the aim is now to roll it out in the West (Corbett, 2014, 2019a; Wood, 2018; Davis, 2022).

The decision by a numerically tiny transnational ruling class to use its control over the means of production to wage war against the rest of humanity is as desperate as it is audacious, and can only be understood in the context of 150 + years of transnational class conflict. The rise of international socialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was met with ruthless methods of suppression, including world war, paramilitary brutality, fascism, and totalitarianism (van der Pijl, 2015, 2019; Sutton, 2016). After World War II, similarly ruthless methods were used to crush any sign of emergent socialism in “Third World” countries under the pretext of fighting a “Cold War” against the Soviet Union (McCoy, 2015; Ahmed, 2012, pp. 70–1; Hughes, 2022b). Social tensions mounted in the West, and following May 1968, when France was brought to the brink of revolution, low-level counterinsurgency methods came to be deployed against Western populations (Minnicino, 1974; Ganser, 2005; Hughes, 2022b). From that point on, it was clear that an ongoing, transnationally coordinated effort to suppress class conflict had to take precedence over rivalries between different ruling classes and that, ultimately, only a global scientific dictatorship can prevent worldwide social revolution. The ARPANET (the military precursor of the internet, created in 1969) has since evolved into a global surveillance dragnet collecting data on everyone for counter-revolutionary purposes (van der Pijl, 2022, p. 73). The “War on Terror” was used to normalise the invocation of emergency powers (Agamben, 2005), militarise the domestic environment (Valentine, 2017), and hollow out liberal democracy.

The transnational ruling class now seeks to replace liberal democracy with technocracy. Historically, such fundamental sociopolitical and economic change has only been possible through world war. Thus, the global class war is synonymous with World War III, which, however, looks nothing like the two previous world wars, just as they did not resemble anything seen before (J. Corbett, 2020a). World War III is waged using the novel methods of Omniwar (see below), i.e. war waged across every domain, but clandestinely, so that the public does not recognise it as such. It amounts to a global counterinsurgency campaign, with dissidents replacing “terrorists” as the enemy using the infrastructure established through the “War on Terror” (cf. Valentine, 2017, p. 64). Deception is fundamental: the public must not get wise to what is happening, lest there be a surge in revolutionary activity. So far, physical fighting has not broken out, however, the largest psychological warfare operation in history—the “Covid-19” operation—has been waged against the public, and historically, psychological warfare serves as the prelude to physical war.

The proximate triggers for the global class war were: (i) the failure of the previous security paradigm—the so-called “War on Terror”—to contain increasingly progressive forms of social movements in 2019 (van der Pijl, 2022, 54–58); (ii) clear warning signs in 2019 that the international monetary and financial system was on the brink of collapse (BlackRock, 2019; Wolff, 2021); and (iii) a crisis of the Western propaganda system (see below). A new paradigm of social control was needed, the pretext for which was provided by “Covid-19,” whether “real or simulated” (Agamben, 2021, p. 7). Indeed, it is conspicuous that once the dominant security paradigm shifted from the “War on Terror” to biosecurity in 2020, major terrorist attacks in the West declined markedly.

After decades of laying the groundwork for global technocracy, low-intensity operations against Western populations gave way in March 2020 to full-frontal psychological warfare. All meaningful semblance of liberal democracy disappeared as governments and major media corporations around the world, acting in coordination at the behest of the transnational deep state (Hughes, 2022b), resorted to menticidal techniques against the public, a phenomenon previously only seen under totalitarianism (Meerloo, 1956, p. 35). Quite apart from its demoralising, disorienting, and debilitating functions, the “Covid-19” operation was used to coerce populations into taking the “vaccine,” a physical measure whose most likely purpose, in the context of war, is as a weapons platform (see Chaps. 6 and 8).

Permanent Counterrevolution: A Brief History

Contrary to the clichéd image in IR realism, war is not simply fought “horizontally,” between nation-states. More fundamentally, it is also fought “vertically,” between classes, putting aside national differences. This first became evident in 1871, when the Paris Commune was crushed by a combination of French and German forces, even though Bismarck had only just prevailed in the Franco-Prussian War. Marx’s The Civil War in France recognises the international character of class rule revealed in this event: “Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national governments are one as against the proletariat” (cited in Epp, 2017, 87). Proletarian internationalism thus derived from “the likelihood of a common response by European exploiting classes, bourgeois and aristocratic, to a revolutionary threat affecting any one of them” (Gilbert, 1981, p. 149).

Bismarck sought to placate the rising socialist movement in Germany by creating the world’s first welfare state in the 1880s. With international socialism continuing to rise, however, working-class energies were channelled into programmes of imperialist expansion, in line with Cecil Rhodes’ 1895 idea of imperialism as a means of avoiding civil war: “In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines” (cited in Lenin, 1987, p. 229). The crisis of capitalism at home, in other words, had to be externalised.

In 1905, following Russia’s defeat in its war with Japan, mass political and social unrest spread throughout the Russian Empire, involving worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies. German Emperor Wilhelm II apparently understood the warning signs, telling the Chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow: “shoot, decapitate, and break the socialists, if necessary with a bloodbath […] After that, war abroad; but not before […].” This was, as van der Pijl (2015, pp. 76–77) notes, a considerable departure from Bismarck’s reforms, representing nothing less than “war against the working class.” It clearly shows that class war is more fundamental than wars against foreign enemies.

With a “counterrevolutionary capitalist bloc” underwritten by Anglo-American power seeking to suppress the rise of “contender states” as well as prevent civil war at home (van der Pijl, 2019, pp. 1275–6), World War I saw the working classes of different countries turned against one another and submerged in what German militarists called “a bath of steel.” But popular revulsion against imperialism and war in turn led to the October Revolution and the widespread emergence of Communist parties at the war’s end. The Revolution symbolised a threat to ruling classes everywhere; for decades, U.S. leaders were “more afraid of the implicit and indirect challenge of the revolution than they were of the actual power of the Soviet Union” (Williams, 1972, pp. 105–106).

The Allies’ intervention against the Red Army, which was intended to “protect their commercial, industrial and financial interests, and to defeat the communist threat” (Abramovici, 2014, p. 115), offers another example of separate ruling classes uniting to protect their shared interests. The communist threat was violently put down in country after country. In Germany, most notably, the crushing of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the paramilitary Freikorps in 1919 were followed by the founding of the NSDAP in 1920.

There are important lessons to be learned from these events when it comes to understanding war from a class perspective. As van der Pijl (2015, p. 77) explains:

[There] developed a silent collective will among the rival ruling classes to deal with their working populations by turning [Trotsky’s] “permanent revolution” into a “permanent counterrevolution” through imperialism and war [...A]cross the entire ruling class spectrum there was agreement that the rise of the socialist labour movement had to be met one way or the other, with war as the common denominator of the different responses [...] against a class which under unchanged conditions was on the way to gaining the upper hand. Only through war could the combined ruling classes, nominal enemies no doubt, deal with the tectonic tensions between the growth of productive forces and the political-economic structure in which these had developed so far.

Thus, for well over a century, there has been a shared understanding among the ruling classes of different countries that their mutual interests are best served by uniting to crush class conflict—if necessary, by war.

In the post-World War I era, Anglo-American power, focused on the City of London and Wall Street, coordinated its designs for the world via the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House, founded 1920) and the Council on Foreign Relations (1921). Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, helped to manoeuvre Hitler and the Nazis into power, as did Henry Ford and Wall Street (Sutton, 2016). Having subverted the Bolshevik Revolution and turned the Soviet Union into a giant opportunity to acquire financial control over nationalised industries on a model previously established in Latin America (Sutton, 1981), Wall Street looked to do the same in Germany. National Socialism, and Roosevelt’s New Deal were all forms of “corporate socialism,” in which the power of the state is made available to big business, thus eliminating competition to an oligarchy of large corporations financed (and thus ultimately directed) by the major investment banks (Sutton, 2016, pp. 50, 121).

