The Bread And Circuses Are Winding Up

Panem et circenses is an ancient Roman phrase, attributed to the poet Juvenal, that means “bread and circuses.” The idea is that a degenerate society, once it has abandoned all higher values, has nothing left but bread and circuses. Take that away, and the society will fall apart. Our bread and circuses are in the process of being taken away.

The Roman Empire discovered that paying for public circuses was a great way of preventing civil unrest. If the people had an upcoming gladiatorial games to look forward to, they were much more likely to be content. When they didn’t have anything to look forward to, they tended to entertain thoughts of rebellion.

Eventually, the Romans found themselves unable to pay for more games, and that was the tipping point. The cessation of the circuses meant that the citizens got their entertainment from wrecking society instead, and that was the end of the Roman Empire.

The Western World appears to be going through a similar process.

Professional sports have replaced the circuses in the West, and most professional sports leagues have been severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. The English Premier League season lost three months, the Major League Baseball season lost 100 games, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, predicted that running the NFL later this year would be impossible.

In New Zealand, there hasn’t been a single All Blacks match so far in 2020, and it looks like there won’t be. There hasn’t been a Black Caps match since March, and there is no news of upcoming fixtures (although a tour to Bangladesh has supposedly been planned).

Even worse, the increasing politicisation of professional sport has seen many turn their televisions off. NBA viewership is down some 20% compared to this time last year. Although the linked article suggests injuries to star players may be the cause of the decline, the truth is that many viewers are sick of having political issues shoved in their faces.

People watch sport to be entertained. They don’t care about the political opinions of professional sportsmen, any more than they care to watch Donald Trump play basketball. They know the sportsmen are not educated intellectuals who study history and human nature. As such, their political opinions don’t need to be taken seriously.

Compounding the problem are blatant double standards when it comes to the political issues being pushed.

In an NBA match earlier this month, Los Angeles Clippers player Montrezl Harrell called Dallas Mavericks player Luka Doncic a “bitch ass white boy“. Although a white player calling a black player a “bitch ass black boy” would be a worldwide scandal, it appears that Harrell is going to avoid sanction entirely.

There might be an inherent demand for entertainment once a person’s basic survival needs are met, but it’s hard to be a white person and keep watching a sports league when you know that league explicitly endorses anti-white racial abuse. It’s a direct humiliation, and many sports fans have found themselves switching off instead.

As in ancient Rome, the lack of easily-available entertainment has led to people seeking it elsewhere, in more destructive ways. There is a direct link between the winding up of the American circuses and the widespread civil unrest there. Instead of finding entertainment in sport, people are finding it in other people getting shot and beaten to death.

More worryingly, the bread is also winding up.

When Juvenal spoke of “bread” he was referring to the grain dole, another Roman invention for defraying rebellious sentiments. Because of the psychological effect of starvation, hungry populations soon become violent. The Roman masses were pacified with free grain, then free bread, wine and pork.

When this food dole wound up, people started going hungry, and this led to even more trouble than the boredom. A bored person can get entertained quickly by setting something on fire; a hungry person won’t be satisfied until they kill someone. For the Roman ruling classes, to not dole out bread meant the collapse of their society.

The West doesn’t have a grain dole, but we do have a system of social welfare which has much the same effect. It’s also being scaled back.

In America, negotiations for a second stimulus check are in doubt, because Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on terms. The first stimulus check was granted because the coronavirus pandemic had destroyed many American jobs, but those jobs are yet to return, and therefore the economic stress has not gone away.

In New Zealand, the COVID-19 Resurgence Wage Subsidy – designed to have a similar effect to the American stimulus checks – is expiring later this week. The likely outcome is a high volume of job losses. Already the New Zealand economy has been hit hard by the near-total annihilation of our international tourism sector; further major job losses would cause widespread despair.

It’s possible that Donald Trump and Jacinda Ardern will extend welfare benefits, at least for now. But the largesse cannot be continued indefinitely. The New Zealand national debt was $US 59.6 billion in March this year, but has already blown out to $US 81.1 billion by September. They can’t keep borrowing money to keep the party going forever.

When these special coronavirus payments are stopped, the inevitable result will be an increase in the number of people taking to the streets in protest. Given how ugly sentiments already are, with multiple protesters having been shot dead in America over the past week, a wider collapse of order is a very realistic prospect.

In summary, society is held together by bread and circuses, and both of those are winding up thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. This phenomenon is occurring across the Western World, which suggests that we’re all in for some difficult times over the next 12 months or so.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2019 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 and the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 are also available.

