They thought they had everything under control. They owned everything, they made the rules, they decided what we could see and hear, they controlled the money, they controlled the jobs, they even controlled the weather. They were well on their way to gaining full control of our bodies, minds and even our spirits. BUT, somehow, they suddenly are losing control! Unbelievable.
That is the power of TRUTH. I thank God every day for every person who is standing up and speaking the TRUTH in a world that loves the lie and hates the TRUTH. It takes a lot of guts/courage/fortitude but most of all FAITH to stand. I am blessed to see every day, more and more people sharing the TRUTH that they have found.
The elite love to call it “Fake News” or “disinformation” because it goes against their agenda and/or reveals their secrets. They want the masses to believe the lie that they are working to make your world better. lol. They are not interested in you at all. Everything they do is for themselves.
I wanted to share this post with you today so that you could be encouraged. Do not be afraid to speak the TRUTH. You are not alone. The more people who find the TRUTH and stand up, the more the lies of the ELITE and the Spiritual forces they serve are defeated.
It is a SPIRITUL BATTLE! OUR WEAPONS are not carnal, but they are MIGHTY TRHOUGH GOD, for the pulling down of STRONGHOLDS!!
They can call out their Fact Checkers and raise up their DeBunkers and their Pre-Bunkers. They can use all their technology and their fear tactics, but the CANNOT STOP THE TRUTH!!
TRUTH IS THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS, IT IS THE ONLY THING THAT WILL STAND!!
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Revolting times: Our ruling class needs to pay heed to its fed-up subjects now
British life today has startling parallels with 1381 in the days leading up to the Peasants’ Revolt, argues the author of a new book on the bloody rebellion
Power to the people: John Balle is credited as being the architect of the uprising in 1381
If that sounds like an accurate account of Britain today then you might be surprised to learn that it is also a description of England in the summer of 1381, an incredibly significant moment in history when the entire fabric of society was shaken to its foundations by the eruption of the first large-scale popular rebellion that the country had ever seen.
Thousands of ordinary men and women across the English shires, from Bridgwater in the South-west to Scarborough in the North-east, attacked corrupt local officials, burned government records and declared themselves free of the chains of serfdom that bound them. The men of Essex and Kent went further, marching on the capital to confront the King himself. With the aid of Londoners, they torched some of the city’s most important buildings, executed the most senior ministers of the Crown and massacred the immigrants that they blamed for their own economic woes.
This was the so-called Peasants’ Revolt, a misnomer if ever there was one, because the rebels were not simply a Monty-Python-esque mob of agricultural labourers waving pitchforks but included wealthy farmers and burgesses, gentlemen and even former members of parliament. That men of such standing were driven to armed rebellion at all says a great deal about their frustration at the inability to make themselves heard, and their problems understood, by those in authority. For a decade, they had been subjected to heavy annual taxation (including the notorious poll taxes) to pay for military campaigns in France which achieved nothing. English armies were unable to make any gains on the ground because they were hampered by treacherous allies, inadequate equipment and appallingly high casualty rates – problems that are distressingly familiar to our troops still fighting unpopular foreign wars more than 600 years later. Worse still, they proved incapable of preventing the French from making frequent and often catastrophic attacks on English shipping and coastal towns, burning, plundering and seizing hostages as they did so.
Rising popular anger at the government’s abject and expensive failure to protect its people from foreign attack was fuelled by hatred of the King’s uncle, John of Gaunt. Today’s coalition government claims the imperative to cut public spending and enforces austerity measures that frequently seem only to target ordinary people, and yet seems to find money from the public purse to fund its own grandiose and expensive pet projects, such as HS2, without an electoral mandate to do so. John of Gaunt similarly had no scruples about diverting public money raised for the realm’s defence to fund his own political and military ambitions on the world stage.
Having married the daughter of the deposed King of Castile, Gaunt was determined to win the Castilian crown for himself, even if he had to use English arms, men and money to do so. To ordinary people, it seemed that corruption was endemic. If the wealthiest and most powerful man in the kingdom felt entitled to abuse his position for his own ends, then it was not surprising that so many others in authority also had their noses in the trough: sheriffs and tax-collectors who extorted more than their due in order to line their own pockets; stewards of vast private estates, many of them held by the church, who coerced tenants into performing physical labour for their landlords or profiteered from fining them for alleged offences; Justices of the Peace who accepted bribes and brutally enforced against others the Statute of Labourers, which fixed wages at uneconomic rates more than 30 years out of date, but themselves ignored its provisions with impunity.
