SOME say protest is pointless, and that it never changes anything. I agree that the Iraq War went ahead regardless and that the current Freedom Convoys in Canada and across the world are unlikely to defibrillate our chest-clutching culture, but stay with it. The reason these things matter is because they do change the world.
The spectacle of a Liberal Prime Minister weaponising the memes of the mainstream media to suppress workers demanding the freedom to live normally is a case in point. The memes of the mainstream are all grievance farming. BLM, climate rage, anti- this and -phobia that is what our politicians do instead of politics.
Making people aware of the distance between reality and the bile farm of politics by media is vitally important for anyone’s sanity. If we are to have anything of normal life it relies on showing how ridiculous are the managers of our addiction economies when they are forced to defend the absurd, repressive and bungling mess they have made of the world.
Protest such as that in Canada – a basic demand to have a normal life – has been branded racist, anti-Semitic, transphobic and is being smeared by association with Nazism. Trucks will be seized. This, again, is from a Liberal leader. It comes at a time when we are being sold the idea that Russia and China are the real threats to democracy.
What is left of Canadian democracy? Trudeau (Castreau?) has vowed to freeze the bank accounts of the truckers, had their families ‘visited’, whilst the supposed Left glories in releasing the personal information of every person who has donated to support them. The famed impartiality of the tech companies has once again been demonstrated as they do nothing to prevent ‘hacked material’ being distributed, which was the argument against publicising the damning contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Trudeau got 21 per cent of the vote and governs like he owns the place. Even the leaders of Canada’s provinces have spoken out against his invoking war powers (the old name for the Emergency Powers he has just rolled out). That is not very democratic of him.
What is left of the Left? These brave class warriors have seen some of the workers of the world unite to try to throw off their chains and have condemned them. The Left does not like the working class. It prefers to fan the flames of resentment, race-baiting, white-guilting and civilisation-shaming to build a gallery of grievances especially convenient for a managerial style of government to exploit. Why is this solidarity of hatreds so helpful to power? It is simply division without end, having no stated terminus it can continue until every cultural and national institution is ruined in the name of Progress.
This provides for an atomised population whose only common interest is the availability of cheap consumer goods. Perhaps this is where Justin could learn from one of his dad’s mates. Stalin was wise enough to pay the lorry drivers a lot more than the white-collar class, because he realised that without them he could not supply bread, coal, shoes or anything remotely useful or necessary to a population he had already starved. Our political class are so out of touch with reality that they will start a war they cannot hope to win whilst destroying their own just-in-time supply chain. In short, the truckers’ protest shows that the urban populations who love their online shopping and BLM-tier memes cannot continue their lifestyles of infantile consumerism without real men driving their treats to market.
Trudeau is in a fight he cannot win with the truckers. Even if he imprisons them all, he has lost any legitimacy granted by the pretence of democratic consent. He also looks foolish, having escalated this matter into a major crisis through his own incompetence. He tried the word-shaming trick and it failed. He keeps doing it. Stop, Justin. It’s hard to watch.
This government-by-irony is all we have at the moment, where most of the West has been locked up for two years, bankrupting itself financially and socially, and where the most trusted people in the world are the pharmaceutical companies – who so helpfully replaced religion with the real opium of the people, opiates. It is hard to take seriously any claims of a free society when this madness over a bad cold was enough to trash it all.
Our conservatives conserve nothing, ‘progress’ means something like ‘revenge’. There is nothing left of the old Left. To make people realise this is to make them face reality. As unpleasant as that is, you will be hard put to find any normal person who deals less well with the shock of the real than one of our politicians. The real lesson of the truckers is how fragile is the performance of power, how flaky the people put up as our leaders. True enough, another crisis actor will take the place of the Canadian Prime Minister when he goes, another Macron, another Johnson, another media mediocrity with no principles. These people belong in magazines.
The truckers are showing us all that what we have is a third-rate Bonapartism after Liberalism’s demise. The demagogues we have are mouthpieces for slogans intended to silence anyone who notices the accelerating decline of their standard of living. They are brand ambassadors selling permanent distraction as the wealth cascades ever upwards from the vanishing middle class. The endless importation of desperate third worlders serves to terrify the working class with an abyss of subsistence wages from which there is no escape. That is a model sanctified by Left and Right alike. We have gone from the promise of rising aspirations to the horror of falling into the serf pit. This is our motivation, as actors like to say.
This machine, which destroys everything that is not itself, is the monster devouring everything in the name of profit. Culture, tradition, God, morality, a better way of life – the global project of consumerism is a vast engine of ruin for everything worthwhile. It can seem all-powerful, eternal, inexorable, just like the Soviet Union once did. Yet now, for a moment at least, the signal has flickered. The machine is afraid.
The truckers are a reminder of how easily this madness can be stopped. Just in time.
