It is a propitious moment for the equivocal enterprises of all the false mysticisms which mingle materialistic sensuality with spiritualistic confusions. For the spiritual forces are invading everything . . . . It can no longer be said that the modern world is lacking in the supernatural. All sorts and varieties of it can be seen appearing; and the great evil to-day is no longer materialism and scientism, it is an unbridled spirituality. But the true supernatural is none the more recognised. “Mystery” envelops everything, and is installed in the sombre regions of the ego it ravages, at the centre of the reason it drives away from its domain. Everybody is ready to reintroduce it everywhere, except in the divine order in which it really resides.
Thus wrote the Catholic Henri Massis, -1927. Defence of the West, trans. F. S. Flint (London: Faber & Gwyer, )
Agamben—-The accomplice and the sovereign
Speech to the DU.PRE commission of 28-XI-2022
I would like to share with you some reflections on the extreme political situation we have experienced and from which it would be naive to believe that we have escaped or even that we can escape. I believe that not all of us have realized that what we are facing is more and more than a flagrant abuse in the exercise of power or a perversion - however serious - of the principles of law and public institutions. I think we are rather faced with a shadow line which, unlike that of Conrad's novel, no generation can believe it can cross with impunity. And if one day historians investigate what happened under the cover of the pandemic, it will turn out, I believe, that our society had perhaps never before reached such an extreme degree of brutality, irresponsibility and, together, of decay. I used these three terms rightly, tied today in a Borromean knot, that is, a knot in which each element cannot be untied from the other two. And if, as some not without reason maintain, the seriousness of a situation is measured by the number of killings, I believe that this index too will be much higher than we believed or pretend to believe. Borrowing from Lévi-Strauss an expression that he used for Europe in the Second World War, one could say that our society has "vomited itself up". This is why I think that for this society there is no way out of the situation in which it has more or less consciously confined itself, unless something or someone puts it into question from top to bottom. that is, a knot in which each element cannot be untied by the other two. https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-il-complice-e-il-sovran
Then we have courtesy of the Lioness of Judah a Judicial decision that points directly to the heart of the matter. Summary and Commentary by Br. Alexis Bugnolo
In a decision that was expected and feared, after the Council of State appointed one of Mario Draghi’s personal lawyers as a member of the Constitutional Court, the Court decreed the end of all semblance of order, rights, democracy, and justice in the Italian Republic.
For in a case that sought to overturn the decrees of the last two governments which by a dictate of the President of the Council of Ministers (that is the name for the Italian Prime Minister) imposed the outrage of an obligation to receive the DeathVaxx upon all sanitary workers, police, and teachers, the Constitutional Court judged yesterday that it was not unconstitutional for him to decree an obligation to be DeathVaxxed for any specific class of Italian residents.
The 5 legal experts who brought the case in defense of their client’s rights to bodily autonomy, emphasized all the glaringly constitutionally contrary aspects of these decrees of the past governments.
Alas, to no avail.
Even at their request that judges appointed by the past two governments be recused, the president of the Court defiantly refused all discussion.
The sentence regarded the decrees of the Conte and Draghi governments, but it has set a diabolic monstrous precedent.
So now the Italian Republic is no longer even a state or legal convention. One party, the political elite, has arrogated to itself the right to murder, maim, and genetically transform everyone in Italian territory.
What does this mean for Italians?
It means that they now have the natural and Christian RIGHT and DUTY, to no longer obey the government in anything, to not pay any taxes whatsoever, to report nothing to the government, to bear any kind of arms, whatsoever, and to undertake any moral means to overthrow the Italian Republic, even with the use of violent force.
I advise everyone who cannot stomach what is about to come to get out of Italy. And I have myself resolved to flee at the soonest possibility: as it is pure insanity to risk living in a territory where you can be lawfully murdered at any moment.
Italians are universally shocked to the core by this sentence. They now literally have no legal recourse to any other action than flight or violent revolution. And it is not me, who is saying it, it’s being said from the heights of the Alps to the shores of Sicily.
There is talk of reforming the Constitutional Court, since, as I hear, one cannot impeach its justices. But I think it is unrealistic to think the political class, given such power, will ever give it back. Those politicians who embrace this ruling may, however, be signing their death warrants if a revolution breaks out.
The only way to avoid civil disorder, as far as I can see, is if the present government of Giorgia Meloni announces immediately that they will introduce a bill to change the rules of the Constitutional Court, effectively reforming it in one manner or another.
TRANSLATION of Tweet below: If the Constitutional court passes the Vaccine Obligation, civil war will break out: let everyone descend into the piazza in every city of Italy every Saturday, until they undo such a verdict authorizing the State to commit genocide.