In pictures: Previous public sector protests against pay and working conditions
Again, there are obvious parallels with our own times, both in the recent scandal of MPs exploiting their expenses to make indefensible claims (duck houses and pornographic videos inevitably spring to mind) and in the current outrageous situation where poorly paid yet indispensible public servants, including midwives and nurses, are denied a one per cent increase in wages by a Government whose MPs are about to receive a 10 per cent increase for doing less work than their predecessors.
What made the situation in 1381 even more toxic was the fact that there was no one to turn to for redress. The King, Richard II, was a boy and ultimate power lay in the hands of his uncles and his ministers, the very people whom the public held responsible for government incompetence and corruption. Parliament, which should have been the obvious mouthpiece for popular discontent, was stuffed to the gills with those who benefited from the system: not just the great land owners of the House of Lords but the gentry and merchants of the House of Commons, who were exploiting their roles as sheriffs, stewards and Justices of the Peace in the shires and county towns, for their own personal gain.
It was hardly surprising that there was a rising sense of popular anger and frustration which radical preachers were able to tap into and feed. What they all had in common was the fundamentalist Christian belief that God had created all men equal: it followed that all the bonds of lordship upon which society was built had no scriptural authority and were therefore illegitimate. This argument was most powerfully articulated in the famous lines attributed to John Balle: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” The natural corollary of such ideas was that lordship in all its forms could – and should – be swept away. Here, too, we can draw comparisons with today. Islamic fundamentalists, from those dubbed “preachers of hate” by the popular press to the fanatics who fight in the ranks of Isis, have a similarly simplistic and reductive agenda: they argue that Western society is degenerate and morally corrupt so it should be destroyed and a new universal caliphate, based on the purest forms of sharia, be erected in its place.
Balle is generally depicted as the great architect of the revolt in 1381, the man of ideas and principles who gave the people their voice and the rebellion its agenda. Like Alex Salmond in Scotland and Nigel Farage in England, he was a demagogue who portrayed himself as a man of the people and powerfully articulated the sense of popular disconnect with the Westminster elite of his day. It is surprising, therefore, that we know so little about him – and almost all that we think we know is wrong. We do not know when or where he was born, or became a priest. We know that he was a former chaplain who had been thrown out of the church in 1364 for preaching “articles contrary to the faith” but he had not been silenced, taking his message to the people by wandering from place to place and sermonising in churchyards and at market crosses. In this, he was like most unlicensed preachers of the time, including the friars, who attacked the worldly wealth and moral corruption of the established church while preaching and practising apostolic poverty and simplicity of life themselves.
What Balle is best remembered for today is his famous sermon at Blackheath, based on the Adam and Eve adage, but this is almost certainly a fiction created by Thomas Walsingham, a hostile monastic chronicler determined to blame heresy for causing the revolt. By quoting extensively from the supposed sermon, and having Balle preach it at Blackheath, where the assembled rebels were about to invade London and murder the head of the church in England, Walsingham placed the excommunicate chaplain at the spiritual and physical heart of a rebellion that threatened to overthrow both church and state. Even if Balle’s personal role has been deliberately exaggerated by the Establishment to suit the post-revolt narrative, it was deeply significant in at least two respects: almost all the surviving evidence places him in Essex, at the heart of the region where the revolt began, and, in contravention of usual church practice, he preached – and wrote – in English, the language of the common people.
Balle, and others like him, articulated the grievances of the population at large and, in their fundamentalist ideology, offered a vision of an alternative society founded on purely religious principles. In doing so, they stirred up a generation of unlikely converts to their cause – not just the poor, marginalised and uneducated who were always easily incited to rebel, but also the wealthy and literate, many of them in positions of trust and authority, who felt both financially exploited and politically ignored by the Establishment.
These unnatural rebels had no other way of making their voices heard and their legitimate concerns addressed. They were therefore prepared to join an armed rebellion against the state, even if the vast majority of them had little or no sympathy with its more radical elements. As many Ukip supporters today have also discovered, joining a more extreme political party to register a protest against the mainstream parties can also mean having to put up with some uncomfortable bedfellows, from out-and-out racists to those who believe that a woman’s place is only in the kitchen. But, just as in 1381, these protest voters feel that this is what they must do to achieve change.