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Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘Struggle Session’?

Sometimes it feels as if Clown World takes the worst aspects of other political systems and combines them all into one infernal whole. From capitalism we have taken soulless, materialistic overconsumption and from Communism we have taken resentment-fuelled narratives of hate. It is from Communism that Clown World has adopted struggle sessions.

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Communist revolutionaries formalised their systems of humiliation and abuse into what were known as ‘struggle sessions’. The target of a struggle session would be subjected to ritualised public degradation for an extended time, with the intent of breaking them down and making them submissive towards the Communist Party.

The idea was that certain wrongthinkers harboured opinions that threatened the viability of the Revolution. These counter-revolutionary ideas put everyone at risk, and therefore they had to be driven out. This was considered to be as much for their sake as anyone else’s, because a struggle session might prevent someone from being sent to a labour camp.

In reality, struggle sessions were used to destroy any and all enemies of the Communist Party.

Struggle sessions were banned in China after Deng Xiaoping came to power. But the demand for them didn’t go away. In Clown World they have been reintroduced, under various guises, to workplace training and education. As with Revolutionary China, they achieve the same objective: to eliminate wrongthinkers.

Today’s wrongthinkers are, as then, anyone who disagrees with Communist Party dogma. If you disagree with the dogma that human nature is a blank slate upon which anything can be written, or that evolution stops at the neck, or that past discrimination justifies and necessitates present discrimination, then you are a racist.

‘Racist’ has replaced ‘bourgeoisie’ as the label describing the chief enemy. All rightthinkers know that if we abolished borders, the world’s working classes would come together in an international brotherhood of man, ending suffering forever. People who believe in borders are wrongthinkers motivated by an irrational hatred for their black and brown fellows.

The desire to purge people of wrongthink prompted the Maoist struggle sessions. Since that desire still exists in Clown World, struggle sessions have made a comeback.

In Clown World, struggle sessions are repackaged as “anti-racism seminars”. Today’s leftists don’t give two shits about poor people anymore – they just want to persecute people they hate. Because they don’t care about the poor, their enemies are no longer the rich people in the landlord class. The enemy is any wrongthinker, even (or especially) working-class ones.

These seminars achieve precisely the same goals of the Maoist struggle sessions.

The most obvious way is by humiliating the enemies of the Communist Party. In today’s era of Brown Communism, the enemy is white people. In struggle sessions, white people are told that their moral values cause suffering, and are made to feel shame in an effort to get them to repudiate those values.

White people are told that their racism is the reason for all of the evils of the world. Without it, all of the world’s peoples would live in harmony. As such, anyone harbouring “lingering racist sentiments” has to have them ripped out – again, for their own sake as much as anyone else’s.

Possibly the most insane example of a Clown World struggle session was that inflicted on the staff of Sandia National Laboratories, a contractor involved in constructing America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

These workers were subjected to a struggle session in the guise of diversity training, during which the white males on the staff were made to apologise for their white privilege. They were also made to acknowledge a connection between white male culture and mass killings. This closely mirrors how educated people were made to apologise for all the ills of the world during the Maoist struggle sessions.

According to those running the struggle session, White Men as Full Diversity Partners, a willingness to work hard is white supremacist oppression that causes suffering to people of colour. Resourcefulness, self-confidence and a will to take the initiative are also signs of white supremacy.

Employees in the Seattle City Council have had to go through similar struggle sessions – but only if they were white. Non-white employees, not being the enemy, were exempt. The white ones were taught how they need to make themselves accountable to people of colour, a transparent attempt to humiliate.

Public sector workers in Australia and New Zealand are subjected to struggle sessions in the form of indigenous values training. Although these are presented as dispassionate sociological lessons, their real purpose is to sow doubt and confusion. In this sense, diversity training is the workplace equivalent of Drag Queen Story Hour.

A struggle session in England saw students at Glenthorn High School first segregated by race, following which white children were taught that their heritage was shameful, while black and brown children were taught the opposite. Struggle sessions are now just as common in education as in the workplace.

Ultimately, these struggle sessions are conducted against master morality. Maoism (like all forms of Marxism) is a slave morality, primarily motivated by resentment. Struggle sessions are intended to humiliate the targets of that resentment, so that the slaves feel less ashamed about themselves. In Clown World, the slaves call the tune.

This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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The Ultimate Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory

2020 so far has been the year of the Coronavirus, probably the biggest thing to happen to the world since World War II. As with every major event, plenty of bullshit has been spoken about it. This has led to an inevitable spate of conspiracy theories. This article describes the ultimate COVID-19 conspiracy.

