Item: there’s “panic on the streets of Dublin,” and typical elite recourse to slogan-talk to compose the Official Version of what happened. (Try this experiment: find a way to toss the phrase “far-right” into as many utterances or thoughts of yours as possible, say, 527 times in a single day, and see if you are more intelligent, or less, at the end of it.)
Item: from the same elites, at least the ones with the means and connections to have been selected as the “representatives” of the Irish, there’s now also brazen repudiation of the liberal-democratic principles of free speech, enacted into law.
Item: The info being gathered by activists and journalists about our own Censorship Industrial Complex just keeps getting worse and worse, and we still encounter not a smidgen of repentance from progressivist leaders.
I recall Minister Hempf, the Minister of Culture of East Germany in the Lives of Others, when he menacingly interrupts the playwright George Dreyman speaking of a certain director being blacklisted by the regime, with
“Blacklisting? We don’t do that here. You should choose your words more carefully.”
Our Democrat masters and their underling supporters say it to us constantly, that censorship is not something that is happening here, no matter how much evidence stacks up, showing that it is, and in utterly unprecedented ways and amounts. A legal scholar and former Democrat like Jonathan Turley, in the piece on the Irish law I linked to above, can speak of “the emergence of the Democratic Party as a virulent anti-free speech party,” and they simply deny, deny, deny, and sometimes threaten. The evidence is never addressed.
Item: in New Zealand, a man named Barry Young is arrested, for releasing the public’s data to the public, for trying to stop the silent massacre of our time. Steve Kirsch does his best to make an event of the release, as does a (now in hiding!) NZ activist-journalist Liz Gunn, and Covid-19 vax-harm dissidents like Igor Chudov debate among themselves about the quality of the data, with a consensus beginning to emerge in its favor. Of course, among our Official Media, and our Official Conservatives, there is no debate about the arrest or the data. For these items are not even acknowledged to exist.
Item: there will likely be no mention also from either our Pravda (MSM, incl. Fox) or from our Supservatives (definition here), of the two-hour session held this evening in Britain’s Parliament at the behest of Andrew Bridgen. A preview here:
And don’t miss the most disgusting part of this, 3:15 and following, where the narrator speaks about the fact that he cannot say the “v-word” (vaccine) nor even the “j-word” (jab), lest youtube take his video down.
All of this is to provide some context to the fact that here in sedate Utah, our Provo Great Books Club has been reading various poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a couple of our more conservative members found themselves kind of agreeing with the revolutionary sentiments in one of them. We’ve been preparing to tackle Shelley’s long “Prometheus Unbound,” as the capstone to our Hesiod-Aescyhlus-Plato series on the Prometheus myth; so far, “Mont Blanc” has been the highlight of our studies, but a number of us also read one of his more political poems, “The Mask of Anarchy.”
Scholars tell us that many 19th-century socialists and communists cherished it, sometimes reciting it at their gatherings. That makes sense, as it was Shelley’s response to the Peterloo Massacre, and contains stanzas like these:
'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell,
**
`So that ye for them are made
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,
With or without your own will bent
To their defence and nourishment.
For the two mentioned members of our group, both of them opposed to Marxism and hesitant to assume that Shelley’s assessment of the state of affairs in Britain circa 1819 was entirely sound, the overall spirit of the poem nonetheless felt apropos to the present state of things. While aware that the sufferings and degradations of the non-elites today cannot approach those of the working-classes of the early Industrial Revolution, the two conservative readers (one of whom was moi) nonetheless felt that lines like these spoke rather too well to our own times:
And Anarchy, the Skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.
**
For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the sceptre, crown, and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.
And here’s the finale:
‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number--
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you--
Ye are many -- they are few.'
Strange days when a couple of Utah conservatives find themselves stirred by this!
The pair of stanzas I quote prior to the finale are stanzas 19 and 20; to my mind they speak about the tendency of the despotism-mainstreamers of our day to mask themselves behind respectability. Here, I’ll mar one of them with my own updating, speaking of that grinning Skeleton-man:
For he knew the Legislations
of our Reps were rightly his;
His the gavel, gown, and booted feet,
and every button that Deletes.
Well, one more “item.” I’ve recently been devouring this book, a late 2021 one—the title alone sold me.