Had the “Business Plot” of 1933/34 (an attempted coup d’état by Wall Street financiers and wealthy industrialists) not been foiled by its intended leader, General Smedley Butler, the United States would likely have followed Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the path to totalitarianism—and with it, perhaps, the world. This demonstrates the ruthlessness to which the ruling class is willing to resort to keep the working class in check, particularly during moments of acute capitalist crisis, such as the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash. Once again, world war proved to be the means of resolving the crisis in favour of the ruling class. Wall Street and Henry Ford profited from backing both sides (Sutton, 2016), while millions of working-class lives were lost; in Germany and Japan, it did not take long before the leading industrialists of old were back in positions of power after 1945 (Hughes, 2022b).

The “Cold War,” though marked by geopolitical rivalry at one level, was also marked by a more fundamental collaboration between the West and the USSR to suppress international class conflict (Hughes, 2022b). For example, the East German uprising of 1953 was not only crushed by Soviet tanks, but “to make sure that it did not spread, the western powers of England, France and the United States built a wall of police and military might to prevent West Berlin workers from marching to join their brothers and sisters in the East” (Glaberman & Faber, 2002, pp. 171–2). Similarly, when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary in 1956 to crush the uprising there, “the Eisenhower administration loudly protested the Soviet action, but did not intervene militarily. Liberation was exposed as a sham” (Wilford, 2008, p. 49).

Revolutionary activity in the “Third World” was met by 104 covert operations in eight years under President Eisenhower, followed by 163 covert operations in only three years under President Kennedy (McCoy, 2015). Such operations were used to force open markets and establish client regimes facilitating Western capital penetration and labour dispossession (Ahmed, 2012, pp. 70–1). McCoy (2015) describes a “‘reverse wave’ in the global trend towards democracy from 1958 to 1975, as coups—most of them U.S.-sanctioned—allowed military men to seize power in more than three-dozen nations, representing a quarter of the world’s sovereign states.” The permanent counter-revolution entailed subversion in any country where socialism threatened to gain a foothold. Socialist movements were ruthlessly crushed using methods derived from the Nazis, including death squads, torture, false flag terrorism, biochemical warfare, surveillance-based targeting of political opponents, and the mass killing of civilians (Hughes, 2022b).

The transnationalisation of resistance in the 1960s, which culminated in President de Gaulle being forced to flee France in May 1968, led to the permanent counterrevolution assuming the form of low-level counterinsurgency operations against Western domestic populations, modelled on Kitson’s (1971, pp. 52–53) “stability operations,” which are “as much concerned with organising the population as they are with fighting battles.” Tavistock-inspired psychological operations involving the application of shock and stress to entire populations (see Chap. 2) fit this model, as does NATO’s covert paramilitary false flag terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s (Ganser, 2005; Hughes, 2022b).

When the domestic population is seen as the object of counterinsurgency, it becomes the enemy in a clandestine war waged by the transnational deep state (Hughes, 2022b). As Minnicino (1974, p. 37) realises, the ultimate direction of travel is martial law, or “direct military takeover in the advanced capitalist sector.” A transnationally coordinated effort to keep a rapidly growing population in check at this point becomes more fundamental to global political economy than rivalries between different ruling classes, geopolitics, and inter-state competition. Wars of course persist, but in the final analysis, “the only war that is left [is] the world revolution” (Minnicino, 1974, p. 51). Globally, the ruling classes have no choice but to join forces and push for a world state/global dictatorship, while the rest of humanity has no choice but worldwide social revolution if it wishes to avoid permanent subjugation and enslavement.

With the end of the Soviet Union, a new pretext (other than fighting “communism”) had to be found for the capitalist oligarchy to maintain its violent rule. Carter et al. (1998, p. 81) envisaged a “transforming event” that would, “like Pearl Harbor […] divide our past and future into a before and after,” involving “loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime,” and necessitating “draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.” Similarly, the Project for a New American Century (2000) claimed that rebuilding America’s defences would be a drawn-out affair “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

“9/11” was duly used as the pretext, not only for continuing imperialist wars abroad, but also for militarising the domestic environment under the banner of the “War on Terror” (Hughes, 2022b). The ensuing “permanent state of emergency” (Agamben, 2005, p. 2) meant, in the words of Jeff Halper, that war was “rendered endemic, since it is neither possible nor desirable to end the ‘permanent emergency’” from a ruling-class perspective; “pacifying humanity becomes the only way to remove war, but that endeavour itself becomes a violent, never-ending totalitarian project” (cited in van der Pijl, 2022, p. 61). As Orwell (1984, p. 329) predicted, the ruling classes are “not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the [class] structure of society intact.”

The dress rehearsal for “9/11” was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, whose provenance is dubious (Corbett, 2015). Senator Joe Biden introduced the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act two months before the bombing that enabled its passage, and it served as the template for the USA PATRIOT Act that was hurriedly passed into law in 2001. In 2002, Biden reflected that the 1995 legislation was intended to alter the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from exercising police powers within the United States, to allow the military to intervene in incidents involving WMD (“Biden backs letting soldiers arrest civilians,” 2002). General Ralph Eberhart, who presided over NORAD’s catastrophic failure to prevent the “9/11” attacks and who lied under oath to the 9/11 Commission (Griffin & Woodworth, 2018, Chap. 37), was made the inaugural head of U.S. Northern Command, which asserts military jurisdiction over the U.S. domestic arena. Eberhart agreed that “Posse Comitatus and other laws” needed to be reviewed.

In words that seem prescient considering the “9/11” attacks, Hoffman (1998, p. 385) writes in his book on the OKC bombing:

The Shadow Government’s willingness to kill large numbers of foreigners in its bloody wars and covert operations is now being extended to the American people, as its goals shift from controlling third-world populations to controlling American citizens [...] It is a short leap from rationalizing the killing of hundreds of thousands or even millions of foreigners to killing a few hundred or a few thousand Americans, if the policy objectives deem it necessary.

The 3000 lives lost in the attacks of September 11, 2001, enabled the transnational deep state (Hughes, 2022b) to pull off a covert coup d’état, and Western democracy was replaced by a new mode of governance modelled on the Italian Strategy of Tension (Ganser, 2005), though its outward trappings remained. This involves normalising emergency powers through a never-ending series of manufactured threats (terrorism, financial crisis, the “climate emergency,” disease outbreaks, etc.) to keep the public fearful, shocked, duped, and willing to cede its liberties in the name of dealing with those threats. Western societies have thereby been manoeuvred in an increasingly authoritarian direction, which Hoffman (1998, p. 391) calls “worldwide fascism.”

Western populations, subjected to military-grade psychological operations, not only failed to see that they were the quarry after “9/11,” but were also manipulated into defending official narratives, and, through Pavlovian conditioning, were trained to attack anyone who questions those narratives as a “conspiracy theorist.” Meanwhile, the architecture of their oppression was invisibly scaffolded around them, not least via “smart” technologies and social media that create the digital gulag harvesting everyone’s personal information for surveillance and control purposes as part of “permanent surveillance and information warfare” (van der Pijl, 2022, p. 76). Worse still, during this entire period (since before “9/11”), a revolution in warfare, based on “convergent technologies” in the “IT/Bio/Nano” era, was being worked on behind the scenes, and a potentially highly advanced weapons system, for use against the public, may now be in the process of installation (see Chap. 8). The permanent counterrevolution now stands on the brink of irreversible triumph—the technocratic enslavement of humanity—that only worldwide social revolution can prevent.

The “Covid-19” Operation: Proximate Triggers

By 1968 at the latest, the logic of an increasingly transnational class struggle meant that the ultimate outcome would either be a global dictatorship (the fulfilment of permanent counterrevolution) or world socialism (the fulfilment of Trotsky’s permanent revolution, requiring the expropriation of the means of production by the working class and the just redistribution of wealth and opportunity on a worldwide scale). The transnational ruling class, while using low-level counterinsurgency and psychological warfare techniques against Western populations since 1968, has been carefully laying the groundwork for the inevitable global class war for over half a century, buying time until the necessary revolution in warfare could be covertly achieved.