Most conspiracy theories arise to explain otherwise inexplicable behaviour on the part of the ruling class. The great replacement theory arose to explain why Western elites allow so much mass immigration. Another theory suggests that cannabis prohibition was instituted to repress freethinking, not to protect mental health.

The ultimate coronavirus conspiracy theory arose in the aftermath of the economic damage done to Western societies by lockdowns. It isn’t easy to explain why Western rulers are willing to do so much damage to their economies for the sake of a virus that has a 99.7%+ survival rate. Some calculations suggest that the economic damage done by the lockdowns will kill more people than the virus.

One conspiracy theory has it that these lockdowns are part of a Communist revolution, in which the followers of Marx seek to deal a fatal blow to capitalism by destroying as many businesses as they can. The uncertainty created by the threat of further lockdowns has made many businesses go bankrupt, and some think this economic disruption may have been the goal all along.

This theory shares some features with the ultimate coronavirus conspiracy, but the ultimate one is more scientific.

Many climatologists contend that the Earth’s climate is being placed under intolerable stress right now. According to the theories put forward, the volume of industrial emissions getting pumped into the Earth’s atmosphere is so vast that it has started to heat up the planet. Earth’s temperature has spiked in recent years, and if we keep producing emissions at this rate it will continue to climb.

The problem: if the temperature of the planet would heat up by more than a few degrees, human life would no longer be possible. The ecosystems of the Earth are so finely balanced that any change in temperature will cause disruption and death. A two degree temperature rise would have catastrophic effects on food yields, and thus on the viability of human civilisation.

It follows from this line of reasoning that our current course of action is like being in a car that’s accelerating into a brick wall. The emissions we’ve already pumped into the atmosphere have raised the Earth’s temperature by 0.6 degrees, and half of those have been in the last 30 years. Another few decades of emissions will raise it by two degrees or more. If we don’t change course – and drastically – we’re all going to die.

It follows from that line of reasoning that any measure, no matter how extreme, is permissible if it achieved the goal of preventing ecological collapse. Reducing our industrial emissions is an imperative – if we don’t, we’re dead. It simply doesn’t matter how we do this. No price is too high to avoid ecological collapse.

The world’s industries produce their emissions as an inescapable byproduct of meeting the world’s demand for goods and services. The only way to reduce emissions to a level where the planet can survive is to reduce economic activity, perhaps by shutting down all of the advanced economies of the world.

Any idiot can anticipate that people would resist such a proposal. After all, we all know that when the elite ask us to make sacrifices, they don’t intend to make any themselves. An economic shutdown would primarily affect the already poor.

How, then, to get the world to accept a drastic reduction to their standard of living? As rulers have always known, put enough fear through a population and they’ll do whatever you tell them to. Author Michael Crichton described it simply: “Social control is best managed by fear.”

The usual sources of fear are absent this year. There is no sign of a war on the horizon, and the Muslims have been quiet since the Christchurch mosque shooting. So the ruling class had to go back to the tried and true: a pandemic.

The ultimate coronavirus conspiracy theory has it that the world’s ruling classes took the opportunity presented by the COVID-19 outbreak to dismantle the world’s economy under the guise of fighting the virus. The real motive behind the lockdowns is to reduce fossil fuel emissions. The coronavirus pandemic might have happened naturally, and might be a real thing with real victims, but the lockdown measures are only superficially related to the pandemic itself.

The true purpose of these intensely intrusive rolling lockdowns is to suffocate the world’s economic’s activity. This is why no-one cares about the severe GDP contractions: those are not drawbacks but objectives.

Even though socialist rulers like Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand or Dan Andrews in Victoria are successfully destroying capitalism in the areas under their control, the lockdowns aren’t a Communist conspiracy to destroy the West. Capitalism, and the economies of the world, are being destroyed to save the environment.

We can predict from this that the lockdowns will continue until living standards in the West are reduced to around the level experienced by Brazil today, or less. This might take five or ten years to achieve.

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Billy Te Kahika And The Donald Trump Effect

The rise of Billy Te Kahika continues to confound many. An article in E-tangata magazine described it as “The rise of Maori MAGA“. As this article will examine, what Te Kahika is trying to achieve with the New Zealand Public Party is not original. He is walking a similar path to that taken by American President Donald Trump.

The parallels between Te Kahika and Trump are many. The most obvious parallel is that both are despised by the mainstream media.