It is here, I think, that we can learn lessons for today. One might question how a popular revolt that was quickly crushed and achieved none of its stated aims can teach anything to those living more than 600 years later. Our world would be unrecognisable to our medieval ancestors, not just in its technology and material condition, but in its forms of society. We proudly claim to be democratic and liberal. We boast that wealth, social background and power are immaterial because we are all equal under the law and no one can be discriminated against because of age, gender or religion.
And yet, just as in 1381, there is a simmering discontent throughout Britain which is not purely the result of our economic woes, though low wages and unemployment are a festering sore. There is a sense of disconnection with the political Establishment, fostered by a feeling that we, the ordinary people, especially those living outside London, are not being heard by those who are supposed to represent us in Parliament.
Vainglorious Prime Ministers such as Tony Blair and David Cameron appear interested only in posturing on the world stage and, regardless of the cost in lives and to our purses, have committed us to foreign wars we cannot win. Westminster politicians of all parties appear to feel entitled rather than obligated: the party whip prevails over loyalty to the views of constituents and it is only powerful big businesses that seem to have the ear of the Government.
All this helps to explain why Farage’s Ukip party is storming its way up the polls, how Salmond came so close to winning the referendum for an independent Scotland and what the appeal is of Islamist extremists such as Abu Hamza and Anjem Choudary. The Establishment might choose to dismiss and pour scorn on such radicals, but they are Balle’s successors and, rightly or wrongly, they articulate the disenfranchisement that many people feel in Britain today.
We have to learn the lessons of the past. If those who are supposed to represent and govern us don’t, or won’t, listen, then ultimately they will be held to account – but preferably at the next election rather than in a second Peasants’ Revolt.
© Juliet Barker, October 2014
England, Arise: The People, the King and the Great Revolt of 1381, by Juliet Barker (Little, Brown, £25), is out now
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The Peasants’ Revolt—when people fought corruption
Wat Tyler was murdered for leading the peasants (Pic: Flickr/ British Library)
Deadly illness ravaged the world, and in the teeth of an economic crisis a small corrupt elite enriched itself above everyone else, backed by authoritarian laws.
It could only lead to one thing—the vengeful killing of people in charge by a giant, angry mob.
Perhaps not entirely like today then. But the events of the Peasants’ Revolt, some 640 years ago this month, shouldn’t be treated as simply a far off bit of history.
It’s true that society was very different. Capitalism didn’t yet exist. But there was a rich elite who lived off the labour of the masses of very poor people below them.
Most people lived in self‑contained towns or villages, where the local lord owned the land and charged the peasants rent to work on it. Peasants rarely had a choice in the matter.
If they were serfs, or “villeins,” they were legally tied to the land, which the lord owned. Even their daughters couldn’t marry without the lord’s permission.
And if a peasant died, the lord could claim their best animal as compensation for the rent they would have paid.
Church
On top of that, every peasant had to pay rent to the church—about ten percent of all their income—plus “tithes” of certain produce. The church itself was a big landowner, its clergy took up positions in wealthy estates and had roles in writing and implementing laws.
Through its real control of people’s lives, the church taught that this rigid hierarchy was justified by the sins of the peasants’ biblical ancestors.
So most peasant families lived on the edge of hunger, while a landowning and clerical elite grew corrupt and wealthy off the back of their work.
The bubonic plague tore across England in 1348 and wiped out at least a third of the population, mostly among the peasants.
One flipside of this was that there were far fewer people to do the work on the land. Suddenly peasants could start making demands of the lords, such as wages or more freedoms.
And if the lord refused, they could even break the law and flee, knowing they’d find another lord to hire them.
Amid these economic challenges to the rule of the lords and the king, there could be political challenges too.
New, maverick priests—often expelled from the church—travelled between towns and villages preaching a message that struck at the heart of the status quo. They rejected the very idea that God had chosen favourites to rule.
They said the system was made by people and could be changed by people.
Some of them carried an even more radical message. John Ball, famous as one of the leaders of the revolt, preached equality.