As explained in Chap. 8, a timeline involving the years 2020, 2025, and 2030 was framed as early as 2001, but even so, the “Covid-19” operation was in many ways rushed and botched, as though rolled out ahead of schedule. It is hard to avoid the impression that the ruling class wanted longer to prepare. This section lays out three reasons why the “Covid-19” operation was launched earlier than planned, namely: (i) worldwide social protests in 2019; (ii) the crisis of the international monetary and financial system in 2019; and (iii) the crisis of the Western propaganda system.

Worldwide Social Protests

In keeping with the global Strategy of Tension outlined above, a spate of terrorist attacks in France between 2015 and 2017 resulted in the introduction of a state of emergency, renewed five times since, seeing 10,000 troops deployed on French streets under the Sentinelle anti-terrorism operation (van der Pijl, 2022, p. 64). However, if such actions, in France and elsewhere, were intended to quell social unrest by moving societies ever further in the direction of police states, the effort failed, as conspicuously expressed by the rise of the Yellow Vests in France in 2018, as well as mass uprisings in Chile and India (van der Pijl, 2022, pp. 54–58). Those social movements assumed a socially progressive form not easily assimilated by populism, “instilling fear in the ruling classes the world over” (van der Pijl, 2022, p. 3). In 2019, following a decade of austerity, a “tsunami of protests” erupted in one in five countries, “unleashing public fury on a global scale,” and reflecting “unprecedented political mobilization” (Wright, 2019). It seemed that “every corner of the globe” was being “rocked by an explosion of unrest” and that “the Old World Order of neoliberal globalism under Pax Americana [was] finally coming apart at the seams” (Corbett, 2019b). These uncontainable social tensions, according to van der Pijl (2022, p. 72), were what triggered the “Covid-19” counterrevolution in 2020, “the signs of revolution [being] too serious” for the transnational ruling class to ignore.

Crisis in the International Monetary and Financial System

The acute crisis of capitalism in 2019 was also reflected in warning signs regarding the international monetary and financial system (IMFS). In May 2019, the yield curve on U.S. treasuries inverted, historically a harbinger of recession (Jones, 2019). The S&P price/earnings ratio in 2019 was the second highest of all time, even higher than in 1929 and 2007, again indicative of a coming recession (Bourbon Financial Management, 2019). CEOs obviously knew that trouble lay ahead, with record numbers resigning (Atkinson, 2019).

This was not to be just any recession, however. This was, potentially, to be a system-destroying recession (Wolff, 2021). The storm clouds had been gathering for some time, viz. the Long-Term Capital Management crisis (1998), the “global” financial crisis of 2007/8 (more accurately described as a crisis of the “Atlantic banking community” [Nesvetailova & Palan, 2008]), and the Eurozone debt crisis. First, the banks had to bail out a hedge fund; then, the public had to bail out the banks; then, sovereign nation-states went bankrupt. Since 2008, the system had been on artificial life support in the form of “quantitative easing” plus near-0% interest rates. The next major crisis always had the potential to prove fatal (Wolff, 2021).

The erstwhile Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, warned at a meeting of the world’s most senior figures in international finance in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2019 that “the deficiencies of the IMFS have become increasingly potent. Even a passing acquaintance with monetary history suggests that this centre won’t hold” (Carney, 2019). The previous week, BlackRock had published a seminal report arguing that conventional monetary and fiscal policies will not be enough to deal with the next economic downturn (BlackRock, 2019). The report proposes completely remaking the financial system based on the idea of “going direct,” i.e. abolishing the split-circuit system that keeps central bank reserves and retail money separate (as is necessary for a democratic system of “no taxation without representation”) and instead establishing a direct connection between central banks and individuals’ private accounts.

This is what the drive towards central bank digital currencies (CBDC, cf. Strohecker, 2023) is all about, with the public having been primed for the rollout of digital currency via the cryptocurrency mania of the 2010s (the crucial difference being that CBDC will be centralised rather than decentralised). If implemented, central banks will be able to freeze individuals’ bank accounts, or take money out of them, or impose conditions on the way that “money” (just a voucher system by this point) is spent, and no financial transaction anymore will be private (Davis, 2023). Put bluntly, it is a system of financial enslavement, more “direct” than “debt slavery.” Dissidents will be financially outcast, as already indicated by the abortive move to freeze Canadian truckers’ bank accounts and those of their supporters in January 2022.

On September 17, 2019, a crisis in the U.S. repo market saw the secured overnight lending rate briefly hit 10% (vs. its prior 2019 rate of 2–3%), prompting the Federal Reserve to step in and provide additional liquidity. As Titus (2021) demonstrates based on Federal Reserve activity, this was the moment when the decision was made to put the “Going Direct” plan into action, and with it the entire manufactured “Covid-19” crisis: “It’s easy if not trivial to look at a timeline of monetary events and see that the official monetary response to the ‘coronavirus pandemic’ went into effect before there even was a pandemic.”

Crisis of the Western Propaganda System

Propaganda has long served an essential function in the maintenance and management of U.S. liberal democracy. Lippmann (1925, p. 145), for instance, writes that the public is “necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome,” and so, through propaganda, “must be put in its place […] so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.” Bernays (1928, p. 1) writes in the famous opening lines of Propaganda that “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society” and those who do this constitute “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” Lippmann (1922, p. 248) coins the phrase “the manufacture of consent,” and Bernays (1947) uses the term “engineering of consent.” Donald Slesinger, a participant in a 1939 Rockefeller seminar on communications, uses the phrase “dictatorship-by-manipulation” when objecting to Lippmann’s ideas (cited in Simpson, 1994, p. 23). According to Fortune magazine in 1949, “It is as impossible to imagine a genuine democracy without the science of persuasion as it is to think of a totalitarian state without coercion,” leading Chomsky (1982, p. 67) to infer: “indoctrination is to democracy what coercion is to dictatorship.” In neither system is there real freedom.

Soviet communism and Western liberal democracy had a shared interest in censorship: direct political censorship in the case of the former, censorship through “the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns” in the case of the latter (Huxley, 1958, p. 35). Centralisation of media ownership is one of five “filters” identified by Herman and Chomsky (1988, p. 2) in their propaganda model of the Western media. The others include advertising revenue, reliance on information provided by government and business, “flak” as a means of disciplining those who step out of line, and the dominant ideology of the time. The net result is a highly sophisticated propaganda system, often reliant on self-censorship by those who have internalised its workings, which gives the lie to the liberal model of the media as an obstreperous “Fourth Estate.”

The U.S. propaganda system enables “brainwashing under freedom,” whereby the most egregious human rights abuses by U.S. imperialism go virtually unnoticed by a population indoctrinated to believe that U.S. foreign policy is fundamentally about safeguarding freedom and other higher values (Herman and Chomsky, 1979, p. 67). “To achieve this result without explicit government censorship,” the authors note, “is the genius of the Western way.”

Wolin (2008) uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” to describe the United States. No national institution in the USA can properly be regarded as democratic, he claims, pointing to “the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media” (2008, p. 105). This system, in Wolin’s view, represents “the antithesis of constitutional power,” constantly projecting power upwards while seeking to keep the citizenry off balance and passive (Hedges, 2015). The “genius” of the “totalizing system” in the USA, Wolin writes, “lies in wielding total power without appearing to, without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissident elements so long as they remain ineffectual” (2008, p. 57). “The government does not need to stamp out dissent,” he argues, because “the uniformity of imposed public opinion through the corporate media does a very effective job” (cited in Hedges, 2015).

Yet, the rise of social media, independent media, and citizen journalism during a period of relative internet freedom up to 2020 posed an increasing threat to the “genius” of the Western propaganda system. More and more people, waking up to the extent to which their previous worldview had been manipulated through propaganda, came to see through that system and to lose trust in liberal democracy. Should the population, steadily stripped of its rights and freedoms, grow restive and refuse to play along in the illusion of democracy, Wolin warns, it can expect a response familiar from past systems of totalitarianism (in Hedges, 2015).

