Tectonic Shifts Unnerve Both Factions of the USA Ruling Elite

My latest social analysis article, published at Dissident Voice:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/11/dear-young-progressives-the-white-supremacist-anti-immigration-anti-political-correctness-free-speech-fascists-are-your-friends/

Dear Young Progressives: The White-Supremacist Anti-Immigration Anti-Political-Correctness Free-Speech Fascists Are Your Friends

Tectonic Shifts Unnerve Both Factions of the USA Ruling Elite

By Denis Rancourt

Yup. The ruling elite are doing everything they can to divide you. They are doing everything they can to promote hate between you.

In this article, I argue that the real enemy is the ruling elite, which manipulates us all. I explain that the Western USA-based ruling elite is desperate these days, and exceptionally adversarial, which is driven by the successful rise of Eurasia (economically led by China, and supported by Russia), and by increased global abundance of extractable energy reserves. We allow ourselves to be collateral idiots and pawns in this saga.

The ruling elite and the captured media want you to be convinced that their oppression of everyone comes from either a tsunami of irrational “socialism” or spontaneous upsurges of “fascism”; that fascist cells are nucleating and growing at an unprecedented rate, and that you and all your immigrant, brown, black, LGBTQ compatriots will be deported or imprisoned or deprived of medical attention, if the said cells are not deplatformed, censored, run out of town, punched in the face, and exterminated.

Actually, no, that is not true.

The ruling elite in the USA, and in the Western world, by projection, are comprised of two opposing and collaborating factions: The “Democrats” and the “Republicans”, which represent different and overlapping blocs of the Western ruling elite.[1][2][3][4]

Both blocs or networks agree to use military force and covert means to exploit and extort, in the world that they consider their plantation. Both networks use their influence to constantly transform national and global rules to their advantage, to the point even of literally writing the laws, and to the brink of destabilizing the USA domestic society itself,[5] and the global economic and strategic balance.

The ruling elite (acting together, consistently and deeply) manipulate, socially engineer, and exploit the rest of us, to different qualities and degrees, depending on social class. The main mechanism is to divide to conquer. The divisions are first along class lines, and, within classes, along cultural, race, religion, and gender lines.

Democracy is a constant threat to the ruling elite. Therefore, democracy must be constrained to a manageable form, and crushed wherever it actually emerges. The remnants of electoral democracy are used in more-or-less a show-competition between the two opposing networks, which serves them both by floating the illusion of popular participation and by dividing the public.

The “Democrats” are tied to global finance and push for a global carbon economy, and global “development”, in the image of their malicious interest. Their deep-state base is the CIA and they excel in media and entertainment-industry control.

The “Republicans” are more tied to the USA domestic-energy sector (such as the exploded shale-oil economy), to the army, and to the armament industry. They are more nationalist in their power centre, more into the extraction and wage-slave-production industries in Latin America and Africa, via USA corporations, and have less use for the UN in their manipulations.

Both ruling-elite networks have collaborated together since the end of the Second World War, with the deep state, to establish and maintain the USA dollar as the global currency, which is their most potent weapon of global exploitation, and now overt extortion, backed by violent military interventions, campaigns of economic devastation, and covert coups and proxy wars.[6][7]

Fast-forward to today: Two global tectonic shifts have and are occurring, which fundamentally threaten the USA/Western ruling elite, in that USA hegemony itself is challenged.

The first global tectonic shift is the continuous rise of Eurasia, economically led by China, with strategic, diplomatic and organizational support from Russia. This coincides with Russian emergence in protecting its national interests in Syria and Venezuela, while offering military technology (S-400 air-defence missile system) that neutralizes USA air dominance, to Turkey and others.