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Marcello Veneziani is an author and a commentator. His most recent book is not in English. The 2022 book is called the Hood. What world do we live in? We have lost the sense of the present and are no longer able to have a general vision of reality. It's like we're under a hood. You feel its weight, even if it has no features and no borders, it is ineffable and enveloping. The Cape hides the beauty, the greatness, the symbol, the myth, the sacred, the real world».
A hood envelops the world and takes away vision and breath. We have slipped from an open society to a covered society, trapped in a global system that controls and corrects everything: nature, the sexes, health, history, language, thought, religion. Bioliberal to death, but in a regime of total surveillance. Meanwhile, the Great Mutation is looming. To pierce the asphyxiating pall that oppresses the mind and the world, it is necessary to equip oneself with a special sword.
Then in two articles he neatly captures feelings about this moment—The Beheaded World-https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/loccidente-decapitato/
Who rules in the West? Where are the leaders who lead the West, Europe and the United States? Perhaps for the first time in contemporary history there is no leader who represents, expresses and guides the West. Without going too far back in history, there are no longer figures like Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan , but also in his own way Trump, who represent the leadership of the major Western power. But even in Europe, after Kohl and Mitterrand, Thatcher and Blair , and even Angela Merkel , there is no European leader. Macron and Scholz are barely leaders of the French and German nation, but they fail to represent Europe and to think and act as Europeans. Last acting, I'm a faltering, faded, elderly gentleman by nameJoe Biden and a distinguished lady, Ursula van Der Leyen , who is barely a carer in Europe. But there is no one who expresses the West at the top and indicates its strategy. An autopilot and an answering machine today seem to guide the fate of power. Behind them, I would say above them, there are only functional apparatuses, military and financial, and greater impersonal powers. The rest is represented by the great giants of the web and their mythical founders, acronym AFGAM- Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, plus Tesla/Twitter, and little else. And then the large military industry, NATO, large finance, the large energy and pharmaceutical industries, international food, and other multinationals.
But the scepter of power is not associated with any sovereign, not even temporary, much less elective, that is, expressed by popular sovereignty. This absence of leadership also corresponds to an absence of models, of guidelines, of guiding ideas of the West. Leaderships were once associated with economic models – liberalism, labourism, social democracy, the social market economy, and even the Christian democratic or socialist inspiration. After Reaganomics and Thatcherite liberalism, there is no longer a reference model, much less a dialectical confrontation between two or more ways: there is only the reality of a single model, macroliberal, turbo-capitalist, garnished with a single ideology, of liberal, humanitarian and progressive bill. But there is no longer any competition of models, nor even a visible reference to a state and a sovereignty; there is only the real and global domination of a command system, which presents itself as unique, irreversible, unsurpassable. There is no right or left, conservatives or progressives, with respect to this impersonal, headless and polycentric system, and it is only madness to even hypothesize its critique or even its overcoming; I'm not saying the possibility of a revolution but also just the attempt to reform it. It is given as in nature, if not as a form of monotheism descended upon earth, without the possibility of discussion or amendment. All this is also presented as the absolute realization of freedom; therefore calling it into question means attacking freedom and dreaming of going back, retreating to experiences, regimes, ideologies of the past. Never seen a freedom conceived as a Single Model, one way, one way.
https://www.marcelloveneziani.com/lo-scrittore/interviste/siate-scontenti-ma-con-la-vostra-testa/ Today the world rests on those who accept fate but walk on the legs of the discontented. What happened in the second half of the last century that plunged us into the hell of our discontent?
The discontent of wealthy society exploded after '68. It was the other face of the welfare society. Since then there has been an attempt to push discontent back into the private dimension, to transfer it from politics, from protest to the reasons for individual dissatisfaction. Once upon a time, power did not want disgruntled subjects because they were potentially rebellious. The new power, on the other hand, pilots discontent, solicits it, because dissatisfaction generates dependence on the level of consumption but also on the biological level. Changing nature, sex, city, body, becoming someone else becomes the obsession that arises from discontent.
Discontent as the fruit of the convergence between spiritual malaise and historical malaise. Can you expand on the concept?
There is an inner discontent that affects the human condition, our mortal being, exposed to pain, old age and disease, no longer having the policies of the past (faiths, religions, civilizations, etc.). And there is a discontent derived from external causes, therefore historical, civil, political and which changes into discontent by making itself public. The two evils intertwine and generate that frustrated and dissatisfied humanity which is prevalent today.
Discontent means unlimited desire. But if discontent is methodical and unsystematic, can discontent perhaps be a starting point?
Of course, I distinguish between discontent as a permanent state that borders on insatisfaction and discontent as a spring, an energetic drive to change things. In that case it becomes a starting point.