So in the years before the Revolt, England’s rulers passed a series of laws designed to keep the peasants in their place. One of them punished preachers for spreading “false news.” “Fake News” sound familiar? Then, just as now, the ones in control get to determine what “news” you hear. Most often they are spouting propaganda that supports their agenda, and anything that runs contrary to their agenda is deemed “FAKE NEWS”.
There was also a law that banned them from demanding higher wages. Sound familiar? Raises in pay which used to be commonplace, have become a faint rumor from the past. Meanwhile, the rich keep getting richer, taking bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, and raising the cost of everything.
After this came laws that said if a peasant left for work in another town or village they could be branded with the letter “F” for “falsity” on their forehead.
Then came the poll tax—and the start of the revolt.
King Richard II’s many wars in France were going badly, and were expensive. A law was introduced that said every person had to pay a shilling—about a month’s wages—in tax.
It would be collected by bailiffs and thugs. Peasants became adept at dodging the tax collectors—and then resisting them.
In Spring 1381, a tax collector rode with soldiers into the village of Fobbing, in Essex. Twenty villagers with longbows met him and forced him to turn back.
He returned with an even bigger gang on 2 June. This time 100 villagers with longbows grabbed him, tied him backwards to his horse, and sent him out again.
He was followed by the severed heads of two jurors who had promised to help him find the villagers guilty.
That same day bailiffs arrived to collect tax in Dartford, Kent. In the home of one family, they grabbed a young girl to “examine” her genitals to “prove” she was over 14.
Her father John Tyler smashed the tax collectors’ head with a staff. According to one account, “The brains flew out of his head, wherethrough great noise arose in the streets and the poor people, being glad, everyone prepared to support the said John Tyler.”
The collectors were driven out.
‘Kill all the Gentlemen’—tales of rural revolts
Resistance
These acts of resistance were the start of the revolt—and there are signs of some organisation, coordination and preparation.
In Essex and Kent the peasants sent word to neighbouring villages calling for help to fight the collectors, and quickly raised armies.
Villages across the two counties did the same. They all marched to Maidstone where the radical preacher John Ball was in prison and fought to free him.
Ball, who had spent years agitating across south east England, sent letters out everywhere with the message, “Now it is time.”
The people who got these messages knew what they meant and raised armies of their own, all to march on London.
At Maidstone they also elected a leader, Wat Tyler, an ordinary man, to lead them.
They had clear targets and organisation. Two peasant armies of tens of thousands, one from Essex and one from Kent, marched into London together from north and south of the Thames.
Villages and towns marched through the streets in regiments.
Rather than aimless rioting and destruction, they targeted the houses and palaces of the lords, as well as lawyers’ offices, burning the legal documents that kept them in servitude.
Wat Tyler banned looting—everything the rich owned must be destroyed. Two peasants who defied this were among some of the only people killed in the uprising.
Others they killed were some of the most important people in England—including treasurer Robert Hales, responsible for the tax, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in charge of the law.
Both were hiding in the Tower of London. Tyler’s army stormed the tower, grabbed them, cut off their heads and nailed them to London Bridge.
The peasants were in control of London. The king had to meet with Tyler just outside east London. He spent the whole day signing declarations granting freedom to serfs and peasants.
Tyler then demanded another meeting in Smithfield, in today’s City of London, where he demanded even more radical measures.
“No lord shall exercise lordship over the Commons.” And, “The property and the goods of the holy church should be taken and divided according to the needs of the people.”
That Tyler, an ordinary person, was now in a position to meet and demand this of the king was astonishing. At this point he felt confident enough to meet the king almost alone and armed with just a dagger.
The king’s men murdered him. Then the king himself went to the peasant armies to tell them Tyler’s death was a mistake, but that he would keep his promises. They believed him and went home.
It might seem strange that they could trust the king so easily.
But they had already forced him to agree to their most outlandish demands.
More fatally, they still had some faith in the king. They hated his advisers, but the king’s rule was the foundation of how society worked.
The revolt itself was cast as an attempt to rid the king of the corrupt advisers and priests. The peasants thought they could use the king to bring in the changes they wanted with the legitimacy and authority of the crown.
Corrupt
If that seems naive, think how people can both hate and trust their bosses and governments today. Or how in the Arab revolutions ten years ago people overthrew dictators but left corrupt politicians and generals in their place.
It’s not stupidity to not immediately see the need to overthrow the whole basis of the only society you’ve ever known.
The king followed up his betrayal with brutal repression. Thousands of peasants were killed after returning to their villages.