The second global tectonic shift is the increased global abundance of easily extractable fossil-fuel reserves. It turns out that shale-oil is everywhere, as is natural gas; and Chinese coal, not counting secure imports,[8] is plentiful enough to power China, using modern centralized generation and transformation stations, for decades. There is oil and gas in Venezuela, Russia, Syria, Iran… Canada, USA… more places than can easily be controlled to starve competitors, to ensure high prices for preferred producers, and to keep the petro-dollar alive.[6]

These global tectonic shifts divide the ruling elite, as they scramble to settle and impose a response strategy, and as their differing economic interests collide.

The globalist “Democrats” want an enforced carbon economy (to save humanity) and a crypto-currency that they control,[9] and, in their daydream, want to include Eurasia, the whole shebang. They don’t want all-out trade wars that drive Eurasian exclusionary integration. They prefer covert power rather than military campaigns, and prefer to preserve the UN as a tool.

They are content to deprive their ruling-elite adversaries of oil-supremacy if they can keep finance supremacy, enforced by military might as needed. They are habituated to occupation by social engineering, and hope for an entire world woke to climate change, public health by vaccination, life-extension by big-pharma, food abundance by GMOs and glyphosate, and human rights by gender-reassignment medical and pharmaceutical procedures, “anti-racism” and “gender equity”.[6][7]

The nationalist “Republicans” want to control oil by force, using blockades, sanctions, and military occupation (Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, even Canada in a pipeline-propaganda war[10]), sell USA oil at top dollar (with an emphasis on “dollar”), save the USA-dollar-as-world-currency gravy train, and extort military-protection rent and arms sales from its “allies”, while making Eurasia enemy number one.

In a nutshell, the governing elite are running a vast and violent exploitation and extortion racket that is now in decline in the world. The decline is putting tremendous pressure on the scheme, and the elite are desperately lashing out to slow or reverse the inevitable. Their disagreements are more urgent than ever, and they are willing to have unprecedented adversarial battles in the open, and to use us all as triggered or engaged idiots.

“White supremacists” are just ordinary folks sick of being manipulated and cheated by the ruling elite. “Black bloc” anarchists are ordinary youth sick of being brushed aside and made irrelevant by the ruling elite. Both need to see the strings and stop looking for schoolyard fights. Our best friends need to be all those harmed by the same elite manipulators. Our worst immediate enemies are the collaborators. We need to treat words as words, and stop looking to punish our compatriots. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the “white supremacists” are thereby eminently your friends.

Free-speech enthusiasts are right of course but they need to see those wanting false protection from censorship as merely misguided targets of the common enemy. It is the enemy that is implementing the censorship, not snowflakes. The elite will censor using any pretext. Woke automatons are just proof of the broad destructive power of social engineering. Woke automatons are not the enemy of the Right: Ignore them, insult them if this has civil-jolt value, but focus on the real enemy. The real enemy determines school curricula, writes laws, attacks democracy, censors speech, funds everything, and campaigns for war.

Endnotes

[1] “U.S. Economic Warfare and Likely Foreign Defenses”, Keynote Paper delivered at the 14th Forum of the World Association for Political Economy, July 21, 2019, by Michael Hudson, The Saker, 25 July 2019. http://thesaker.is/u-s-economic-warfare-and-likely-foreign-defenses/

[2] “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy”, by Michael Hudson, ISLET-Verlag, 2015, ISBN 13: 978-3-9814842-8-1.

[3] “Denis Rancourt Democrats & Republicans Use Identity Politics As Cover For Economic Devastation”, Jamarl Thomas - YouTube Channel, 24 July 2019. https://youtu.be/EukGQ33x-To

[4] “The Classic Political Theories of Socialism, Capitalism, and Anarchism are Unrealizable”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 12 August 2015. https://dissidentvoice.org/2015/08/the-classic-political-theories-of-socialism-capitalism-and-anarchism-are-unrealizable/

[5] “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 7 September 2017. https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/