ACCORDING TO BAUDRILLARD, what has happened in postmodern culture is that our society has become so reliant on models and maps that we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the map. Reality itself has begun merely to imitate the model, which now precedes and determines the real world: "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory" ("The Precession of Simulacra" 1). According to Baudrillard, when it comes to postmodern simulation and simulacra, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” ("The Precession of Simulacra" 2). Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that postmodern culture is artificial, because the concept of artificiality still requires some sense of reality against which to recognize the artifice. His point, rather, is that we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice. To clarify his point, he argues that there are three "orders of simulacra": 1) in the first order of simulacra, which he associates with the pre-modern period, the image is a clear counterfeit of the real; the image is recognized as just an illusion, a place marker for the real; 2) in the second order of simulacra, which Baudrillard associates with the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, the distinctions between the image and the representation begin to break down because of mass production and the proliferation of copies. Such production misrepresents and masks an underlying reality by imitating it so well, thus threatening to replace it (e.g. in photography or ideology); however, there is still a belief that, through critique or effective political action, one can still access the hidden fact of the real; 3) in the third order of simulacra, which is associated with the postmodern age, we are confronted with a precession of simulacra; that is, the representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum.
Baudrillard points to a number of phenomena to explain this loss of distinctions between "reality" and the simulacrum:
1) Media culture. Contemporary media (television, film, magazines, billboards, the Internet) are concerned not just with relaying information or stories but with interpreting our most private selves for us, making us approach each other and the world through the lens of these media images. We therefore no longer acquire goods because of real needs but because of desires that are increasingly defined by commercials and commercialized images, which keep us at one step removed from the reality of our bodies or of the world around us.
2) Exchange-Value. According to Karl Marx, the entrance into capitalist culture meant that we ceased to think of purchased goods in terms of use-value, in terms of the real uses to which an item will be put. Instead, everything began to be translated into how much it is worth, into what it can be exchanged for (its exchange-value). Once money became a “universal equivalent,” against which everything in our lives is measured, things lost their material reality (real-world uses, the sweat and tears of the laborer). We began even to think of our own lives in terms of money rather than in terms of the real things we hold in our hands: how much is my time worth? How does my conspicuous consumption define me as a person? According to Baudrillard, in the postmodern age, we have lost all sense of use-value: "It is all capital" (For a Critique 82).
3) Multinational capitalism. As the things we use are increasingly the product of complex industrial processes, we lose touch with the underlying reality of the goods we consume. Not even national identity functions in a world of multinational corporations. According to Baudrillard, it is capital that now defines our identities. We thus continue to lose touch with the material fact of the laborer, who is increasingly invisible to a consumer oriented towards retail outlets or the even more impersonal Internet. A common example of this is the fact that most consumers do not know how the products they consume are related to real-life things. How many people could identify the actual plant from which is derived the coffee bean? Starbucks, by contrast, increasingly defines our urban realities. (On multinational capitalism, see Marxism: Modules: Jameson: Late Capitalism.)
4) Urbanization. As we continue to develop available geographical locations, we lose touch with any sense of the natural world. Even natural spaces are now understood as “protected,” which is to say that they are defined in contradistinction to an urban “reality,” often with signs to point out just how “real” they are. Increasingly, we expect the sign (behold nature!) to precede access to nature.
5) Language and Ideology. Baudrillard illustrates how in such subtle ways language keeps us from accessing “reality.” The earlier understanding of ideology was that it hid the truth, that it represented a “false consciousness,” as Marxists phrase it, keeping us from seeing the real workings of the state, of economic forces, or of the dominant groups in power. (This understanding of ideology corresponds to Baudrillard's second order of simulacra.) Postmodernism, on the other hand, understands ideology as the support for our very perception of reality. There is no outside of ideology, according to this view, at least no outside that can be articulated in language. Because we are so reliant on language to structure our perceptions, any representation of reality is always already ideological, always already constructed by simulacra. https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism/modules/baudrillardsimulation.html
Discontent - hmmm.. I think it is more like people have gotten lazy and their boredom has led them to be discontent so they want to play "let's see what all we can make happen." When bored and not busy, people go looking for trouble. Isn't there some saying about "idyll hands" and such? So has this happened by both the globalists and those who consider themselves "elites" as well as those who have spent much time watching t.v. or on the computer. Isn't what is happening part of what happened to Rome, to Sodom and Gomorrah? There is no question about what happened to them all. Everyone decided that they'd "go along to get along" - even when things got crazy. I believe that you are right in your decision to get away from a doomed situation. However, at some point not everyone can run. Like my husband said - If there is a choice between something chasing me and threatening my life and my standing and at least fighting, I'd have a better chance at fighting - I'm a slow runner.