by John Ward
SATIRE IN THE SURREAL AGE OF UNTRAMMELED POWER
For most of my life, I’ve been a firm believer in the use of satire against power. The question of whether to use it or not has never really arisen, because the answer is always “Yes”. Some people are shocked by this attitude, often finding something “in poor taste” or muttering things like “she’s barely cold in her coffin”. Explain to them how fractional reserve banking works, however, and they seem entirely relaxed.
Satire is the art of taking a profoundly degenerate, mendacious or hypocritical action and simply taking it on a stage into the Ridiculous. It is only in poor taste if it kicks the victim rather than the perpetrator: Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi Magazine Der Sturmer in 1930s Germany, thought the destruction of Jewish property and deporting of Jews was funny. In fact, his cartoons were both pitifully rabid and pitiless in their vengeance. Compare that to the ironic Jewish story of the SS officer saying to a concentration camp prisoner “I lost an eye on the Russian Front”, and the prisoner saying “Yes, your left eye is glass”. The Nazi asks how he knew, and the Jew says, “Because it has some degree of pity in it”.
Here’s an example of a satirical piece I drafted a few days ago:
WINDSORS IN SHOCK AS BoE BOSS BAILEY FLOATS PROPOSAL TO DIGITALISE CHARLES III
In a plan designed to put Britain ahead of the World, the sun, the Andromeda nebula and Hull Kingston Rovers, mystery company Karl Notanazi GmBH has been in secret discussions with GCHQ and the Bank of England to give planet Earth its first ever virtual monarch.
“We learned a lot by preleasing the new Charles III portrait for commemorative coins,” said top mafiosa Godfather Androzzi ‘Fats’ Bellini, leader of the notorious Threadneedle Mob, “and it was clear that within 24 hours of doing so, the value of Sterling dropped by 960 per cent, so we decided to digitalise His Majesty before he could do any further damage”.
The virtual King will be known as C3PO and live in a fractionally reserved Cloud somewhere over the rainbow and three doors up from the Pot of Gold. The day to day business of being a King will be awarded to the winner of a special National Lottery to help pay for the tax cuts originally and hastily planned to be funded by cutting the benefits of anyone who doesn’t buy the special lottery ticket price £15.99 available from CarrieBoJo Enterprises Nigeria Ltd.
“Ve are alle werry prout to haff finally penetratet ze greatest national leader since unser geliebter GribbleStuka und makink him an example of ze transhuman Ordnung,” commented Notanazi boss Klaus von Schwaberghof, “during ze rigruss tests ve haff conductet, it was ver clear from ze feedback that C3PO iss only artificially intelligent, und zuss ze perfect Robot Untermensch”.
Most well-informed people would recognise the context of an unprincipled globalist central banker reading the riot act to Prime Minister Truss and her greenhorn Chancellor Kwarteng about cutting taxes, when the neoliberal narrative clearly states that the idea is to get more tax out of the useless eaters and screw the economy. What Governor Bailey did was to point out in no uncertain terms that he and his mates are the power in the Land, not them. (The minute Mistrust & Khazi U-turned on the cuts, the Pound immediately strengthened)
The draft also took a swipe at the comic megalomania of Schwab, the pretentions of King Charles, the idiocy of AI and the corruption of Boris Johnson, while further establishing the Slog’s use of the robot C3PO as the (hopefully) enduring nickname of our inheritor of the Crown of Thorns.
But the satirical element was something of a misfit with the seriousness of the charge – that one banker and a dozen hedge funds working for Britain’s closest ally had chosen to destroy its currency if necessary to get their way.
And the problem, further, is that this is nothing new: when French President François Hollande went for anti-neolib socialism during 2013-14, POTUS Obama engineered an all-out attack on his national debt bonds, making repayment near as damnit impossible. Hollande quietly sued for peace within 11 weeks.
This is buck-naked unelected power at work; and increasingly, satire feels to me like a Resistance form one hundred per cent deficient in mordancy when it comes to the uniquely ghastly nature of this, our unfortunate epoch.
For example, after years of the delusionally vainglorious antics of the dogooder liberal Nazis in Brussels and Frankfurt, Italy has finally rejected the lunacy and elected a traditional Forza Italia style Prime Minister in the shape of Giorgia Meloni (left) – a lady whose acceptance speech took no prisoners at all. “They want to destroy la Famiglia,” she correctly observed, “because making that unit seem dysfunctional is the road to ultimate power over the People”.
You could discern pretty immediately that the MSM’s compliant whores didn’t like it, because without exception they went on a smear campaign to dwarf any national anti-vaginal cancer push you could imagine. She was, variously, an oddball, very far Right, a throwback, admirer of Mussolini, rabidly anti-immigration and made nonstop “madcap religious observations” about the intentions of senior EU officials.
What none of the compliant media mention is that she is also a distinguised journalist, has spent seventeen years in the Chamber of Deputies, has led the Brothers of Italy political party since 2014, and has been the president of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party since 2020. So far she has not made any marches on Rome of which I’m aware, nor indeed invaded Abyssinnia. And unlike the vast majority of fat-boy Europols, she was brought up in poverty by a single mother, her feckless jailbird Dad having abandoned them. She is not a fascist in the real (as opposed to ideologically motivated standard insult) which is why she distrusts blocism, globalism and Big Government generally.