[6] “Geo-Economics and Geo-Politics Drive Successive Eras of Predatory Globalization and Social Engineering: Historical emergence of climate change, gender equity, and anti-racism as State doctrines”, by Denis G. Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, OCLA Report 2019-1, April 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332182416_GEO-ECONOMICS_AND_GEO-POLITICS_DRIVE_SUCCESSIVE_ERAS_OF_PREDATORY_GLOBALIZATION_AND_SOCIAL_ENGINEERING_Historical_emergence_of_climate_change_gender_equity_and_anti-racism_as_State_doctrines

[7] “From Dollar Hegemony to Global Warming: Globalization, Glyphosate and Doctrines of Consent”, by Colin Todhunter, Dissident Voice, 10 June 2019. https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/06/from-dollar-hegemony-to-global-warming/

[8] “China's `Friendly' Neighbors Seize Coal Share From Australia”, Markets - Bloomberg News, 26 April 2019. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-26/china-s-friendly-neighbors-seize-coal-share-from-australia

[9] “Is The Fed Preparing to Topple US Dollar?”, by F. William Engdahl, New Eastern Outlook (NEO), 1 September 2019. https://journal-neo.org/2019/09/01/is-the-fed-preparing-to-topple-us-dollar/

[10] “Over a Barrel”, Documentary Film, 8 October 2019 (Canada), producer Shane Fennessey, based on the research of Vivian Krause. www.overabarreldoc.com

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS are now institutionalized, and that is no accident

By Denis Rancourt

I hate those prayer-like public land acknowledgements because they are pure virtue signaling and intended to push a religion of historical interpretation (guardians of nature itself, etc.), and of response to the said interpretation. They are institutionalized social engineering.

I have no problem acknowledging that the State perpetrated on on-going genocide against aboriginal peoples in Canada, and that this is Canada's major foundational and active mass war crime, but those acknowledgements are an intrinsic part of the cover-up, IMO, and to me the words are like the scratching-on-the-blackboard sound of my institutional school days.

"Acknowledgement" is not a first step towards change. On the contrary, "acknowledgement" puts one at easy and asleep. "Acknowledgement" is the peace of complacency, not the anger of motivation. "Acknowledgement" is a false care that nurtures and preserves victimhood, not a cry of a warrior for justice.

Public land acknowledgements are now spoken by paternalistic or motherly institutional guardians of the nurturing State, including its many collaborators. The acknowledgements are State propaganda, being fully integrated into the State educational system.

When Israel starts doing it, we will know that its genocide is complete and irreversible.

Freedom of speech is not a "value in society"

My social-theory thought for today:

OK, wait, no... Free speech is NOT a "central value in our society". It is not a "value".

Rather, free speech is a foundational structural rule that prevents runaway totalitarianism from occurring in the societal dominance hierarchy, by guaranteeing this venue for the individual to fight back against excessive suppression of individual rights and interests -- and, by extension, collective rights and interests, via free association.

So tired of hearing that free speech is a value or right that can be balanced against other values or rights. No, it cannot. Individual free speech itself (separate from any concomitant crimes such as violent intimidation, persistent harassment, illegitimate use of power, etc.), for the purpose of individual influence by expression, must be absolute to serve its purpose.

And read my 2016 article entitled: << Towards a Rational Legal Philosophy of Individual Rights >>.

Dear True Environmentalists: Fight Corporate Criminality, not Atmospheric Gases

by Denis Rancourt / October 3rd, 2019

Published at Dissident Voice. 

Dear true environmentalists: I am with you.¹

Corporate pollution and releasing of toxic substances should be treated as a criminal act, with full power to seize assets for reparations, actual reparations, not just punitive fines.

I would apply the same standard of prosecution to the “medical”/pharma² and agri-food industries,³ also.

However, the planet and biosphere are not at risk of imminent collapse, and certainly not from CO2.
The “imminent collapse” fabrication serves powerful manipulators, and necessarily diverts us away from attaining actual democracy and fairness.  In the words of Chomsky:⁴

For example, suppose it was discovered tomorrow that the greenhouse effect has been way underestimated, and that the catastrophic effects are actually going to set in 10 years from now, and not 100 years from now or something. Well, given the state of the popular movements we have today, we’d probably have a fascist takeover—with everybody agreeing to it, because that would be the only method for survival that anyone could think of. I’d even agree to it, because there just are no other alternatives around right now.

