‘The World Shifting Beneath Our Feet’The birth pangs of the 'totalitarianism of disintegration' are quickeningBy Rod Dreher
May 26, 2022
Another day of the Internet — well, the part of it I look at anyway — filled with exhortations to ban all guns, or something like it, to stop things like the Uvalde shooting. I’m not a Second Amendment absolutist, and I probably support more gun sales restrictions than most of my conservative friends do. But I think that most of this talk is people demanding Advil to deal with a headache caused by a brain tumor. I know somebody who is suffering real pain right now, with an obvious medical condition that is treatable, but this poor person refuses to see a doctor out of fear of what the doctor will say. My mom has been like that too, for all her life.
If every gun in America not in the hands of law enforcement were to disappear magically tomorrow, we would still be a country that was disintegrating. I’m going to tell once again a story that is familiar to you longtime readers, but which has been on my mind since yesterday. You who are familiar with this story can skip the next few paragraphs. I’ll put it inside a quote, so you can easily pass over:
Back in 2002, on the first anniversary of 9/11, I woke up early in Brooklyn to walk behind the bagpiper band (NYPD, I think) marching to Ground Zero. It had been arranged that a piper band would leave each of the five boroughs and march to Ground Zero, converging just before the ceremony on the grounds started, reading the names of the dead. It was to start at precisely the moment the first plane hit.
I was walking there with a journalist friend (with whom I lost touch ages ago). When we got to Ground Zero, we split up. At exactly the moment the first plane hit, a fierce wind came up, from exactly the direction that that first plane flew. There was a hurricane far offshore, not threatening land, but this was the first (and only) effect New York City got from it. The timing was bizarre; I looked at my watch to make sure it was for real.
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I walked back home to Brooklyn. In an hour or so, my journalist friend called, and urgently asked me to come over. I walked up to her place, and she took me into her home office. She showed me a small antique American flag that was framed under glass, hanging on her wall. It was split down the middle. I asked her what I was looking at. It just appeared to me to be a damaged antique.
She said, “I’ve had that for years. When I got home today from Ground Zero, it had torn down the middle.”
Nobody had been in her house that day. The flag remained behind glass, sealed within a frame that had not been tampered with.
As Christians, the symbolism of this was staggering to us both: in the Gospels, when Jesus died, the veil in the Temple separating the Holy of Holies from the people, spontaneously tore in half — a sign that the covenant between God and His people had been broken, but also that, from a Christian point of view, the true veil, the God-man, had been murdered, but this act symbolized a new relationship between God and humankind.
Anyway, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in a single generation after that. I think that I wrote about it at the time in National Review, though I can’t find the archive. Looking back now, 20 years later, I think I saw a sign, a prophecy. What brought it to mind was yesterday, having lunch with one of my old teachers, who said that the things that have come over this country over the last twenty years have been hard to make sense of.
Now, read this interview by Jonathon van Maren with the pseudonymous writer N.S. Lyons, published in The European Conservative. Lyons writes a must-read, subscriber-only Substack newsletter of geopolitical analysis, titled, The Upheaval. I’ve corresponded with him (I guess it’s a male), but all I know about his identity is that he works in the foreign policy sphere in Washington. Van Maren speaks with Lyons about the condition of the world today. Lyons explains that Russia’s disastrous Ukraine invasion has caused the acceleration of a new order within the West. Lyons says:
This new order is also likely to be fundamentally technocratic, power centralizing, and anti-federal. There can be no dissention in the bloc, or it risks falling apart; if EU-U.S. unity breaks or Europe fragments then this whole order would collapse, and we’d move back to a more equal U.S.-China rivalry. So, to cut to the chase, internal dissent from official values is going to be tolerated less and less. As part of that, I expect this order to be vertically integrated, with a focus on digital control, and make public-private partnership a core part of its operating system. In other words, I’d expect far more movement toward ‘harmonizing’ digital regulations (i.e. on censorship), ESG standards, formal and informal sanctions, and digital currency systems across the Atlantic.
More:
How likely is it that we will see centralized digital currency and ID and the corresponding threat to the rights of those who oppose fundamental tenets of progressive thought arrive in the next few years?
I think very likely. Both the Biden administration and the EU have described digital currencies as an urgent priority. In part, I think they fear the massive sanctions levied against Russia will encourage other countries to try to begin using digital currencies (and in particular the digital yuan, which is currently the most advanced) to start circumventing dollar/euro supremacy. To make sure this doesn’t happen, multiple central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB), the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan, have begun cooperating to ensure their new central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can be easily convertible. This would make staying within that currency system very convenient and unavoidably attractive for global capital.
It just so happens that CBDCs would provide governments with totally unprecedented surveillance and control over all transactions, wherever in the world they occur, in real time. It would make fine-grained control of economic incentives—say setting limits over how much anyone can spend on fossil fuels each week before their money stops working or begins to have less purchasing power—much simpler, along with making tax evasion and any other illicit financial activity impossible. We’ve already seen a recent example in Canada of how useful this kind of control over financial activity could be to enforce ideological political control.
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Read the whole thing. And do subscribe to The Upheaval. Lyons’s most recent essay there, “The World Order Reset,” is worth the price of subscription alone. It’s long, pungent, and clarifying. The thing that jumps out at me the most is his explanation for why the West is going to push for Central Bank Digital Currencies, which would give the state total control over all financial transactions. If you are, like me, a reader of the Book of Revelation, this is the long-prophesied moment in which refusing to take the “mark of the beast” means you can no longer buy and sell. Lyons, of course, doesn’t mention Biblical prophecy, but it is impossible for a Christian who takes prophecy seriously not to read this Lyons passage in light of it:
Were Trans-Atlantis, with its preponderant share of the global economy, to establish a system that allowed for instant conversion, transfer, and data sharing between their various digital currencies and central banks, this could form the keystone of a new era of centralized power. Not only would it allow for new, unpresented methods of direct, granular financial control, but it would help to head off any long-term decline in the use of the dollar and the euro by ensuring there could be no alternative that was remotely as valuable for global commerce. It would, in effect, represent another re-founding of the global monetary and financial system equivalent to the establishment of the Bretton Woods system that cemented the first century of American power.
And, with a CBDC system in place, a market-dominant, vertically integrated Trans-Atlantis seems like it would be in a strong position to demand much of the world play by its standards and conform to its values. But what would those values be?
The Binary is Real
Are you a small nation yearning to live free? Or a regular Joe from small-town Lubelskie/Midlands/Maharashtra/Oklahoma who just wants to be left alone to grill and raise a family with the same values as your father and his father before him? Well I have some bad news for you: Trans-Atlantis is not going to leave you alone until you’ve been thoroughly enlightened. Pluralism might in principle be an old liberal value, but today there is no liberal West anymore. We are moving beyond the liberal international order, and the successor order has a successor ideology all lined up – one that it is going to be very insistent that you follow.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/ns-lyons-world-shifting-beneath-our-feet-paul-kingsnorth-live-not-by-lies/