Since March 2020, a transnational deep state operation (Hughes, 2022b) has been underway to institute a novel, technocratic form of totalitarianism. In many ways, we are still at the thin edge of the wedge, but the warning signs are undeniable. Although, in the West, we may not yet find ourselves “under the yoke of totalitarian regimes comparable to those we know so well from the twentieth century, there is no doubt that we are faced with a global paradigm that brings forth steadily expanding totalitarian tendencies […]” (Alting von Geusau, 2021). However, Alting von Geusau is wrong to claim that those tendencies are not “planned intentionally or maliciously.” They are by design, instigated by a transnational ruling class seeking recourse to totalitarianism in response to an acute crisis of capitalism—the same principle as in the 1930s. Then, as now, totalitarianism did not simply spring, fully formed, into existence. The descent into its worst horrors took place over many years. The origins of Nazi genocide, for instance, can be traced back to earlier euthanasia programmes, making the reappearance of state-sponsored euthanasia since 2020 deeply troubling (Hughes et al., 2022).

Further similarities between the “Covid-19” era and Nazi Germany include: the surrendering of liberties in the name of “the greater good” (Agamben, 2021, p. 17), use of propaganda to induce ideological conformity, the telling of Big Lies (see Chap. 6), widespread order following (“following Government guidelines”), mass psychosis (see Chap. 2), dehumanisation of outgroups as spreaders of disease (e.g. Jews, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”), the descent of civilised society into harmful and irrational behaviour (see Chap. 7), forcing health services to comply with government dictats (viz. the “‘Nazification’ of the NHS” [Corbett, 2021]), experimenting on human beings without their informed consent (Hughes et al., 2022), eugenics themes involving the same actors active in Nazi Germany (Ehret, 2021), censorship and silencing of dissent that belong “firmly in the realms of a totalitarian Nazi dystopia” (Polyakova, 2021), legislation that pushes in the direction of dictatorship (Davis, 2021e), a fascistic fusion of the state and Big Business (today’s “global public–private partnership” [Davis, 2021b]), and the promotion of ecopolitics (cf. Brüggemeier et al., 2005; Biehl & Staudenmaier, 2011). These continuities are explored in greater detail in Hughes (2024).

Technocracy: A Brief History

Technocracy: Origins

Technocracy originated on the campus of Columbia University in 1932 as the brainchild of Howard Scott, who went on to found Technocracy, Inc. with M. King Hubbert (later proponent of “peak oil” theory) in 1934. Their Technocracy Study Course (1934) characterises technocracy as “dealing with social phenomena in the widest sense of the word; this includes not only actions of human beings, but also everything which directly or indirectly affects their actions,” including biology, the climate, and natural resources (Technocracy Inc., 2005, p. v). Their magazine, The Technocrat, defines technocracy as “the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population” (cited in Wood, 2018, p. 10). In other words, technocracy is about the scientific management of everyone and everything.

Writing during the Great Depression, Scott and Hubbert were looking for an alternative economic system to capitalism. Technocracy represents a centrally managed system based on energy rather than money. Instead of market forces of supply and demand determining price, citizens are to receive a quota of energy certificates to be spent on goods and services priced according to the energy cost of production (Technocracy Inc., 2005, p. 230; cf. Wood, 2018, p. 13). The efficiencies achieved will, in Scott and Hubbert’s vision, lead to material abundance alongside increased leisure time. The technology required to fulfil this vision, which essentially requires the constant monitoring and control of everything, was not available in the 1930s, but it is now (under the label “smart”).

Technocracy is hostile to human freedom. At the apex of its power structure (the Technate) stand the technocrats, who control everyone and everything. It is they who get to manage and distribute resources, right down to the individual level (Davis, 2022). Paraphrasing Wood (2018, pp. 14–15), technocracy implies:

• eradication of private property, for everything is owned by the Technate;

• dependence on the Technate for all basic needs, e.g. food, housing, healthcare, transportation (all vehicles, for instance, must be rented, with ride sharing as the norm);

• inability to save for future needs, since energy certificates expire at the end of an accounting period;

• abolition of all previous political systems, including democracy;

• education as a form of conditioning to prepare people for the career path chosen for them by the Technate.

Technocracy thus inaugurates a new form of totalitarianism facilitated by scientific advances that could in principle be used for human emancipation, were the relevant technologies expropriated from the ruling class.

The “Scientific Dictatorship” and the “Technetronic Era”

Mid-twentieth-century thinkers also recognised the prospect of using science for purposes of total social control. Russell (1952, pp. 30–54), for instance, envisages a “scientific dictatorship” in which access to the relevant scientific knowledge will be “rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.” Not only “the art of persuasion” (propaganda), but also diet, injections, and education will combine to render “any serious criticism of the powers that be […] psychologically impossible,” immunising the ruling class against revolution. After a single generation needed to perfect such techniques, the scientific dictatorship will no longer require physical forms of coercion (police forces and armies) to control its subjects.

According to Huxley (1958, p. 118), “Under a scientific dictator education will really work – with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.” Huxley envisages “a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism,” not based on terror and coercion, in which the trappings of democracy (e.g., elections, parliaments, and the rhetoric of freedom) remain while “the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit” (1958, pp. 110–11). The “final revolution” (or, better, counter-revolution) will be a “dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies” (Huxley, 1959, p. 226). In 1962, Huxley spent a semester at Berkeley as a Ford research professor. Evidently attracted by his ideas, the Ford Foundation threw enormous sums of money at behavioural science research in the 1960s.

Brzezinski (1970, p. 10) argues that social change is being driven by the advent of “technetronic society,” present only in the USA at the time, characterised by the pervasive “impact of technology and electronics – particularly in the area of computers and communications,” with the ARPANET having come online in November 1969. Technetronic society represents a “more controlled and directed society,” dominated by

an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behaviour and keeping society under close surveillance and control. (Brzezinski, 1970, p. 97)

This requires nothing less than a “redefinition of the American system” (Brzezinski, 1970, p. 66) and leans in the direction of totalitarianism. In fact, Brzezinski (1970, p. 34) cites Teilhard de Chardin: “monstrous as it is, is not modern totalitarianism really the distortion of something magnificent, and thus quite near to the truth?”

China: The World’s First Technate

In Brzezinski’s words, Henry Kissinger and President Nixon “initiated a kind of secret collaboration or even perhaps you could call it an alliance” with China in the early 1970s (cited in Corbett, 2014), paving the way for David Rockefeller’s trip to China in 1973. Signalling his eagerness to collaborate with China, Rockefeller (1973) wrote in the New York Times: “The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history”—ignoring the tens of millions of people who starved to death during the “Great Leap Forward” (1958–1962). In 1979, Rockefeller met with Rong Yiren, chairman of China International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC). An agreement was reached between CITIC, Chase, and the Bank of China to “identify and define those areas of the Chinese economy most susceptible to American technology and capital infusion” (Chossudovsky, 1986, p. 140).

China’s remarkable annual GDP growth rate since 1978, averaging just under 10%, flows from the “opening up” to Western investment. Thus, Corbett (2014) remarks, “the Chinese industrial juggernaut did not just spring up overnight”; rather, it was “carefully and deliberately constructed by wealth transfers, banking agreements, R&D investments, military technology ‘leaks’ and offshoring of manufacturing over the course of several decades.” Particularly interesting is the boom in research and development funding since the 1990s, which is not about exploiting cheap Chinese labour. Rather, a deliberate technology transfer has taken place, akin to that identified by Sutton (1981, 2016) with respect to U.S. transfers to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. This includes military technology transfers (Corbett, 2019a). Sutton (2002, p. 135) predicted in 1983 that by 2000, “communist China will be a ‘superpower’ built by American technology and skill.” Contrary to the realist image of “great power competition” (Layne, 2018), the West and China have, for decades, been collaborating in the development of new technologies capable of making technocracy workable.