Rather than accept fascism or totalitarianism, corporate and finance criminality can best be fought from a position of realistic perspective regarding the end of the world, sober analysis of means regarding leverage for change, and focused political targeting against corporate rule without accountability.

History of imbedded doomsday narratives

All societies are dominance hierarchies, and all large, human dominance hierarchies have hired high-priests that construct and maintain the State doomsday narrative. These high-priests constantly instruct us on required beliefs and behaviours that minimize the deleterious effects of the alleged impending catastrophe. The behavioural instructions fan everything from diet, to hygiene, to dress code, to physical activity, to work ethics, to attitudes and morals, to child rearing, to political positions, to deference to experts, and so on.

It would be delusional to believe that this structural feature of society is any different than it ever was. In present Western society, the high-priests are the “scientists”, which include the medical doctors and all the “experts”.

This does not mean that science itself is not a valid and rigorous method to test and eliminate hypotheses and theories. It only means that establishment scientists are hired high-priests, notwithstanding the rare exceptions that prove the rule. It also does not mean that scientists never tell the truth. It only means that establishment scientists never harm or rebel against the dominance hierarchy, except by accident or solely in appearance.

These days, there is an industry of scientists that indulge in generating, testing and ameliorating ever more creative doomsday predictions, which are hoped to be of utility to the bosses. The said utility is often termed “societal relevance”. As an eminent example, we have the theory of a “tipping point” towards irreversible total collapse of the ecosphere, often referred to as a “species mass extinction”. The notion of a tipping point has also been advanced for planetary climate, wherein, in the absence of any non-human cause, one crosses into a global climate regime of constant extreme weather and flooded continents.

Whereas past planetary transformations have been related to game-changers, such as the advent of photosynthesis, the calming of tectonic (volcanic) activity, and so forth, and whereas the known recurring climate catastrophe of ice ages is believed to be driven by variations in solar insolation, the new “tipping points” spontaneously occur from the gradual changes of increased modern human or industrial activity, including: habitat destruction, burning of fossil fuel, population growth, and dispersal of toxic substances.

The new “tipping point” theory is not unlike the deluge of the Old Testament, which followed an accumulation of human depravity, except that no god is postulated, and building the Ark requires a centralized and globally restructured economy, handled by overarching elite private institutions, of course. War, disease, hunger … are all defeated under the same umbrella, death itself eventually.

The accompanying calls from establishment icons are often shrill.  In the words of Prince Charles, in 2009:⁵,⁶

If we do nothing, the consequences for every person on this earth will be severe and unprecedented – with vast numbers of environmental refugees, social instability and decimated economies: far worse than anything which we are seeing today … We have 100 months left to act.

While the leader of the most warring nation on earth, President Barack Obama, concluded in his 2015 State of the Union speech:⁷

No challenge  poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.

The role of scientists

The scientists follow and are often not more contained than Prince Charles or President Obama:

Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Human impacts are causing alarming levels of harm to our planet. As scientists who study the interaction of people with the rest of the biosphere using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that humans are damaging their ecological life support systems is overwhelming. We further agree that, based on the best scientific information available, human quality of life will suffer substantial degradation by the year 2050 if we continue on our current path. Science unequivocally demonstrates the human impacts of key concern: Climate disruption – more, faster climate change than since humans first became a species. …⁸
We maintain that humanity’s grand challenge is solving the intertwined problems of human population growth and overconsumption, climate change, pollution, ecosystem destruction, disease spillovers, and extinction, in order to avoid environmental tipping points that would make human life more difficult and would irrevocably damage planetary life support systems.⁹
But today, for the first time, humanity’s global civilization—the worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded—is threatened with collapse by an array of environmental problems. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’, facing what the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival; land degradation and land-use change; a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds; …¹⁰
The loss of biodiversity is one of the most critical current environmental problems, threatening valuable ecosystem services and human wellbeing. A growing body of evidence indicates that current species extinction rates are higher than the pre-human background rate, with hundreds of anthropogenic vertebrate extinctions documented in prehistoric and historic times.¹¹

