Covid Colonialism

Is it not strange that, in a time when masked or unseen forces appear to be attempting the enslavement of the world by means of a globalized neo-colonialism under cover of healthcare, the left has taken to the streets to protest the residual consequences of the last great wave of colonialism and its close relative, slavery? A case of misdirection, methinks.

What I want to draw attention to is that there are signs concerning this new cultural contagion that have not yet been diagnosed but which remind me of an existing condition, of which my country, Ireland, has had an intense historical experience. When I speak of a contagion, I do not mean Covid-19, nor the virus that allegedly causes it, SARS-CoV-2, but the psychosis it has unleashed upon the world, a cross between mass hypochondria, Emperor’s New Clothes and a live rehearsal of a script by Orwell and Huxley working together.

Many of the symptoms we observe are indicative of a condition that may have persisted undetected in the general culture of the West for a considerable time. They include the unquestioning obedience to unreasonable demands, the fervent mask-wearing, the widespread indifference to the loss of freedoms, the outright irrationality concerning the absence of real evidence, the snitching up of neighbors and so on. All these suggest the presence of pathological antibodies, which distinctly resemble the conditions to be seen in populations historically afflicted by the experience of colonization, on which, as an Irishman, I am something of an expert.

The great diagnostician of colonialism, the Caribbean-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, constructed a compact but comprehensive body of thought based on the idea of colonialism as a source of pathologies that infect history, wounding its human prey in manifold ways. At the core of Fanon’s thinking is the idea that man is easily persuaded to take leave of himself, his nature, personality and culture, and only with intense attention find his way back. This process of dislocation from the truth of the human can occur under the force of the will-to-power, greed, sadism and psychopathy, and, in the sufferer, from the experience of being looked upon or spoken to as though an animal or an object. Shame, guilt, self-hatred, all the pathologies colonialism inflicted, tended to ensure that its nature remains hidden, not least from those who endure it.

Coming from Ireland, which suffered such an experience for many centuries, I have noted in recent months both the intensification in my country of symptoms of self-abnegation and capitulation which have been detectable in diluted or camouflaged form all my life, and remarked on the extent to which these symptoms are present also in other societies, including, of all places, the United Kingdom.

What this may be telling us is that the psychic conditions diagnosed by Fanon from his work in Algeria in the late 1950s may now be present throughout the modern world, for reasons we only begin to comprehend: That something about the modern world — perhaps globalism, perhaps mass technologization, perhaps saturation propaganda and the resultant entrancement of whole populations, may be engendering something like the same pathologies inflicted by historical colonization in conditions of apparent freedom.

The Irish sense of Ireland’s place in the broader world has historically been unsettled and ambiguous. This is perhaps mostly because our principal ‘community’ — the relationship with our neighboring island — was also for us a tyranny. This ambiguity or ambivalence is epitomized by a phrase in common use in the national conversation of recent years, referencing our ‘shared history’ with Britain — colonialism as cooperation, as though our historical experience of occupation, cultural scorched earth and ethnic cleansing amounted to a series of minor misunderstandings,  the occasional drunken scrap, the odd prang at the traffic lights.

Don’t worry: I am not going to fly to London on Saturday to tear down the statue of Oliver Cromwell from outside the House of Commons in Westminster. I merely insist on describing truthfully our history — radically marked by the absence of sharing — not from an attitude of vengefulness, not in search of retribution, not to seek an impossible ‘justice’ — but because I want us all, Irish and British, to have good, i.e. well-functioning memories concerning very bad memories, very bad events. I insist on bringing it up, even now when the subject is as fraught as it is, because the historical phenomenon of colonialism, in particular its psychic effects on the colonized, may have much to tell us about where the globalist project is taking us now.

Nations and people colonized by great powers tend to become infantilized and culturally enfeebled. They lose their sense of internal equilibrium, and also the thread of their own true culture. They become imitators – sleek, master-imitators – but also demoralized, alienated, emasculated, deracinated, atomized, privatized. They surrender not merely their political independence but also existential independence. And the most pathetic thing of all is that, at the end of all this, they remain convinced at the deepest psychic level that their condition and situation are almost entirely their own fault, that the best efforts of their colonizers have failed to rescue them from their unworthiness. 

There is more than a hint of these tendencies in the recent ominous talk about individual responsibility for health, the designation of each and every human being as first and foremost a biohazard, and the insinuation of sickness as a kind of secular original sin. In both the distant past and the present moment our attention is drawn to something fundamental in ourselves, something requiring radical reform, something dark and dangerous and intolerable. In both phenomena, there is a kind of inversion of the presumption of innocence, originally concerning the right of admittance to civilization, and now focusing on what was once regarded as the ineluctable misfortune of ill-health.