By 2010, while the “global” financial crisis of 2007/8 had prompted a perilous cycle of “austerity” and “quantitative easing” in the West, China was still enjoying significant annual GDP growth. Around this time, Chinese authoritarianism began to be promoted as a potential global template. The Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network (2010, p. 18), in their infamous “lockstep” scenario, contrast the “deadly leniency” of the U.S. response to a fictional pandemic with the Chinese government’s “quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens,” which “saved millions of lives,” enabling a “swifter post-pandemic recovery.”

Corbett (2014) notes the praise heaped on China by representatives of the transnational ruling class in the years around 2010, including George Soros, Evelyn de Rothschild, Richard Rockefeller, and Henry Kissinger. Corbett (2022a) also notes the open affinities of Western political leaders with China, including Justin Trudeau (“There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China, because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime”), Angela Merkel (described as an “old friend” by Xi Jinping), Joe Biden (who calls Xi a “bright and really tough guy”), and Boris Johnson (who claims to be “fervently Sinophile”).

Klaus Schwab’s son Olivier married a Chinese woman and has led the World Economic Forum (WEF) office in Beijing since 2011. Chinese officials of increasing importance have attended the WEF since 2009, including Xi Jinping in 2017. Schwab claims that the West needs to adopt the kinds of technologies introduced in China (Velázquez, 2020).

Wood (2018, p. 125) warns of the dangers of the Chinese social credit system (SCS), noting that those with a higher score “will have travel freedoms, will attend better schools and get better jobs. Low SCS holders will not be allowed to have travel passes, live in better housing, get into better schools and will be left with less desirable work conditions.” The social credit scoring system was then extended to companies in China—a precursor of the “Environmental Sustainability Goals” metrics currently being introduced to score companies worldwide and thereby manipulate their activities. Wood (2018, p. 125) also cites a BBC experiment conducted in Guiyang to test how long it would take for police to locate and apprehend a reporter randomly present in a population of 3.5 million people. The answer: just seven minutes. Whereas “pre-crime” was science fiction in Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report (Dick, 2002), Chinese pre-crime algorithms based on social data, which will inevitably be used to target dissidents, are a reality and have been exported to multiple U.S. cities despite being illegal and unconstitutional—“scientific dictatorship, pure and simple” (Wood, 2018, pp. 126–7).

China as “the world’s first Technate” (Davis, 2022) or first “full-blown Technocracy” was only made possible via the “clever manipulation and support of Western elites like the Trilateral Commission” (Wood, 2022). Now that technocracy has proven feasible as a means of controlling the world’s most populous country, the aim is to roll it out in the West and elsewhere (Wood, 2018, p. 73). China’s “intentional Technocracy,” Wood (2022) warns, is “spreading like a cancer” to other nations worldwide. The goal all along was to use technology to implement global scientific dictatorship.

To see where it leads, one need only consider the Shanghai “lockdown” in April 2022. 25 million people were confined to their homes, policed by drones using facial recognition software and broadcasting the message “Control your soul’s desire for freedom” (Browning, 2022). Amidst conditions of food deprivation, inability to help vulnerable loved ones, and a brute display of power by the government, harrowing videos emerged of people screaming from their high-rise balconies, some jumping to their deaths. In May 2022, China announced that it would “strictly limit non-essential outbound travel activities by Chinese citizens,” i.e. prevent its own citizens from leaving the country (George, 2022). Lest such things be deemed unimaginable in the West, remember that Canada did not allow “unvaccinated” people to board commercial planes or trains between October 2021 and June 2022.

World War III

World War as an Instrument of Social Engineering

In the context of an inevitable worldwide eruption of class conflict caused by “a dangerously lopsided, oligarchic capitalism in terminal decline” (van der Pijl, 2020), and with conditions of class compromise having irreversibly broken down, a numerically tiny transnational ruling class went to war against the rest of humanity in 2020 in a desperate attempt to prevent its own demise by issuing in a system of global technocracy. As Davis (2021a) writes, “The pseudopandemic was the opening salvo in a global coup d’état.” The “real battle,” James Corbett (2020) notes, is “between the banksters and would-be societal engineers and the mass of humanity.” The Atlantic ruling class has a track history of using world war to remake society in its desired image. Prior to World War I, for instance, social engineers saw war, all of its attendant horrors, as “the easiest way to demolish the old traditions and beliefs that lay between them and their goals” (Corbett, 2018).

Lest “war” seem too strong a term for what is happening, consider what ruling-class representatives have told us in their own words. The WEF (2019) argued pre-Covid that a “new global architecture” must be created, much as “after the Second World War, leaders worked together to develop new institutional structures and governance frameworks.” UN Secretary General António Guterres described Covid-19 as “the most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War” (Guterres, 2020). Angela Merkel called “coronavirus” the greatest challenge since the Second World War (Lawler, 2020). Klaus Schwab told the WEF on June 3, 2020: “It is obvious that we are in the middle of the most severe crisis that the world has experienced since World War II” (cited in Poona, 2021, p. 14). IMF head Kristalina Georgieva (2020) announced a “new Bretton Woods moment” on October 15, 2020. Bill Gates claimed that “Covid-19 vaccine” production was “similar to how, during World War II, the U.S. ramped up its manufacturing capacity at a mind-blowing rate” (Gates, 2020). These powerful figures are tacitly acknowledging that the radical, systemic changes they want to make only occur because of world war. Their slogan “Build back better” is analogous to postwar reconstruction after 1945, although the destruction wrought under the banner of “Covid-19” results from the policies of governments enacted against their own citizens, and not from the actions of official enemies.

These repeated invocations of World War II by ruling class representatives raise the very real possibility that we are now in World War III. If so, then, like previous world wars, World War III will look nothing like what went before (J. Corbett, 2020a). World War I, for instance, introduced machine guns, no man’s land, and mass mechanised slaughter. World War II introduced bombers, submarine warfare, nuclear weapons, and the targeting of civilians. The aims, strategies, tactics, and weapons systems in World War III will not resemble those of the two previous world wars. Yet, the outcomes, in terms of large numbers of lives lost and the manifestation of previously unimaginable horrors (see Chap. 8), are sure to be the same, unless those behind the war can be stopped.

Wars typically kill large numbers of people. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2023a, Fig. 1), all-cause mortality in England and Wales has exceeded the five-year average most weeks since the start of the “pandemic” and many of those deaths are “deaths not involving Covid-19”; in Week 16 of 2023—not in the winter, and measured against a five-year average including deaths in the previous three years, it hit 22% (ONS, 2023b). In the United States, excess mortality has been consistently above the five-year average since March 2020 (U.S. Mortality, n.d.). Across the European Union between 2020 and 2022, excess mortality trended mostly within a 6–27% range (spiking to 40% in November 2020), before dropping to ca. 3–4% in 2023 (eurostat, n.d.). In Australia, the death rate for 2022 was 15.3% higher than the “historical average” (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023). In New Zealand the death rate in 2022 was 10.4% higher than in 2021 (Gabel & Knox, 2023), and between July 2022 and June 2023 it was 14% higher than in the corresponding period in 2018/19, the last available pre- “pandemic” data (Hatchard, 2023). The step change in the number of people dying in the West since March 2020 (which can be explored further via www.mortality.watch/explorer) offers prima facie evidence that a war is indeed taking place, with most excess deaths being “induced by the government measures,” according to detailed analysis by Rancourt et al. (2021, pp. 115, 35–6). The outlier is Sweden, which did not “lock down” in 2020, and where deaths per 1000 people have held steady between 8.52 and 9.93 every year since 2009 (peaking at 9.48 during the “pandemic”) (Official Statistics of Sweden, n.d.).

How Can the Few Wage War Against the Many?