In fact, there is no science of a “tipping point” for earth biodiversity or for earth climate. No such testable theory has been elaborated. The entire notion of “tipping point” is hypothetical and tenuous. It is a product of bias to presume that a large and complex system (planet) would be susceptible to “tipping” rather than extraordinarily stable against internal superficial changes.  A recent paper describes how one might begin to define concepts or measures that would allow even discussing the topic of “tipping point” intelligently, for realistic ecological systems.¹²

Furthermore, even among scientists, still getting their bearings, there is persistent disagreement as to whether species extinction rates are higher in recent decades. A critical review concludes:¹³

Net species gains or losses should be assessed with respect to common baselines or reference communities. Ultimately, we need a globally coordinated effort to monitor biodiversity so that we can estimate and attribute human impacts as causes of biodiversity change. A combination of technologies will be needed to produce regularly updated global datasets of local biodiversity change to guide future policy. At this time the conclusion that there is no net change in local species richness is not the consensus state of knowledge.

Reality check

There is a large structurally imbedded industry of doomsday narrative. In addition, individuals are reared in a dominance hierarchy and therefore constantly seek messaging about fitting in. The result is that we adopt the State religion. Even if the State is occupied by an exploitative elite, we continue to uphold and follow any State religion that has been sufficiently implanted.

In this case, the State religion is that we are cared-for by mother earth but that our bad behaviour is poisoning mother earth and that we are therefore all at risk, unless we adopt the new stringent conditions that should be imposed globally. Non-believers should be rooted out and isolated. We should demand that all our peers and our representatives do what is proscribed by the State religion.
Meanwhile corporate criminality, while dressed in the colours of the State religion, will continue at an accelerated rate, and our minds and bodies will continue to be occupied.³

I say no. To escape this trap, we must realize that the planet is, well, a planet, with huge response capabilities; that the planet is far more resilient and robust than we imagine.

Habitat destruction and industrial practices are grotesque, and these cause real and significant harm to human communities and ecosystems — more so even than actual wars in the present era … although not more so than so-called economic sanctions and exploitative nation financing.  In contrast, “warming” itself cannot hurt the biosphere or humans, nor is the planet at risk of “collapse” from all the criminal practices. That is fabricated nonsense.

Our joint efforts should be on justice, attaining actual democracy, the elimination of criminal behaviour, extortion and exploitation, enforcement of reparations, enforcement of corporate transparency and accountability…

The problem is human behaviour against humans and nature, organized by an occupied dominance hierarchy, and the solutions are political; nothing to do with CO2, methane or anything else in the atmosphere.