Ball was caught, hanged until he was nearly dead, disembowelled and dismembered so his body parts could be sent all over England as a warning.
But the poll tax was gone. And 50 years later, villeinage was abolished.
So there are some lessons. One—don’t trust those at the top.
Two—revolts take time to organise. Then they can explode.
Three—when they do, they can make those at the top, who are seemingly untouchable, suddenly weak. And it’s always worth it.
Maybe violent retribution does await our corrupt rulers after all.
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The 2023 World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos started five days ago amid an air of pessimism.
Months beforehand, 73% of business leaders surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers had predicted a decline in global growth in the coming year, with inflation, volatility and geopolitical conflict topping the risk list. It is hardly a surprising figure given 2022 ended with global stocks having fallen by nearly 20%, with market losses of $30 trillion, the worst since 2008.
Despite that grim economic forecast, the first three days in Davos were taken up with discussions on EU/US trade issues and then Ukraine, with German chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Zelenskyy the leading speakers.
If global heating and climate breakdown have figured little at Davos, then the same applies to Guterres’s other concern: systemic global inequalities.
In the four-month period from April to July 2020, as lockdowns took hold,the world’s 2,189 dollar billionaires increased their wealth by a staggering 27.5%, a remarkable example of ‘disaster capitalism’ at work.
This year, Oxfam once again timed its annual report on wealth distribution to coincide with the start of WEF, and presented yet more evidence of a system failing the majority of the world’s people. It reported that since January 2020, 63% of all the new wealth generated – some $26trn – went to the richest 1%. It also noted that for the first time in a quarter of a century, the rise in extreme wealth was being matched by a rise in extreme povertyand called for wealth taxes to be levied on the world’s super-rich.
This is hardly likely to happen on any scale, so the prospect of a bitterly divided and environmentally limited world looms.As the economic geographer, Edwin Brooks, put it over half a century ago, the risk is of “a crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth, buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate people in the global ghettoes”. SOURCE
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“A Revolution Against The Elites!” – WEF’s Klaus Schwab Openly Worries
1.28M subscribers
Elites Gather in Davos; Some Worry About Plunging Public Trust
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Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Chairman and founder speaks during the Crystal Awards ceremony of the annual meeting of the Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 16, 2017.
The founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos says it is time to favor “humanization” over “robotization and globalization.” Klaus Schwab spoke Monday as political, economic, and social leaders gathered in the Swiss resort town of Davos for an annual discussion of economic and other problems.
In remarks to royalty, prime ministers, CEOs, and other elites, Schwab said it is time to reinvigorate the global economy, create jobs, and recreate confidence in the future. He said the world is overwhelmed by cynicism and pessimism, and called on members to repair deficiencies in capitalism and restore the social compact.
Angry, disillusioned voters recently surprised elites by moving Britain out of the European Union and electing political outsider Donald Trump to be President of the United States.
Those votes come at the same time Schwab said the world is undergoing extraordinary transformations of business, economies, society, and politics.
A global survey by the Edelman public relations firm, shows “the largest-ever” drop in trust of government, business, media, and NGOs. The company published its findings in advance of the gathering of Davos.
The study shows more than half of survey respondents think the current overall system is unfair and offers little hope for the future. Only about one in seven people said the system is working for them.
A separate survey of CEOs by a consulting company shows a slight majority plan to hire more people. The Price Waterhouse Coopers study, published just before Davos, also shows majorities of CEOs are worried about economic uncertainty, regulation, and finding enough workers with modern skills. Many also worried that protectionism could hurt international trade.
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Elites in Davos strategize on how to fight ‘right-wing’ groups: ‘Hit back’
One panelist said NGOs are ‘terrible at taking a punch’ from the right wing
Fighting back against the “right wing” and the “disinformation” it spreads is a critical step for restoring trust in nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that are working with governments and other organizations on projects aimed at “improving the state of the world,” according to participants on a panel Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
In a discussion about “disrupting distrust,” Richard Edelman, CEO of the global communications firm Edelman, said one of the “sadnesses” he’s experienced over the last few years has been the “deterioration of trust” in NGOs. He said companies are now trusted more than NGOs in dealing with civil society issues, and he blamed this change on “right-wing groups.”