The mainstream media savaged Trump from the beginning. From the moment Trump won the Republican nomination they ripped into him, declaring him a menace to human civilisation. The major news shows became the Two Minutes’ Hate from 1984, only directed at Trump instead of Emmanuel Goldstein.

The reason for this mainstream media hate was that, being a nationalist, Trump was a genuine outsider. All nationalists are outsiders in today’s system, because today’s system represents the complete victory of globalist interests. Globalist narratives, especially around foreign investment, trade and mass immigration, are now standard.

In New Zealand, the mainstream media has turned its guns on Te Kahika. The New Zealand Herald wrote a hitpiece smearing him as a conspiracy theorist, The Spinoff wrote a hitpiece smearing him as a conspiracy theorist and Stuff called this “the conspiracists’ election“. Chris Trotter’s column for The Daily Blog this week howled for the Government to keep an eye on the maverick Maori.

Astute observers will have noted that Billy Te Kahika is hated by the same people who hate Donald Trump.

Vinny Eastwood is entirely correct when he says that the New Zealand mainstream media is owned by international banking and financial interests. These interests own almost every media outlet, apart from the independents like The Vinny Eastwood Show and VJM Publishing (who are, predictably, written off as “conspiracy theorists” by the mainstream).

Ownership of the mainstream media by international banking and financial interests is why those media are always pushing globalist narratives. The reason why they keep pushing mass immigration and refugee resettlement is because banking and finance interests profit from increased housing demand. The reason why they excoriate nationalists and freethinkers is because they threaten this extremely profitable arrangement.

Like Trump, Billy Te Kahika speaks honestly about how the mainstream media lies, and how it works with the Government to manipulate public opinion. Like Trump, the mainstream media treats the nationalist Te Kahika as a direct enemy. The international banking and financial interests hate nationalists above all.

All this explains why Te Kahika has so much support among Maoris. The E-tangata article linked at the top of this page, in its hysteria about white supremacists, neglects to mention the powerful nationalist sentiments held by Maori people. It is these sentiments that make people fall in behind Te Kahika.

Despite the relentless and enduring attempt made by mainstream political and media interests to divide the New Zealand people into a Maori part and a white part always at each other’s throats, the vast majority of Maoris have rejected separatist narratives. They think primarily in terms of roots. This means that they feel strong bonds of solidarity with white people who also have deep roots in New Zealand.

Dan McGlashan proved in Understanding New Zealand that Maoris are strong supporters of the nationalist New Zealand First party, more so than the supposed “old white racist” demographic (who tends to vote National). This, more than any other factor, explains why a nationalist like Te Kahika has so much support among Maoris.

At this point it could be countered that Te Kahika is a long way from winning, so it doesn’t matter anyway. His best result in any preferred Prime Minister poll so far was 1%, and even then he rounded up. But Trump was himself once a rank outsider.

Before he won the Republican nomination, Trump was priced at $100 to win the Presidential election on BetFair. To say he was an outsider is an understatement. He was an outsider among outsiders, perhaps even a joke candidate. But what he said resonated.

The public felt that Trump was brave enough to speak truths that had been kept from them by the corrupt political and media establishments. Although Trump was sometimes wrong – as when he accused Barack Obama of being born in Kenya – he was right enough of the time for people to see him as an alternative to the Establishment. In a time when the Establishment is hated, that was enough.

Every intelligent person knows that the political and media establishments lie all the time. The lies they told to justify the War on Drugs are exemplary. The lies they told to justify the Iraq War are obscene. The lies they continue to tell, in order to prop up a financial system that sees so many young people without hope of owning a home and raising a family, are murderous.

These lies are effective when the entire apparatus of propaganda is under globalist control. The problem today is that people like Trump and Te Kahika can use social media to evade that control. Josef Goebbels’s second principle of propaganda states that “Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority”. Te Kahika’s livestreams, like Trump’s tweets, get around all the gatekeepers.

When a people deprived of truth finally gets to hear some, the effect is like rainfall on a parched landscape. It makes the entire world come to life. This is the main reason why Te Kahika has got so much traction: he offers truth to those who have been deprived of it by the mainstream media. Te Kahika could go as far as Trump did: all the way to the highest position in the land.

The real Trump Effect was that the mainstream media’s hatred for Trump increased his support. Because the mainstream media are a collection of the most wretched, most shameless liars to ever exist, it stands to reason that if they tell you someone is bad, that person is probably good. As the mainstream media now turns itself to destroying Te Kahika, they might find that they propel him to victory instead.

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