1. “Questioning Climate Politics: Denis Rancourt says the ‘global warming myth’ is part of the problem” by Dru Oja Jay, The Dominion, 11 April 2007. []
2. “Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis” by Denis Rancourt, Research Gate, December 2015, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129. []
3. “GEO-ECONOMICS AND GEO-POLITICS DRIVE SUCCESSIVE ERAS OF PREDATORY GLOBALIZATION AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING: Historical emergence of climate change, gender equity, and anti-racism as State doctrines” by Denis Rancourt, Research Gate, April 2019, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26897.89449. [] []
4. “Undertanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky”, by Noam Chomsky, edited by Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffet, The New Press, NY, 2002; at page 388, in Chapter 10 “Turning Point – Based on discussions in Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland in 1994 to 1996 and 1999”, ISBN 1-56584-703-2. []
5. As quoted in “Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures” by Erik Swyngedouw, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Volume 24, 2013 – Issue 1, pages 9-18. []
6. “Climate change must be tackled before global poverty, says Prince Charles” by Andrew Alderson in Santiago, The Telegraph, 10 March 2009. []
7. “Obama: No greater threat to future than climate change” by Madison Park, CNN, 21 January 2015. []
8. “Introducing the Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support” by Anthony D Barnosky et al., The Anthropocene Review, 2014, 1: 78. []
9. “Avoiding collapse: Grand challenges for science and society to solve by 2050, by Anthony D. Barnosky, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Elizabeth A. Hadly, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 4: 000094, doi: 10.12952/journal.elementa.000094. []
10. “Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?” by Ehrlich, P.R. and Ehrlich, A.H. (2013) Proc R Soc B, 280: 20122845. []
11. “Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction” by Ceballos et al., Sci. Adv., 2015, 1: e1400253. []
12. “Unifying Research on Social–Ecological Resilience and Collapse” by Graeme S. Cumming and Garry D. Peterson, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Review| Volume 32, ISSUE 9, P695-713, September 01, 2017. []
13. “Estimating local biodiversity change: a critique of papers claiming no net loss of local diversity” by Andrew Gonzalez et al., Ecology, 97(8), 2016, pp. 1949–1960. []

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association. He has published more than 100 articles in leading scientific journals, on physics and environmental science. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. Denis can be reached at denis.rancourt@gmail.com. Read other articles by Denis.

LAWS THAT PUNISH FOR HYPOTHETICAL HARM MUST BE ABOLISHED

By Denis Rancourt

Given the state of laws in Canada, it has become necessary to state the obvious:

An individual legitimately can be punished solely for proven actual harm that is also proven to have been caused by the individual.

In a free and democratic society, laws that punish an individual for harm that is hypothesized to have occurred, or hypothesized to have been caused by the individual, or hypothesized to have both occurred and been caused by the individual, are pathological in that such laws attack democracy itself in its foundation, as explained below.

Canada and institutions and corporations sanctioned by the State enforce many laws and rules that punish individuals for hypothesized harm, in which the State or State-sanctioned actor does not have to prove actual harm or actual cause.  With these laws, proving actual harm is not relevant in the prosecution, and is considered inadmissible and unacceptably wasteful of court and tribunal resources.

Instead, the prosecutor merely needs to argue that there is “likelihood” that unspecified harm has occurred to unspecified “victims”, which is caused via an unspecified mechanism by the accused. Here, the prosecutor can rely entirely on the “judgement” of the court or tribunal, or can bring an “expert” witness to give opinion evidence about the said “likelihood” of harm.

No victim will testify or be cross-examined. No evidence of actual harm, physical or psychological, will be entered. No victim will even be named or identified to the court. There is a total absence of evidence of actual harm caused by the accused person.

The proceedings are separate and distinct from any criminal proceedings of responsibility for actual physical or psychological harm against an actual and identified victim.

What are these laws, you ask? These are the so-called “hate speech” laws, the codes of conduct, and also the common law of defamation.[1][2][3]  These laws include:

• “hate speech” provisions of the Criminal Code
• censorship codes, rules or “guidelines” enforced by social-media corporations
• censorship rules and practices of employers regarding the personal actions of employees
• professional-ethics codes or rules regarding personal expression on public media
• codes of conduct on campuses
• common law of defamation

In all of these laws — in a total absence of proven actual harm, from mere expression of comment, opinion, thought or belief, excluding criminal harassment, intimidation or threat against any actual and specific person, often made through the filter of a public social-media platform rather than any face-to-face interaction — the punishments range from fines, to unlimited “damage” awards, to workplace or professional-association discipline, to loss of access to education, to loss of employment, to loss of professional certification, to lengthy jail terms or house arrests, and include gag orders or compelled speech enforced by imprisonment.