How is it possible for a numerically miniscule ruling class to wage war against the rest of humanity? Let us consider some numbers. The richest 10% of the world’s population controls 76% of the wealth and receives 52% of the total income, whereas the poorest 50%—half of humanity—only accounts for 2% of the wealth and 8.5% of the income, notwithstanding variations between countries and regions (Chancel et al., 2022, p. 10). We might, therefore, speculate that the top 10% is afraid of the remaining 90% pressing its claims for a more just world, and is certainly afraid of the revolutionary power of the bottom 50%, which, having been completely fleeced, has virtually nothing to lose and the whole world to win.

Another way of thinking about the numbers is in terms of millionaires. There are 62.2 million people in the world with a fortune of $1 million or over—a meagre 0.8% of a global population of ca. eight billion (Chancel et al., 2022, p. 20). So, when talking about “the 1%,” we are effectively dealing with the millionaire class. Between 1995 and 2021, the richest 1% captured 38% of global wealth growth, with 21% of that growth going to the top 0.001% consisting of 76,460 people with a fortune of over $100 million (Chancel et al., 2022, pp. 15, 20). To be clear, over a fifth of global wealth growth in the last quarter of a century has been captured by one one-hundred-thousandth of the global population. Phillips (2018), focusing mainly on Europe and America, argues that the “global power elite” consists of just a few hundred named actors. Seen in these terms, it is clear where the root of the world’s problems lies, as well as the focus of any potential solutions.

How, then, can a ruling class whose wealth accrues almost exponentially in the top 1%, the top 0.1%, the top 0.01%, the top 0.001%, etc. hope to win a war against the rest of humanity? True, it can count on the support of the richest 10% that has so much to lose, as well as further layers that see their interests best served by aligning with power. It also has control over the means of production on its side, including the power to magic money out of thin air (Werner, 2014), global communications flows (most importantly the “news”), the food supply, consumer products (including “smart” devices for connection to the technocratic control grid), and all military technologies (including black technologies). Nevertheless, coercing populations worldwide to accept a system of technocratic enslavement—the war aim—without reaping the whirlwind of revolution poses seemingly insuperable challenges.

Clearly, the solution does not lie in the centuries-long development of ever more destructive technologies that used to win wars. Ever since General MacArthur’s thwarted desire to use nuclear weapons during the Korean War in 1950, or the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958, when President Eisenhower refused to authorise nuclear weapons usage against China for fear of galvanising national liberation movements (Hanania, 2017, pp. 78–80), it has been evident that nuclear weapons usage risks catalysing massive transnational opposition to the aggressor state. In any case, nuclear weapons are “totally unsuitable for dealing with insurgents” (Kitson, 1971, p. 28), and the war for global technocracy amounts to a global counterinsurgency campaign.

Nor can advanced technologies such as drones and Boston Dynamics robots (whose military potential is obvious) be deployed against entire populations, not only for reasons of scale, but also because it would be obvious that the government had openly declared war on the people, inviting revolution. An overt war of any kind against the people additionally risks soldiers, police officers, and state officials defecting once they realise what it is they are part of.

To prevail against overwhelming numerical odds in World War III, the ruling class must revolutionise the nature of warfare. It will have spent over half a century (since 1968 at least) covertly working on ways of doing so. The key elements of the new way of war will, of necessity, remain classified, but there is nevertheless much that can be worked out based purely on the logic of the situation. For the first time in history, a numerically tiny proportion of the world’s population seeks to wage war on the overwhelming majority. That peculiar situation dictates the fundamentals of both the war’s aims and how the war must be fought.

The most fundamental principle is deception: the public must not be allowed to know that war is being waged against it. Sun Tzu (1963, p. 66) famously claimed that “All warfare is based on deception.” The Mossad motto reads: “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.” Much as the United States has not formally declared war since 1941, despite being almost continually at war ever since, particularly through covert operations, so World War III is undeclared and is waged by stealth. Deception must be carried to the extreme in World War III, for if the public gets wise to what is happening before the technocratic architecture of its oppression reaches maturity, worldwide social revolution becomes a realistic possibility. Therefore, the war must be waged pre-emptively, to preclude revolution, and it must remain “invisible” to the extent that its weapons are not immediately obvious and it is concealed by a highly advanced propaganda system.

No war has ever been won through purely psychological means, however, and the point will inevitably come when public consciousness starts to align with the objective reality of the global class war. At that point, the war could turn physical in ways that it has not already. In that respect, it is troubling that the injections reportedly administered to over 5.55 billion people (Holder, 2023) turn out to have been a military operation from start to finish (see Chap. 6). Moreover, they demonstrably contain an array of undisclosed ingredients (Hughes, 2022c), apparently including EMF-responsive self-assembling and disassembling nanotechnologies (Hughes, 2023, 50:25). Coupled with the simultaneous 5G rollout (the Secure 5G and Beyond Act of 2020 was passed into U.S. law on March 23, 2020), we must take seriously the possibility that a weapons system is being installed that would allow human bodies to be targeted via remote administration of particular frequencies (see Chap. 8). This, in the final analysis, is how a tiny cabal of technocrats could fight and win a war against the rest of humanity.

In the longer term, the precipitous declines in birth rates since the “Covid-19 vaccine” rollout (Pfeiffer, 2022; Bujard & Andersson, 2022; Swiss Policy Research, 2022; Naked Emperor, 2023) could prove consistent with a global depopulation agenda dating back to 1968, the year the ruling classes of the world found confirmation that their position was endangered by a growing and restive global population. Hardin (1968) argues that “a finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero.” The Club of Rome, founded in 1968, published its Limits to Growth report in 1972 (Meadows et al., 1972), premised on the same flawed Malthusian logic. The Rockefeller Commission Report on Population and the American Future (Centre for Research on Population & Security, 1972) argues that “no substantial benefits would result from continued growth of the nation’s population.” National Security Memorandum 200, aka the Kissinger Report, states: “it is urgent that measures to reduce fertility be started and made effective in the 1970s and 1980s,” and proposes “constructive action to lower fertility rates in selected developing countries” (National Security Council, 1974). Since 1968, the global fertility rate (number of children per woman) has halved (United Nations, 2022a) and is now at or below the 2.1 replacement rate in all regions apart from Africa (United Nations, 2022b).

Omniwar

Contemporary developments in warfare are sometimes described in terms of “fifth-generation warfare” (Abbott, 2010; Qureshi, 2019; Krishnan, 2022). Isolated from the context of global class relations, however, that term is unhelpful. There is much confusion in the literature as to what “fifth-generation warfare” is supposed to mean, how to recognise it, how it differs from hybrid warfare and grey-zone conflict, and whether it exists at all. It has been associated, inter alia, with not “fighting a defined adversary in a defined battlespace for a defined period of time” (2018, p. 4) and with “wars of perception […], with information being the weapon, [including] deception and propaganda” (Qureshi, 2019, p. 210). Perhaps most significantly, the targets of “5GW” may not even realise there is a war going on, or that they are combatants in that war; the secrecy of such warfare then makes it “the most dangerous warfare generation of all time” (Qureshi, 2019, p. 209).

The 5GW literature fails to get to grips with who is waging war against whom and for what purpose. For example, the idea of “unrestricted warfare” (Liang & Xiangsui, 1999) is often associated with an alleged plan by China to undermine and destroy the United States. It is, thus, just a more sophisticated version of geopolitics, played “horizontally” on the global chessboard. The more fundamental war—i.e. global class war, waged “vertically”—goes missing. Corbett (2022b) provides a much-needed rectification:

Fifth-generation warfare is an all-out war that is being waged against all of us […] right now, and it is a battle for full-spectrum dominance over every single aspect of your life: your movements and interactions, your transactions, even your innermost thoughts and feelings and desires. Governments the world over are working with corporations to leverage technology to control you down to the genomic level, and they will not stop until each and every person who resists them is subdued or eliminated.

This is an apt description of the global class war, though Corbett’s anarchism makes him reluctant to frame it in the language of class and edges him in the direction of parallel societies rather than revolution.