Underpinning the historical mission of colonizing the ‘uncivilized’ world was an ideology of progress that insisted on there being just one way of advancing into the future. And this ‘One Best Way’ was sustained by the non-disprovable possibility that the claim might be true, which meant in turn that, despite all external appearances, the intentions, at least, of the colonists were often deemed virtuous, even — indeed especially — by their victims. But of course what we survey in such a history is external interference as a program not of gifting an endowment of civilization but of imposing the rule of one civilization upon another, supplanting the other’s culture with your own, subduing human beings for no better reason that they exist to be subdued. Here, in this 2020 moment, power over communications, propaganda, the capacity to impose a form of mass entrancement, means that the claims of the new occupiers of our hearts and minds are unassailable also.

Covid-19 is, I would say, best examined as an instrument of neo-colonialism, the extension of a failed and abandoned historical project to the whole world at the same time. If this seems an exaggeration, it is because of the success of the methodologies I refer to. The package of various forms of terror operates on the global population by the same logic by which famine was applied to Ireland up to the 19th century: as an accelerant on programs of control deemed to be too slow-moving on their own for maximum effectiveness. Covid may be a more subtle instrument, but it has the capacity to subdue human beings by making them feel themselves to be sub-human and unworthy. It has shown itself capable of achieving a mass capitulation that must surely have shocked even the planners and perpetrators. And let us not forget that by means of sterilization programs imposed by stealth via mandatory vaccinations, it has the capacity also to radically reduce the population over the longer run.

In our experience of colonialism, we Irish have been afforded a preview in live conditions of the workings of the world 2020, and may therefore have something to offer by simply recalling our own historical experience. For in a relationship that is capable of being taken as benign, we can observe the ways tyranny operates to avoid as much as possible getting its hands dirty, which is to say bloody. We also offer the possibility of observing in laboratory conditions where these new trends may be diving the world.

Ireland was never, legally speaking, a colony of England (we were, you might say, voluntarily incorporated), but was a de facto colony in all the usual ways: dispossession, genocide by famine, destruction of language, culture and religious expression. Once colonized, a people tends to enjoy servitude, and so becomes increasingly easy to enslave again and again. Quantities like self-hatred, alienation, demoralization, are handed on as though genetically. Hence, having escaped one nasty experience of subjugation, Ireland, on gaining nominal independence a century ago, began almost immediately to look around for another. In 1973, we found it, joining what was then the European Common Market, which shortly became the European Economic Community. 

In the past five decades, Ireland has not limited its self-abnegation to throwing itself at the feet of the European Union — which we did even when that body was openly robbing our resources, autonomy and sovereignty. The arrangement was, however, so beneficial for those calling themselves our leaders — because all they had to do was to obey their exterior masters, and this they were conditioned and happy to do — that, in time, for good measure, these ‘native settlers’ invited in innumerable other entities with similar or other ambitions for appropriating Ireland’s resources, sovereignty and goodwill. This has translated into our becoming, in modern times, a corporatocracy. Remember, here, that Benito Mussolini intriguingly declared corporatism a synonym for fascism.

Among our new masters, then, are elements of Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Data — but also of course other transnational entities like the UN and the WHO, the World Bank and the IMF. For good measure, we also reached out and offered slices of ourselves to Big Gay, the Climate Change industry, Islamic Sharia, the Chinese Communist Party and, to assist us in quelling any dissent from these relationships, Antifa and the like, who stand by to bully into silence anyone seeking to dissent from all this. Practically speaking, these relationships arose largely by dint of Ireland’s rock bottom corporation tax rates, as a result of which — and for no other reason — Dublin hosts the European headquarters of sundry of global corporations.

These relationships are predicated on assisting our ruling class with implementing over the heads of the Irish people the only model of functionality they are capable of implementing. One of the characteristics of the situation I describe — I mean the journey of a post-colonial country from subjugation to superficial freedom and back again, an inevitable trajectory in the absence of a thorough renewal of the national psyche — is that it throws up, in place of leaders, administrative functionaries who carry out the will of external agencies seeking to plunder the resources of the confused and increasingly corrupted post-colonial statelet. 

Today, what is called the ‘Irish’ economy is no such thing. We live off the crumbs of our cuckoo-in-the-next economy of transnational tax-avoiding corporations. Our principal industry is fiscal prostitution.