Such is the status of Canadian law, despite the fact that Canada has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which expressly prohibits all such written or unwritten censorship laws.[1][2]

As a result, Canada has spawned a legal landscape not unlike that of past eras having blasphemy laws to prevent the alleged deleterious effects of the most offensive and subversive utterances of the day. This legal landscape vitiates the fundamental right of freedom of expression and incapacitates democracy itself.

The fundamental right of freedom of expression is the right that allows the individual free expression, and the personal agency that derives from free expression, even though the individual is confined by society’s changing and democratically agreed-upon rules.  Free expression is the right to express.  It is essential for personal development and emancipation.  It does not, in itself, confine others, and it is up to the individual to seek and secure receptive listeners. This is the essence of both personal growth and society. 

Beyond person growth within the fabric of society, freedom of expression plays a second role that is equally important. Democracy is susceptible to capture by a self-interested elite, and politics must not be solely a contest between dominant-elite special interests. The balancing force against runaway capture, in a democracy, is freedom of expression, together with freedom of association, which permit effective democratic participation, and are the true sources of the often touted “transparency” (whistle blowing) and “accountability” (popular opinion making).

Censorship, including censorship actuated with the pretext of preventing hypothetical harm, does not protect the individual.  It is a lockdown designed to frustrate the essential democratic process of expression, discussion, debate and argument, in an increasingly illegitimate and intolerant system. Its use by politicians in exploiting the oppression Olympiad in their partisan manipulations is unconscionable, as is its use in special-interest propaganda by litigation. 

For these reasons, the State must not provide laws that enable an influential elite in-effect to neuter vehement individual expression that has transformative potential. The State must not be allowed to thus erode and suppress individual agency. Instead, it is the duty of the State to protect individual freedom of expression. If democracy cannot be trusted, then there is no democracy.

Relation to recent work

In her 2018 book [3], Nadine Strossen brilliantly reviews the research showing that “hate speech” laws are harmful to society. While this scholarship brings current empirical support for abolishing “hate speech” laws, I don’t find it to be satisfying. We should not be reduced to making policy arguments regarding harm reduction in order to justify preventing the State from suppressing fundamental human freedom, or preventing the State from enabling elite interests and corporations from suppressing the said freedom. If history itself and the study of sociology[4] cannot inform us about the necessity to safeguard the fundamental human right of freedom of expression, then we are lost.[5]

Opposing “hate speech” law is not “free-speech absolutism”

Unfortunately, in the present climate of clamouring to ask the State to limit fundamental personal freedoms “for our own safety”, the arguments become polarized, and many have used the sophistry that the position of opposing the aberrant inherent features of “hate speech” law is equivalent to advocating for “free-speech absolutism”.  This is a false equivalency.

If the State were to strike down all “hate speech” laws, limit the codes of conduct to exclude “hate speech”, and strike down the common law of defamation (which presumes falsity, damages and malice), then there would still independently exist: the civil tort of malicious falsehood, the Criminal Code provisions against threats, coercion, intimidation, harassment, and so on; and all the laws against discrimination. The individual would not lose any of these common law, statutory and constitutional protections.

Limiting the State’s power to prosecute victimless speech crimes (presuming harm at large, and presuming causation) does not limit the State’s power to enforce crimes that have proven victims and cause, irrespective of the role of expression in these offences, and does not limit the individual’s means to obtain redress.

This article has been published at Dissident Voice, and at Research Gate.

Endnotes

[1] “Canadian defamation law is noncompliant with international law”, by Denis Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association report, 1 February 2016. http://ocla.ca/our-work/reports/canadian-defamation-law-is-noncompliant-with-international-law/

[2] “Towards a Rational Legal Philosophy of Individual Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 15 November 2016. https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/11/towards-a-rational-legal-philosophy-of-individual-rights/

[3] “HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship”, by Nadine Strossen, Oxford University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0-19-085912-1. http://www.nyls.edu/faculty/wp-content/uploads/sites/148/2018/04/endnotes.apr2818.pdf

[4] “Self-organization and time-stability of social hierarchies”, by Joseph Hickey and Jörn Davidsen, 29 January 2019, PLoS ONE 14(1): e0211403. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211403

