Can the West turn the tide of tyranny?

‘Totalitarian systems have always been maintained primarily by systematic indoctrination and propaganda, injected into the population on a daily basis via mass media (without mass media, it is not possible to generate such long-lasting mass formation as that which gave rise to Stalinism and Nazism). This way, the population is literally kept on the vibrational frequency of the voice of totalitarian leaders.’ Prof Mattias Desmet

The major threat to the Western world today, to my mind, is neither pandemic, climate change nor even nuclear war, but the curtailment of established freedoms under a creeping totalitarianism.

We see it on many fronts at governmental level, both national and local: in proliferating proposals for population surveillance and control (digital ID, digital currency, vaccine passports, ‘smart cities’, ‘15-minute cities’), in consequential loss of privacy, in censorship and the erosion of freedom of speech and expression, in the insistence on establishment narrative and orthodoxy, in the stifling of debate across all sectors (notably in science and medicine), in interference with food production, in the over-reaching hubris of the unelected but dismayingly influential World Economic Forum and World Health Organisation.

When and where did electorates ever vote for all this?

The dangerously narrow-minded belief that all society’s problems can be solved by technology has brought about a cohort of elitist power-hungry technocratic ideologues, including many political leaders, who are buying into the totalitarian narrative –which, at the extreme, presents the daunting prospect of a transhuman future under the dubious claim that the human condition can be enhanced by merging people with advanced technologies.

This is the big picture which, while in its contempt for ordinary people’s lives and livelihoods it threatens an unholy combination of Chinese-style communism and neo-fascist meritocracy, is essentially technocratic and corporatocratic in nature. Wider recognition of this scenario, and the building of popular resilience to it, is necessary in the face of a crisis of values, lest populations succumb.

It does seem that the West is at a critical turning point in its history when it comes to personal freedom, human…