“My hypothesis on that is right-wing groups have done a really good job of disenfranchising NGOs,” he said. “They’ve challenged the funding sources. They’ve associated you with Bill Gates and George Soros. They’ve said that you’re world people, as opposed to actually what you are, which is local.”
President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen speaks as World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab listens during a session of the WEF in Davos, Jan. 17, 2023. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
Edelman said issues like how to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and racial equity are all suffering because of reduced trust in the NGOs. He also suggested one way to regain that trust is for NGOs to fight back against these right-wing groups.
“You guys are great at punching but terrible at taking a punch,” he said. “You have to learn to do two things. One is preempt. When they’re going to punch you, you gotta know they’re gonna punch you and say, ‘Why are they punching us?’ and … we call it pre-bunking.
OH HOW THEY HATE FOR TRUTH TO BE SPREAD. It is not enough that they control the media and the money. They have their “DEBUNKERS” and “FACT CHECKERS” out in force all the time doing their best to squelch the truth. Now they want to stop it before it even gets a chance to heard!! That just goes to show you how evil these people are. IF they were above board and truly working to improve our world, they would feel no threat from what they call “disinformation”.
ECO GROUP SLAMS DAVOS SUMMIT AS GLOBAL ELITES ARRIVE IN PRIVATE JETS TO TALK CLIMATE POLICY
“The other is when they hit you and they’re inaccurate, hit back. Don’t take it,” he added. So, most of the time, those crazy ‘right wingers’ are accurate… LOL If you let these guys talk enough, their own mouths give them away.
Edelman and other panelists acknowledged that people opposed to environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals in the private sector are also forcing companies to reassess how to talk about those goals. When a representative of the Anti-Defamation League said companies are starting to shy away from the explicit use of “ESG” as a corporate goal, Edelman encouraged companies to hold firm.
“Business needs to stand its ground,” he said. But he also said companies should not lose sight of the fact that they’re in business to make money and should make sure ESG goals don’t force them down a path of “chasing some woke illusion.”
Panelist Salah Goss, senior vice president at Mastercard for social impact, said her company still has a “commitment” to ESG goals but indicated there are other ways to discuss those goals. She said her company talks about “people, prosperity, planet.” Doublespeak. They are practicing deceit, using phraseology to make their evil plans sound more palatable. Occulting their true intentions.
Another panelist, United Way Worldwide President Angela Williams, said policymakers need to find more approachable ways to present their ideas. As one example, she said the prospect of banning gas stoves can be a difficult subject for many poor Americans and needs to be couched the right way.
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM CHAIR KLAUS SCHWAB DECLARES ON CHINESE STATE TV: ‘CHINA IS A MODEL FOR MANY NATIONS‘
“If you go to … a Black woman in the U.S. and tell us we can’t use a gas stove any more because of the emissions, and we need to switch to electric, our comment is, ‘Our food’s not going to taste the same,’” she said, adding that another question is how people will be able to afford an electric stove. “So where’s the credit facility that allows me to do this?”
The panel’s moderator, New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, said another issue related to trust is the “disinformation” seen on social media sites, saying there are lingering questions about the extent to which Big Tech companies can remove this content.
“I think that there are true questions around how the technology platforms disseminate information, particularly disinformation, and they see… significant challenges when it comes to content moderation and how to combat the disinformation online,” she said.
“I think the first thing… that business needs to do is deprive platforms that spread disinformation of oxygen,” he said. “Stop advertising. Pull your promotion money.” Take a lesson here folks. YOU need to hit them where it hurts. These globalists and the companies they are connected with will have to respond when you stop giving them your hard earned money.
Edelman said more needs to be done here, as the boycott of Twitter has had just a “modest impact,” while attempts to boycott Facebook have “failed.”
This panel was just one of several that were convened on Tuesday. Later in the day, another discussion on the “clear and present danger of disinformation” was held, moderated by former CNN host Brian Stelter.
NYT: Davos Elite Fret About Inequality Over Vintage Wine and Canapés
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Peter S. Goodman writes in the New York Times that the Davos elite are well aware of the “populist fury” fueled by working-class people around the world who have borne the brunt of globalist economic policies.
Goodman notes, “If the world is indeed in the throes of a populist insurrection, the pitchforks could do worse than to point here. The Davos elites have enjoyed outsize influence over economic policies in recent decades as a growing share of wealth has, perhaps not coincidentally, landed in the coffers of people with a need for bank accounts in the British Virgin Islands, while poor and middle-class households have seen their earnings stagnate and decline.”