One of the things that happens when a post-colonial country is subjected to such invasion is that its system of governance abandons democracy in all but name — in the sense that democracy implies catering primarily for the needs of citizens. The question of national survival ceases to relate to the people, and becomes solely a matter of survival of the elites.

Post-colonial nations tend towards forms of corruption that benefit external predators. Because the colonial state has been by definition extrinsic, colonized peoples came to see government as an extraneous phenomenon. This is a habit imposed by a provincialism which understands power as deriving solely from a distant metropole, to which all resources are promised, destined and due. Government is therefore something arbitrary and alienating.

The American anthropologist Rebecca Hardin has written about the importance in formerly colonized societies in Africa of ‘concessions’ — formal legal arrangements by which foreign actors are enabled to manage and exploit land or other natural resources, this being the sole method by which a post-colonial elite can continue to function in conditions where total self-realization has not been achieved. The inability of the indigenous elite to exploit their own country’s resources directly renders them open to doing deals with outsiders. This creates a false notion of self-sufficiency, when in reality independence is siphoned off in parallel with the resources being plundered. An example is the way Ireland, now apparently one of the leading producers of pharmaceuticals in the world, first attracted this type of industry back in the 1970s: by selling off its then virgin landscape, which the prospective renters were told had an almost unlimited ‘absorption capacity’ to soak up pollution.

In his recent book on mass migration into Europe, The Scramble for Europe, Stephen Smith described this phenomenon in operation in Africa, but his words are a precise description also of modern Ireland.

‘What is fascinating in this political alchemy is that it transmutes incapacity into profits, or base metal into gold: the less the state can act on its own, the more it has to offer to external partners.’

But the resources we trade are not merely mineral or material: they are also cultural, existential, psychic, metaphysical. The extent of what the Irish political class sells off our country is imaginative indeed; they trade, in effect, the very essence of Ireland: its resources, yes, but also its values, culture, uniqueness, weather, laws, Constitution, natural rights, landscape, particularities, citizens’ rights, citizenship, passports. The stealth insurgency over the past two decades of hundreds of thousands of migrants, many of them masquerading as asylum seekers and refugees, is yet another example of such concession-granting: the transnational tech and chemical corporations, from which the Irish political class obtains its lifeline trickle of financial run-off, need low-cost labor to ensure its business models operate to maximum efficiency.  Many of these companies — which were supposed to hire Irish workers —are now overwhelmingly staffed by imported labor.

The consequences seep deep into our culture. When, at the behest of our presumptuous tenants, we hold a referendum to dismantle the institution of marriage so that gays can claim ‘equality’, it is because a partnership of Big Tech and Big Gay has ordered it so. But each instance of ‘progressiveness’ is invariably a further imposition, calculated to diminish long-standing aspects of the host culture, now to be regarded as suspect, outmoded, backward-looking, dangerous, sectarian, even racist. Soft concepts of sinister ideological realities are employed to conceal that what is being promoted by way of ‘diversity’, ‘inclusivity’ and ‘progress’ is inevitably being promoted at the expense of existing, established and well-cherished values that are downgraded and devalued in inverse proportion to the extent to which the new, ‘positive’ values are valorized. As all this escalated over the past two decades, we Irish were told to shut up and simply ‘enjoy’ that we were now among the Most Liberal Countries in the World. 

And, of course, by the same token, when we declare a Covid lockdown, it is because the WHO and Big Pharma decree this essential for the business model they share an interest in. Each step of the way involves a dismantling and discarding of existing structures. We Irish have long been used to ‘new normal’. For the most part, however, and ironically, observation of all this must in general be conducted by outsiders, since it is another symptom of the colonial experience that its objects are rarely able to recognize the symptoms in themselves.

I need hardly spell out that these are ideal conditions for the corporatocracy towards which the world is currently being nudged. For what we have been experiencing, especially in the past six months, is the introduction by stealth and false-pretenses of a new form of colonialism,

In the modern world, almost all losses of autonomy, sovereignty and liberty arise not from invasion or violent insurgency but from attacks on the very spirit of a people. As a result of the accelerating reach of Big Tech and Big Data, almost everyone, every mind, every heart — everywhere — is occupied now. And this makes the world increasingly amenable to being subjugated, plundered and ethnically cleansed.

That world had been but vaguely aware that, in formerly colonized nations, there were acute cultural pathologies – extreme suggestibility, docility, the absence of a collective sense of proprietorship necessary to truly functioning cultures, societies and economies. But these conditions may now be quasi-universal, revealing a world ripe for exploitation by forces moving under cover of soft concepts like ‘caring’, ‘community’ and ‘the common good’.

Covid colonialism is Go!