A better term than “fifth-generation warfare,” I propose, is “Omniwar.” The key thing to understand is that the transnational ruling class has weaponised everything against the population, as indeed it must to subdue billions of people. The war is being waged in every conceivable domain, yet in ways that are intended to remain concealed as far as possible. Corbett (2022b), for instance, discusses information warfare (cf. Webb, 2020, 2022; Turley, 2022; Shir-Raz et al., 2022), neurological warfare (cf. Giordano, 2017, 2018), biological warfare, and economic warfare, and notes the “wider operation to manipulate, control and weaponize all aspects of our environment, our food supply [cf. Corbett, 2023] and even our genome itself for the purposes of the ruling oligarchs.” To this list we might add:

• psychological warfare (Scott, 2021a);

• the “necrosecurity” (Lincoln, 2022) of the “lockdowns,” which medical doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi immediately warned would create “millions of casualties” (Stringham, 2020), which 500 + doctors branded a “mass casualty incident” (“A Doctor a Day Letter,” 2020), and which have caused immeasurable harm (Bardosh, 2023; Harrison, 2023);

• 5G (rolled out despite lack of adequate safety testing and known harms to human health [Burdick, 2023; Jamieson, 2023]);

• deprivation of necessary healthcare (Triggle & Jeavans, 2021; Spectator, n.d.) in the name of reconfiguring health services (Stevens & Pritchard, 2020) to deal with “the virus” (public health as death by stealth);

• bioweapons masquerading as vaccines (Latypova, 2022; Ponton, 2023); and

• stratospheric aerosol injection (Freeland, 2018).

When Goebbels spoke in 1943 of “a war more total and radical than anything that we can even imagine today” (cited in Moorhouse, 2010, p. 339), Omniwar fits the bill. Yet, with most people still thinking of war in terms of nation-state standing armies, foreign enemies, guerrilla warfare, counter-terrorism operations, etc., it never occurs to them that they themselves are now combatants in the undeclared Omniwar being waged against them.

Information Warfare

To give one obvious example of how free humanity finds itself in the crosshairs, consider the UK Ministry of Defence’s (2020) Integrated Operating Concept (IOC), announced as “the most significant change in UK military thought in several generations.” According to the IOC, “The old distinction between foreign and domestic defence is increasingly irrelevant” when it comes to misinformation and disinformation, which can stoke “confusion, disagreement and doubt in our societies,” meaning “home” no longer represents a “secure sanctuary” (2020, p. 7). Here, a militarised domestic environment is treated as threatening, because of the free flow of information and the possibility of disagreement and doubt, which are fundamental to liberal societies. The IOC proposes to “drive the conditions and tempo of strategic activity, rather than responding to the actions of others”—implying permanent counterrevolution in the information space. Accordingly, organisations such as the 77th Brigade and the 13th Signal Regiment were deployed alongside GCHQ to combat online “anti-vaccine propaganda” (Fisher & Smyth, 2020).

Omniwar thus includes a war on free speech and a drive to censor dissident voices, consistent with emergent totalitarianism. The U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, headed by former Google/Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt, advises on “countering disinformation” online, including the use of A.I. to identify which accounts to censor and deplatform (Webb, 2022). Sean Gourley, who created A.I. programmes allowing the military to track insurgents in Iraq, proposes a “Manhattan Project for truth” that will enable intelligence agencies to determine what is true or not (Webb, 2020). “Unless you hear it from us [the Government], it is not the truth,” claimed New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, in March 2020; “we will continue to be your single source of truth” (cited in Haynes, 2021). In 2022, Ardern called internet freedom a “weapon of war,” claiming that “rules” must be introduced to make sure that people do not “take up arms” and “threaten the security of others” by questioning official narratives (cited in Turley, 2022).

Certain fabricated narratives on which the transnational ruling class depends—always involving a global crisis, the myth of “settled science,” and the need for a global solution based on ceding power to authorities at ever higher levels (Hudson, 2023)—are not allowed to be questioned. In this environment, Webb (2022) reflects, “journalism is becoming less of a profession and more of a war zone. Indeed the difference between journalism and ‘information warfare’ is becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint.” The information landscape is just one of many battlefields in the unfolding Omniwar.

The “Covid-19” Operation

This book focuses on one element of the Omniwar in particular, namely, the psychological warfare operation launched in 2020, which I call the “Covid-19 operation.” To be clear, there was no viral “pandemic” in 2020 (see Chap. 6). Rather, what took place was what Devlin (2021, p. 2) calls “the psy-op to end all psy-ops,” i.e. “the culmination of many, many decades of slow and methodical planning with the aim of completely enslaving and subjugating humanity into a technocratic control grid.”

That war aim, which defines victory for the ruling class in World War III, cannot be achieved overnight. Replacing the fiat currency system with biometric IDs and CBDC (Hughes, 2022a, 234; Davis, 2023); rolling out social credit scoring and an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) framework for corporations (Davis, 2021d); scaffolding a global health dictatorship through the WHO Pandemic Treaty and amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations (Kheriaty, 2022); creating the Internet of Bodies in which we are all hooked up to the technocratic control grid (Kyrie & Broudy, 2022)—all of this architecture of oppression takes years to put in place, although the would-be global technocrats are clearly moving as fast as they can, with the initial injection rollout already pushed as far as it could go, the Pandemic Treaty touted for 2024 (World Health Organisation [WHO], 2023) and CBDC in Britain by 2025 (Taaffe-Maguire, 2023). The World Bank’s (2020) $6 billion “Covid-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Programme” has a closing date of March 31, 2025.

These gruesome measures, intended to enslave the human race through biodigital means, would never be accepted by a healthy, confident, free-thinking population. The population must, therefore, be rendered sick, demoralised, and psychologically incapacitated before the main fighting breaks out. This, it seems, was the whole point of the “Covid-19” operation. For if “man can be so utterly demoralised that he accepts any political system” (Meerloo, 1956, p. 132), then technocracy can be rolled out once the population’s will to resist has been broken. “War is an affair of morale,” Rees (1945, p. 81) writes, “and all weapons have, or should have, a morale-destroying effect.”

Historically, psychological warfare aims precisely to break the opponent’s will to fight. During World War II, for instance, William Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA), described psychological warfare as “the coordination and use of all means […] which tend to destroy the will of the enemy to achieve victory […]” (cited in Roosevelt, 1976, p. 99). According to the Nuremberg Tribunal Prosecutor in 1946, “Before every major aggression, [the Nazis] initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims […] In the propaganda system, it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons” (Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, 1946, p. 1041). “If a period of peace can be used to soften up a future enemy,” Meerloo (1956, p. 100) writes, “the totalitarian armies may be able in time of war to win a cheap and easy victory. Totalitarian psychological warfare is […] an effort to propagandize and hypnotize the world into submission.” According to Valley and Aquino (1980, pp. 5–6), “If we do not attack the enemy’s will until he reaches the battlefield, his nation will have strengthened it as best it can. We must attack that will before it is thus locked in place. We must instil in it a predisposition to inevitable defeat.”

“Psychological warfare” is a slippery concept that has “multilayered, often contradictory meanings” (Simpson, 1994, p. 41). First used in English in 1941 with reference to Nazi propaganda, terror, and fifth-column activities, the term was broadened during World War II to include ideological training of friendly forces and boosting morale and discipline on the home front (Simpson, 1994, p. 11). Subsequent U.S. military and NATO manuals include propaganda, covert operations, guerrilla warfare, and public diplomacy under “psychological warfare,” a term used interchangeably with “psychological operations.” Always deployed to achieve certain ideological, political, or military objectives, psychological warfare can work through non-physical means, such as mass communications, as well as through selective applications of violence (e.g. sabotage, assassination, and counter insurrection) (Simpson, 1994, p. 11). Psychological warfare can be brutal and overt, as in totalitarian menticide (Meerloo, 1956), “shock and awe” operations, and barbarous counterinsurgency methods (see Chap. 8). Or it may be more subtle, operating through applied behavioural psychology, mass hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, etc. (see Volume 2 of this book). Officially, psychological warfare is reserved for foreign enemies and populations (viz. National Security Council, 1947; Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2010, § 2.2.a), yet psychological operations have been waged against Western populations for a very long time: “the targets of U.S. psychological warfare” between 1945 and 1960, for instance, were “not only the ‘enemy,’ but also the people of the United States and its allies” (Simpson, 1994, p. 13). During the Gulf War and 2003 Iraq War, “extreme PSYOP” targeted public opinion in both Iraq and the United States (Aquino, 2003, p. 3).