From the New York Times:
You have perhaps noticed that in many countries, history-altering numbers of people have grown enraged at the economic elite and their tendency to hog the spoils of globalization. This wave of anger has delivered Donald J. Trump to the White House, sent Britain toward the exit of the European Union, and threatened the future of global trade.
The people gathered here this week in the Swiss Alps for the annual World Economic Forum have noticed this, too. They are the elite — heads of state, billionaire hedge fund managers, technology executives.
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We Are Witnessing the Revolt of the Elites
The revolt of the new elites is against democracy, but the twist is that this revolt is undertaken in the name of the people.
(L-R) Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Photo: Reuters
22/APR/2020
José Ortega y Gasset is a largely forgotten 20th century thinker, an unconventional Spanish philosopher whose most important social science work, The Revolt of the Masses, reflected his fears about a world in which liberal individuals were disappearing and the “mass man” was emerging.
Ortega’s idea of the mass man was not a picture of the poor, the destitute or the proletarian multitude but of a mass of average men, who were rendered similar by their tastes, dispositions and values, rather than by their dispossession. In this way, Ortega was closer to the later American critics of the men “in the grey flannel suit” than to the Frankfurt School critics of mass society. Still, Ortega was an early voice in seeing the masses, of whatever kind, as revolting against the liberal ideals of the 19th century.
I return to Ortega now because I think the 20th century has exhausted the major forms of mass revolt and that we have entered a new epoch which is characterised by the “revolt of the elites”. These revolting elites are those who support, surround, promote and flatter the new autocracies of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban and many others who have created what could be called ‘populism from above’ – where the people are electoral tools for a mass exit from democracy.
Why call this behaviour of the new autocratic elites a “revolt” rather than simply predatory capitalism, cronyism, neoliberalism in its latest guise, disaster capitalism, all of which are available terms? Who are these new elites and what are they revolting against?
First, they are revolting against all the other elites whom they despise, hate and fear: liberal elites, media elites, secular elites, cosmopolitan elites, “Harvard” elites, WASP elites, older economic elites, intellectuals, artists and academics (these categories are a pool, from which different national populists choose the appropriate national and cultural terms). So, this is an elite which disguises its own elitism in a discourse of anti-elitism.
Second, this revolt is against all those who are believed to have betrayed the real elites and captured power illegitimately: blacks in the US, Muslims and secularists in India, leftists and LGBT people in Brazil, dissenters, NGOs and journalists in Russia, religious, cultural and economic minorities in Turkey, immigrants, workers and trade unionists in the United Kingdom. This is a revolt by those who think they are true elites against those they consider usurpers or false elites.
Third, the revolt of these new elites is against the chains that have bound them in the epoch of liberal democracy. They hate liberty, equality and fraternity, except for themselves. They hate checks and balances, which they view as illegitimate restrictions on their freedom to act without restraint. They hate regulations of any type, especially of corporate privileges, which they see as a conspiracy against capitalism which they view as their private jurisdiction. And above all, they hate deliberation and procedural rationality, since they involve listening, patience and adherence to collective rationalities. They also do not believe in the separation of powers, except when their friends control the legislature and the judiciary.
What this means, most simply, is that the revolt of the new elites is against democracy, but the twist is that this revolt is undertaken in the name of the people. In other words, the modern idea of the people has been completely split from the idea of demos and democracy. This is a revolt – in the sense that uprisings to seize power are always revolts – but not a revolution, intended to change something in the fundamental order of polity or economy. This revolt is the effort by one elite to replace another.
All this might seem overly general and historically familiar if we do not ask a few sociological questions. What is the nature of this new elite? Who defines its conditions of entry? Who speaks for it? What are its social roots? These questions quickly bring us to specific societies and states.
In the case of the United States, the elite that Trump speaks for and to come from backgrounds like his: they are not over-educated, they are mobile entrepreneurs or politicians, they are the rulers of the Republican Senate, the Republican side of the House, and Tea Party jetsam and flotsam at every level of politics. In addition, they include the more megalomaniac or neo-fascist CEOs (including Silicon Valley icons like Peter Thiel), the vast majority of the television and radio media, and the extensive network of racist and greedy evangelical pastors, churches and donors. Add to this the careerist hacks in the major right-wing think-tanks.