She is self-made, and her voice comes from the real proletariat. Isn’t that what the EU needs?
But being both a realist and a well-travelled sufferer from liberal totalitarianism and banking power, she is avoiding the more obvious obstacles. Wise, perhaps – but already, she has sown doubt in my mind. This is what she said in the later stages of the election that propelled her to power:
“Investors should be clear about the fact that I will respect EU budget rules and fiscal orthodoxy”
It was a classic case of getting one’s retaliation in first. But as with Truss and Hollande, there is a cynical acceptance before you’ve even tried to change the world that The World Is Not for Changing. If every radical politician is ready to “compromise” (aka sell out) – and the media whores ignore everything good that the candidate stands for – why should the greedy depopulators give a good Goddamn about satire? The entire mess is auto-satirical in the onanist sense of auto.
I was born to be a writer, but along the way, I lost my way. Time after time. But in the end, awareness returns. At the age of 74, I’m still developing – living as I do with the near-certainty that if you don’t, there might be no 75 – and thus, one must keep on learning as the world changes….however utterly repellant that change might be.
In this context, we are back to DON’T COMPLY, COMPLAIN. As 2022 starts to age and head towards a precociously unpredictable 2023, I’m dumping satire as a weapon. Those who need neither votes nor media approval no longer find it even a minor irritant.
Three weeks ago I said acres of stats can be ignored by media and will only bore the target audience: I voted instead for revealing the identity and incorrigible nastiness of those who now effectively run the world. The use of humour in that space still serves to engage those of good intentions: so I will still write funny stuff (all work and no play makes Johnny Slog a very dull boy) but investigation that leads to startling revelation must be the goal.
We must keep an eye on Ms Meloni. She’s either very wily, or very slippery.
Then there is the case of Netflix. It’s creators made a mountain range of money, but far too much of the company’s output is very clearly bankrolled by dodgy interests who work hard day in, day out to to paint the New World Order picture of a horrendously dangerous future in which every citizen must surrender civic rights in return for the all-knowing State’s protection from inevitable dystopia.
The company boasts “a broad public ownership” but that’s all so much crap: by far the largest shareholder is the Vanguard Fund investment squid – a giga-giant second only to BlackRock in size. Between them, Vanguard and BlackRock control 12 per cent of Netflix – by far the biggest block of shares.
Every time either of them does something a little over-controlling, Reuters dives in with some mendacious fact-checking to claim that really they’re jolly nice. Usually Bloomberg isn’t far behind them. All four of these leviathans are fully paid up members of the unelected Top Table.
Together, BlackRock and Vanguard own:
• Eighteen percent of Fox.
• Sixteen percent of CBS, and therefore also of Sixty Minutes.
• Thirteen percent of Comcast, which owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and the Sky media group.
• Twelve percent of CNN.
• Twelve percent of Disney, which owns ABC and FiveThirtyEight.
• Between ten and fourteen percent of Gannett, which owns more than 250 Gannett daily newspapers plus USA Today.
• Ten percent of the Sinclair local television news, which controls seventy-two percent of U.S. households’ local TV.
• A large unspecified chunk of Graham Media Group, which owns Slate and Foreign Policy.
In the past, I have written many times that until 1995, you had to make 73 phone calls to twist every global editor’s arm. That figure had became seven calls by 2018.
The media control exercised during Covid, global warming mania and Putin-bashing has been total….and don’t dismiss that as conspiranoid: biggies like Vanguard do more than vote their shares; a survey published in the Journal of Finance shows that 63 per cent talk directly to managements they invest in, and almost half to board members. These people suppress media freedom – and their influence connects to the heart of government via CO² footprints, fiscal policy, military budgets and the White House: Former BlackRock executive Brian Deese is Biden’s top economic advisor; former BlackRock executive Michael Pyle serves as chief economic advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris.
That’s the entire NWO information, fiscal and foreign policy, armed forces and climate spread from end to end covered by two outfits….and Netflix is part of the deal. Because fantasy news is no different to obsessively dystopian movie plot output in shaping public moods and opinion. In 2023, the world is going to look a lot more like a Netflix plot – for example, Blade Runner 2049 (2017) · Mad Max (1979) & Mad Max 2 (1981) · The Platform (2019) Okja (2017) · Edge of Tomorrow (2014) still running after all these years, and new stuff Mayday · Little Fish · The Forever Purge · Chaos Walking · Life Like · Upgrade · The Humanity Bureau · How It Ends Mute · Death Race · Terminator Salvation and Children of Men.
As a one-time user of Netflix, I have to express the opinion that today, there’s almost nothing original or in any way worth watching on the Channel beyond some OK documentaries and good stand-up. But given the power of the thing, while it is possible to poke fun at the archetypal movie plot – ‘In a dystopian future, Brad and Janet find themselves trapped in a Timebackroscope heading straight for a black hole inhabited by serial-killer climate change deniers’ – it feels to me like something self-indulgently getting in the way of the much bigger conclusion: They have the power to control eveything that might persuade you of anything….They have effectively abolished harmless entertainment.
That’s many things, but funny isn’t one of them.