In March 2020, a ferocious, transnationally coordinated campaign of psychological warfare was unleashed by governments against their own citizens, on behalf of the transnational ruling class—what Scott (2021b) calls a “menticidal assault” that was “planned and […] firmly on the side of evil.” Elsewhere, Scott (2022) observes that governments, whose first obligation used to be to protect their own citizens, have instead deployed tactics “used to confuse us, terrorise us, manipulate us, and change our minds and behaviour against our will and consent.” According to a U.S. observer, “The unpredictable and abusive psychological attacks by our government and military on American citizens is similar to the brainwashing techniques used on prisoners of war, hostages, and cult members” and is designed to leave the population “battle-fatigued” (K, 2021). Potts (2020) claims, without exaggeration, that the controllers of society have “locked down people’s minds. The ramifications of that psychological murder will last a lot longer than destroyed businesses.” For Broadberry (2022), “There’s a war raging, alright, but you will find its theatre of operations inside the human psyche. It is a war on consciousness,” involving an “atrophy of culture” and “the spiritual malaise of humanity.”

Following over a century of development in different forms, in different historical contexts, psychological warfare has become highly advanced in its methods and applications, which is why this book requires two volumes to do justice to the complexity and sophistication of the “Covid-19” operation. Those behind the operation clearly spent years assimilating every possible method—from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Western propaganda system, the Tavistock Institute, CIA trauma-based mind control experiments and developments in torture, cults, the psychology of evil (Zimbardo, 2007), applied behavioural psychology (Dolan et al., 2010), hypnosis and neurolinguistic programming, etc.—and then deployed all of those methods at once against an unsuspecting public in the most comprehensive and vicious psychological operation of all time.

Seen in its entirety, the levels of premeditation, transnational coordination, and attention to detail are chilling. The planning required must go back a very long way, possibly to before “9/11” (see Chap. 8). Those who think that no conspiracy could be planned on such a scale and in such detail not only ignore the role of compartmentalisation (only the most senior board-level executives of global corporations, for instance, have oversight of the operation as a whole [Davis, 2021c]), but they also radically underestimate (and are probably ignorant of) a transnational deep state dating at least as far back as the late 1940s (Hughes, 2022b). True, there are tensions and rivalries within and between different ruling classes and class fractions (van der Pijl, 1998, p. 3), but when it comes to suppressing the international working class, they act as one, and have done so of necessity since 1968.

This volume deals with psychological warfare techniques used to attack the mind and impair its healthy functioning. Chapter 2 explores the use of shock for social control purposes, including the influence of the Tavistock Institute, Klein’s (2007) “shock doctrine,” and the shock and awe tactics deployed during the first “lockdown.” Chapter 3 is about trauma-based mind control, involving psychological torture techniques, trauma bonding, and false rescue of an infantilised population by transnational power. Chapter 4 addresses the role of fear and imaginary existential threats in rendering the public susceptible to psychological manipulation, discussing multiple ways in which the threat of the “pandemic” was wildly exaggerated via propaganda, manipulated statistics, face masks, PCR tests, new variants, “long Covid,” etc. Chapter 5 deals with cognitive attack, i.e. means of making the world not make sense, including weaponised confusion, deliberately absurd “countermeasures,” unpredictability of treatment, mixed messaging, and abuse of language. Chapter 6, on deception, draws on the Big Lie concept and argues that probably everything we were told about “Covid-19” was false—but that cognitive dissonance renders most people psychologically incapable of engaging with the truth. Chapter 7 looks at the social division manufactured through mass paranoia, weaponised guilt, scapegoating of dissidents, mask mandates as tools of segregation, hate speech, snitching, priming the public for violence, dehumanisation, and media incitement of hatred against “the unvaccinated.” Chapter 8 returns to the theme of global class war and argues that in the context of the “IT/Bio/Nano” era planned for since 2001, the “vaccines” could be a form of military hardware aimed at connecting human bodies to a technocratic control grid—but also that the controlled demolition of liberal democracy presents a moment of worldwide revolutionary potential.

Readers will notice that many terms in this book are placed in inverted commas/scare quotes: “pandemic,” “Covid-19,” “SARS-CoV-2,” “Covid-19 vaccine,” etc. This is because, in the Omniwar, language itself has been weaponised and deceit is ubiquitous. For reasons given in Chaps. 5 and 6, it seems doubtful that any of these things exist in a credible scientific sense. Planting an alien vocabulary of trigger words at a moment of traumatic rupture, on the other hand, is a known tactic of psychological warfare, which is why Curtin (2016) proposes not using weaponised terms such as “9/11” and instead finding a “new vocabulary to speak of these terrible things.” We could, for instance, refer to the vaccine-free rather than “the unvaccinated”: freedom is positive, whereas “un” is always negative. The power of propaganda, however, means that the dominant discourse is all-pervasive, and particularly when trying to engage those who use the buzzwords uncritically, it seems necessary to speak a common language, or at least to appear to do so (though I refuse to write “COVID-19” in all caps that aggressively leap off the page for impact). In this book, I have retained the dominant terms, but placed them in inverted commas/scare quotes to indicate a critical distance from them. The extent to which I have done so merely reflects how automatically they are used in society (a form of Pavlovian conditioning; people unwittingly using the terms of their own oppression).

This book serves, as much as anything else, as a project of anamnesis. It provides a historical record of the phenomenal psychological abuse that was inflicted upon the public through the “Covid-19” operation. A key part of that abuse was the intentional infliction of trauma (see Chap. 3), and as Mary Holland recognises, “Anyone alive today may be forgiven for experiencing PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) about all things COVID […] After three years of horror, it is only human to want to put this behind us and to forget” (Doctors for COVID Ethics, 2023, p. xiii). This psychological defence mechanism, however, is precisely what keeps victims locked in the orbit of their abusers. The abuse is blanked out/suppressed/buried, and patterns of abuse are allowed to repeat. Holland understands, in this context, that the “undeclared war against humanity is not over, and we must arm ourselves with knowledge,” not least of the enemy’s methods. Recognising the nature of the abuse that has taken place is the first step towards pulling free from it and beginning the process of healing, which may involve “deep grieving over the abuse of trust, over the betrayals, over the intentionality of the trauma bonding and the set-ups” (Svali, 2000, p. 4). Reading this book may, therefore, prove to be an emotionally challenging experience and is not something that should be entered into lightly. On the other hand, when survivors can “recall everything about any contact with their abusers, including the sites of the abuse and the identities of the perpetrators,” there is genuine jeopardy for the latter (Lacter, 2011). In that sense, anamnesis is a prerequisite for defeating the vicious transnational cabal that has demonstrated its willingness to go any lengths to enslave humanity.

The contents of this book may prove shocking to many readers. Nevertheless, the evil that is at work in the world must be squarely faced if it is to be confronted and vanquished. Make no mistake: the war for technocracy means that human freedom is now under very real threat. Readers who may be sceptical of my position should consider Yeadon’s (2023) advice concerning asymmetry of risk. If the argument made in this book is correct, then sceptics stand to lose their liberty and would be unwise to resort to the usual thought-terminating clichés and system-justifying responses to avoid serious debate and discussion. On the other hand, if readers are inclined to agree with the argument made here, and it is one day disproven, what is the worst that can happen? As Yeadon (2023) recognises, “These options aren’t faintly balanced. A rational actor should cease believing what we’re being told. It’s not a safe position, keeping your counsel and your head down. It’s the most dangerous thing you could do.” Totalitarianism comes for everyone in the end, which is why the global technocratic coup must be put down before it is too late.