At the very core of this network of elites without any obvious cultural roots, status or history are secret networks such as those in the Federalist Society, with ties to such transnational groups as Opus Dei. These are networks of opportunism, greed and profiteering which have no other traditional ties or values.
A similar picture could be painted of the elites of the current regime in India, which is openly contemptuous of every democratic institution except elections. It is composed of half-educated economists, career thugs, kleptocratic business tycoons that work through monopoly, lobbying and straightforward corruption, and the newly shameless class of criminal politicians and legislators. The revolt of this elite is against every person or group associated with Nehruvian socialism, secularism and pluralism.
It is an elite that believes that the Hindu Right (their own club) are the sleeper-saviours of Indian history, waking up after the long slumber of Mughal, British and Congress rule, an alliance forged in the crucible of anti-Muslim ideologies, policies and pogroms. There is no real class unity for this revolting elite, except for their hold on the means of impunity, political, social and economic. This is an elite of opportunism, lubricated by contempt for participatory institutions of every type.
Although I do not know enough about the social origins and pet peeves of Erdogan’s crew, or Putin’s, or Bolsonaro’s, or Duterte’s, I am prepared to speculate that each of these revolting elites has a similar profile: resentment of traditional cultural and social elites, contempt for liberal proceduralism, hatred of intellectuals, academics, artists, activists, socialists, feminists, admiration for capitalism so long as it regulated only in their favour, and a hatred of democracy matched by their cultish pursuit of the voter (rather than the people).
Orban has just declared his eternal and absolute power in Hungary, Modi has more or less declared himself above the constitution of India, has made common and public cause with Bolsonaro, Trump and Netanyahu, and has used the COVID-19 crisis to extend to all of India the policies of curfew, police beatings, false imprisonments and generalised repression tested in Kashmir. In all these moves, these leaders rely on a network of sympathisers and collaborators who believe that they will thrive if they comply with the Supreme Leader.
Thus, if the elites who characterise many of the world’s new populist autocracies are “populists from above” elites revolting against previous elites, revolted by liberal democracy, how do we account for their followers, their voters, and their base, the “people” in whose name and with whose burning consent they are undoing many democratic structures, values and traditions?
There are some familiar answers to this most troubling question. One is that these autocrats understand and use the instruments of affect (sentiments of love, loss, sacrifice, hate, anger) whereas their opponents are adrift in a sea of quasi-academic arguments about concepts, norms and logic, which have lost all popular purchase. The second is that there is something about the global rise of technologies of aspiration (advertising, consumer goods, celebrity cults, corporate windfalls) that has made the poor and subaltern classes impatient with the slowness of liberal deliberative processes. They want prosperity and dignity now, and these leaders promise it to them.
Another argument is that the lower classes are so fed up with the exclusion, impoverishment and humiliation that they identify with their predatory leaders (who simply grab what they want) that they are more than ever susceptible to the distractions of ethnophobia (against Muslims, refugees, Chinese, Gypsies, Jews, migrants, and so on). All these arguments make some sense in some national contexts.
But I suggest that the biggest insight that Ortega y Gasset offers is to help us to see that we are in the beginnings of an epoch in which the revolt of the masses has been captured, coopted and displaced by the revolt of the elites. The most troubling thing about this capture, which the continuing use of elections by autocrats reveals, is that the masses (whoever they may be) have come to believe that the revolt of the new elites is indeed their revolt, and that all they need to do is to cheer (and if possible to emulate) their demonic leaders, who might offer them a quicker fix than a genuinely popular or insurrectionary effort to change the order of things.
In a manner of speaking, the new electoral masses have begun to feel that the benefits of the predation of their leaders will soon trickle down to them. The main such trickledown deliverable is that the poor and subaltern classes can now kill, maim and humiliate their weaker scapegoats with impunity. The trickledown of the more quotidian benefits – such as jobs, health care, higher incomes and safer cities – still calls for endless patience from those at the bottom of the pyramid. But they live in the hope that if hate can trickle down to them, so perhaps can prosperity.
Arjun Appadurai teaches in New York and Berlin. His most recent book, co-authored with Neta Alexander, is Failure (London: Polity Press, 2019).
This article was originally published on the Graduate Institute website.
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