Dear TCW,
I wonder if you can help me.
I’ve inherited a bit of a mess. I won’t bore you with the whole story – it’s massively complicated and it goes back years – but the other day I suddenly realised how much trouble we’re in.
It was when Mr Cameron, the PR for the ‘Community’ we signed up to, suddenly turned nasty and we saw him for what he is. He said if we try to leave ‘The Community’ all kinds of nasty stuff will happen to our children. And our children’s children! He said there’d be a war. If that wasn’t alarming enough, his unpleasant little henchman George chipped in with threats that we’d be priced out of our house.
That’s when I knew we had to get out of this awful cult they call ‘The Community’.
I feel so stupid that I ever fell for it now. They said it was a happy community where everyone was free to trade and love each other and be safe. Oh God, that sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? That’s what all cults prey on. I’ve been had.
Come to think of it, the signs were there about Dave the PR man all the time. The way he used his own family photos as marketing collateral. I believe ‘Convincers’ is the word con artists use. Dave liked to pretend he was our friend, and that he could negotiate on our behalf with The Boss. He made out he was in with The Boss. But every time he went to see this mysterious Frau Merkel she just laughed at him. I saw him laughing along too, which I thought was a negotiating trick he was using on our behalf, but now I realise he didn’t give a monkey’s about us. He never did. He was laughing along with her, because they were all in it together.
Now I think of it, the whole scheme was ludicrous, right down to the chairman, Jean-Claude, who seemed to stagger around drunk half the time. They even had their own phrase for it: Junkered.
Like all cults, The Community was illogical. In one daily ceremony, they’d take millions of fish out the sea, kill them, then throw 90 per cent of the carcasses back into the water. The option of not catching them, or eating the ones they did catch, never occurred to them. Meanwhile, workers were starving in Grimsby, for no apparently good reason. Why would ‘The Community’ want to systematically destroy the world’s food supply?
There’s a million other examples I could give, but I just want to get out now. I feel so stupid for falling for this scam. Bringing peace to Europe my arse. Some Swedish women said they are a lot less safe now. They were later ‘corrected’, however. We never heard from them again.
Logically, anyone would want to leave this weird cult, but there’s millions of people who are too terrified to leave. I can see why. They’ve been subjected to the cult’s mind control and now they’re suffering from a sort of EU variation of Stockholm Syndrome. Remainder Syndrome, I call it. The Remainders are like the undead, terrified of trying to live independently as they’ve been convinced they can’t cope. “Stay, stay in The Community,” they’re told, “You will be safe here. Just don’t dare go out!”
Some of the tactics are quite sinister. At one so-called debate, a man tried to ask why we need to subsume ourselves – our laws, our belief systems, our money (naturally) – to unelected people that we could never even see, let alone hold to account. Immediately he was labeled ‘a racist’. Suddenly, Julie the moderator was endorsing this heckle, and started demanding that the man defend himself against these unproved charges.
Julie passed the debate on to some men who were watching in a studio and they forgot all about our concerns about safety, sovereignty and the single currency, and framed the entire debate about whether this man Nigel was a racist. Suddenly, all the things we wanted to know about were lost as they asked ‘ordinary members of the public’ if Nigel was a racist, then some ‘expert’ pundits from magazines nobody reads, then some other cult members back in the ITV studio. It’s almost as if they deliberately diverted the discussion in case someone asked a question they couldn’t answer.
When people first started using this tactic I was shocked. I’m a bit naïve, so it’s taken me a long time to realise, but the charge of racism now says more about the accusers than it says about the accused. These days, when a man accuses you of racism, it’s because he’s run out of ideas. If racism is his or her starting point, they never had any ideas in the first place.
I know, I know, we should never have fallen for this sinister Ponzi Scheme cum Cult. Please don’t judge me for my gullibility. It all sounded so plausible when they were selling it to us. Just tell me this: how can we escape from this hideous creepy ‘Community’?
Yes, I’m willing to take a financial hit, anything. Just get me out! Please!
(Image: Sebastien Bertrand)