[5] “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 7 September 2017. https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/

La géoéconomie et la géopolitique entraînent des époques successives de globalisation prédatrice et d’ingénierie sociale

https://lesakerfrancophone.fr/la-geoeconomie-et-la-geopolitique-entrainent-des-epoques-successives-de-globalisation-predatrice-et-dingenierie-sociale

L’influence des conditions géopolitiques et économiques globales sur le tissu des sociétés nationales et sur la psychologie individuelle est le plus souvent sous-estimée par les commentateurs civils, notamment en ce qui concerne les sociétés occidentales dites « libres et démocratiques ». Les militaires, en revanche, ne sous-estiment pas l’importance des facteurs commerciaux et économiques généraux sur le tissu même d’une société et sur la psychologie de ses citoyens, du moins dans les pays en développement ciblés. ²

Cet article a deux objectifs principaux.

Le premier est de démontrer dans quelle mesure le système financier global détermine la réalité nationale et régionale dans la vie et la sécurité des populations, y compris aux États-Unis et dans le monde occidental en général, en mettant l’accent sur les deux principales transformations de l’après-guerre, qui ont débuté en 1971, après l’annulation des accords de Bretton Woods, et en 1991, après la dissolution de l’Union soviétique.

Le second est de décrire le changement tectonique en cours qui a suivi la dissolution de l’Union soviétique en 1991 en des termes plus larges qu’on ne l’envisage habituellement, et comment ce changement motivé et coordonné a été chronologiquement accompagné par : une accélération spectaculaire de la « globalisation » commerciale et financière, et une campagne sans précédent d’ingénierie sociale des classes moyennes supérieures occidentales, visant à faciliter une exploitation opportuniste des nouvelles circonstances globales, par les États-Unis et l’élite globale, qui a abouti par contrecoup aux Gilets jaunes, au Brexit et à Trump… (Dans un sens, « les Russes l’ont fait. »)


Pour un « résumé des points clés » avec description des données socio-économiques à l’appui, voir la section Conclusion.

Denis Rancourt's conspiracy theory today about the world

By Denis Rancourt

I posted this on Facebook and it generated some interesting discussion.

This is just a conspiracy theory but I think there may be a war raging between (the) two Western elite factions these days:

(1) USA globalists who enforce the US dollar as the global currency, using violent intimidation and destruction, wherever judged necessary, tied to military industrialism and USA corporate interests, (motto: energy, etc. must be traded in US dollars, and we will print lots of dollars...) and

(2) more distributed (USA-UK-EU-G7...) financier globalists who manage the US dollar now but who could manage any global currency and who don't want a world of competing blocks not subservient to a unique world currency (motto: let us handle the money, for optimal stability and development). These boys are more artful at steering the UN, and at social engineering using global imagery (climate, gender equity, etc.), rather than nationalistic sentiment.

This working model helps to interpret many things. Both groups do not want a rising China and Eurasia that goes its own way with currency exchange. Group(1) wants to beat China/Eurasia (MAGA). Group(2) would prefer to entice China/Eurasia into a "more fair and balanced" global exchanges currency.

Republicans are more Group(1), Democrats and "liberals" more Group(2), educated at Harvard. You can put almost any Western leader into one or the other: Macron, Trudeau, Trump, etc. And the visible heads of the two groups are really showing their teeth more than usual. Eurasia is a huge pressure making them fight.

Israel, in my view, is clearly tied to Group(1). It exists by US dollar global currency to enforce said currency requirements in the ME.

Group(1) has the guns. Group(2) has the greater elite networks. Fascinating fight.

For related analysis see my report:
“Geo-Economics and Geo-Politics Drive Successive Eras of Predatory Globalization and Social Engineering: Historical emergence of climate change, gender equity, and anti-racism as State doctrines”, by Denis G. Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, OCLA Report 2019-1, April 2019.