The slow suicide of the West

Yesterday I picked up in alternative media (our legacy media being awash only with propaganda) the fact that Sri Lanka’s government has collapsed in the face of riots over food and fuel shortages, and power outages.

I already knew from my pastor friend there that they are suffering 10 hours without power every day, and I was going to send some rechargeable batteries to help keep communications going until it turned out you can’t send batteries overseas by post unless they’re in an appliance. Maybe that’s because a battery catching fire in a motorised teddy bear is less dangerous than in a jiffy-bag, but I’m beginning to suspect that there is some less laudable bureaucratic motive to do with money and power. There usually is, now.

Be that as it may, although Sri Lanka’s problems have something to do with government corruption, and a lot do do with becoming a victim of Chinese Belt-and-Road debt, much of it has to do with the loss of trade precipitated, in the first place, by Western lockdown policies over the last two years, and in the second by the Western sanctions imposed against Russia and any other country daring not to condemn Russia – which is a lot of countries.

Both these kinds of measures have hurt the West far more than did either COVID (alive and well and evading the lethal pseudo-vaccines Big Pharma corporations gave us, whilst they willfully suppressed the downsides they knew about all along) or Russia (the Rouble is trading higher than before the war, and Russian inflation is lower than ours). But it is poor nations that feel the pinch of bad policies first, and one might regard Sri Lanka as a canary in the coalmine for what is likely to happen here before long.

For example, it is also largely unreported here that food shortages and inflation have led to a general strike in Greece, amongst the poorest of EU countries. Its government, despite long and friendly relations with Russia, another Orthodox country seen as its liberator from the Nazis, has thrown all that away by falling into line with the US and EU globalists and supplying Ukraine with arms. Ordinary Greeks are not happy at this further kow-towing to Brussels, but they are also being economically harmed.

Even in MSM the alarming threat to Germany’s economy from loss of energy and industry, as well as food and fertilizer, is being flagged. Once again, the inflation caused by lockstep COVID policies has been compounded by lockstep anti-Russian sanctions. If the richest country in Europe is looking down the barrel of a repeat of the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, then the days of the EU as an economic union, rather than as a sabre-rattling pseudo-nation, must be numbered.

What of the UK, no longer bound to the EU hegemony since Brexit? It is being revealed to be as globalist as ever, its government, intelligence services and media all parroting the US Neo-Conservative line to its own severe detriment. Our government seems to run largely on back-handers, virtue-signalling and cocaine. Without the resources of America, or even the broken-reed support of Brussels, we are happily pushing up inflation as high as we can with green policies, driving our farmers out of business with low commodity prices, and focusing attention on cancelling Jane Austen instead of helping ordinary people. It appears that we’ve even sent all our anti-tank missiles to supply the Nazi Asov Battalion: if Biden does manage to start World War III by yet more false-flag rhetoric, we would have nothing left to fight with anyway.

Exactly who is in charge of this game is unclear (what else does one expect in a propaganda state run by highly-funded and apparently autonomous intelligence services?), but they give every appearance of being as mad and bad as they were over COVID. Only my hunch is that they are now also desperate, because the well-laid plans to usher in a new globalist world order look as if they are falling apart, so (as one commentator has put it) the US will push sanctions to the last EU citizen, just as the West in general is as clear-as-day pushing a proxy war in Ukraine to the last Ukrainian.

I say “the West”, but of course I am talking, as during COVID, about the elites of the West herding us sheep into line via fear, psychological warfare and economic threats… not to mention a pathological obsession with Net Zero although the Central England average temperature has stayed stable for 20 years. It is Western taxpayers who are unwittingly destroying their own future – perhaps literally if the supply problem becomes as bad as seems likely – and paying billionaires for the privilege. The media keeps the zealotry high by relentless propaganda, but of course says nothing about how every weapon sent to someone else’s war costs NHS appointments and contributes to the ramping up of inflation. We did not vote for any of this (though maybe a majority would have been persuaded to do so if nudged sufficiently), but we have got used to “democracy” being a war-cry rather than anything real, since all divergent opinions are now censored.

I just want to put in a good word for the pessimists who saw all this coming two years ago and more, as the experts said that the economy would bounce back after lockdown, that inflation was temporary at the beginning of this year, that vaccines would liberate us and so on. I was one of those gainsayers, in a small and scarcely informed way, when I doubted, as the first lockdowns were about to be imposed, that one could turn off an economy and rely on it restarting when the current was switched back on. My fears all came true, with several additional woes of which I had no inkling – including the bone-headed precipitation of a European war, as per the predictions of wiser men like John Mearsheimer long ago.

Journalist Peter Hitchens was another pessimist. He has been a committed doom-sayer for years (“optimism only disappoints”), but an informed one. He saw the woke denial of our history and our economic mismanagement as the end of the road for a successful Britain even before Brexit. But during the fiscal profligacy of lockdown he repeatedly warned people of his experience as a correspondent in Moscow as the Soviet Union fell, when professionals sold their possessions on the streets in order to get food to stay alive. He was told, of course, that it could never happen here. How can it not happen if government has sanctioned away both grain and fuel and printed money in a shrunken economy?

For the Christian, pessimism about human affairs is paradoxically somewhat liberating, since our Lord has warned us in advance that, on the cosmic scale, the darkest night will be a sign of an impending new creation on the return of Christ. It sweeps away anxieties about the future, replaces them with a hardheaded realism both about one’s own life-expectations, and the kind of tasks for which the Church must prepare, and forces one to rely on the Lord because there is not a single human institution left that one can trust. You know I’m not exaggerating, at this point (though the odd casual reader might still be in thrall to the propaganda, and I urge them to break free and “Live no longer by lies,” to quote Solzhenitsyn).

Whilst in such a gloomily positive mood, let me urge readers to plan seriously for hard times ahead, not that we can hope to be spared that which all men must experience in times of tribulation, but we can plan to be better equipped to help others. In particular, the most fundamental economic risk is the collapse of the entire Western financial system, whether that simply be by hyper-inflation (get tangible commodities instead of cash or shares), the failure of the banks, which are now geared to bail-in your cash, rather than compensate you as in 2008 (so even a fiver in the hand may be worth more than a tenner in a savings account), or by the rebooting of the entire system into a digital, traceable and blockable system which would probably even be called “System 666” once it is the only game in town. Get out of debt if you can, because you can bet that foreclosure will be the last part of the system to fail. Get to know your neighbours well enough to field the idea of a local barter system for essentials when the time comes.

And maybe plant some potatoes in your window-box.