Globalism: MINDSPACE - From 9/11 to The Great Reset Matrix

[grarpamp]

'Reset' This!

https://americanmind.org/salvo/reset-this/
by Michael Walsh via AmericanMind.org,
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Great-Reset-Eighteen-Theses/dp/1637586302
https://posthillpress.com/book/against-the-great-reset

“The following is an excerpt from Michael Walsh’s forthcoming book,
Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order,
which will be published by Bombardier Books and be available October
18, 2022. Walsh has gathered a series of essays from among eighteen of
the most eminent thinkers, writers, and journalists—including the
American Mind’s own James Poulos, as well as Claremont Senior Fellows
Michael Anton and the late Angelo Codevilla—to provide the first major
salvo in the intellectual resistance to the sweeping restructuring of
the western world by globalist elites.”

Part I: The Problem

What is the Great Reset and why should we care? In the midst of a
tumultuous medical-societal breakdown, likely engineered by the
Chinese Communist Party and abetted by America’s National Institutes
of Health “gain of function” financial assistance to the Wuhan
Institute of Virology, why is the Swiss-based World Economic Forum
(WEF) advocating a complete “re-imagining” of the Western world’s
social, economic, and moral structures? And why now? What are its
aspirations, prescriptions, and proscriptions, and how will it
prospectively affect us? It’s a question that the men and women of the
WEF are hoping you won’t ask.

This book seeks to supply the answers. It has ample historical
precedents, from Demosthenes’s fulminations against Philip II of
Macedon (Alexander’s father), Cicero’s Philippics denouncing Mark
Antony, the heretic-hunting Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem¸ and the
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Nietzsche contra Wagner. Weighty
historical issues are often best debated promptly, when something can
yet be done about them; in the meantime, historians of the future can
at least understand the issues as the participants themselves saw and
experienced them. Whether the formerly free world of the Western
democracies will succumb to the paternalistic totalitarianism of the
oligarchical Resetters remains to be seen. But this is our attempt to
stop it.

So great is mankind’s perpetual dissatisfaction with its present
circumstances, whatever they may be, that the urge to make the world
anew is as old as recorded history. Eve fell under the Serpent’s
spell, and with the plucking of an apple, sought to improve her life
in the Garden of Eden by becoming, in Milton’s words, “as Gods,
Knowing both Good and Evil as they know.” The forbidden fruit was a
gift she shared with Adam; how well that turned out has been the
history of the human race ever since. High aspirations, disastrous
results.

The expulsion from the Garden, however, has not discouraged others
from trying. Indeed, the entire chronicle of Western civilization is
best regarded as a never-ending and ineluctable struggle for cultural
and political superiority, most often expressed militarily (since that
is how humans generally decide matters) but extending to all things
both spiritual and physical. Dissatisfaction with the status quo may
not be universal—timeless and static Asian cultures, such as China’s,
have had it imposed upon them by external Western forces, including
the British and the Marxist-Leninists—but it has been a hallmark of
the occident and its steady civilizational churn that dates back at
least to Homer, Plato, Aeschylus, Herodotus, Pericles, and Alexander
the Great, with whom Western history properly begins.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, assaying the inelegant Koine, or
demotic, Greek of the New Testament in Beyond Good and Evil, observed:
“Es ist eine Feinheit, daß Gott griechisch lernte, als er
Schriftsteller werden wollte—und daß er es nicht besser lernte”: “It’s
a particular refinement that God learned Greek when he wanted to
become a writer—and that he didn’t learn it better.” Nietzsche, the
preacher’s son who became through sheer willpower a dedicated atheist,
was poking fun at the fundamentalist belief that the Christian
scriptures were the literal words of God himself (Muslims, of course,
believe the same thing about the Koran, except more so). If something
as elemental, as essential to Western thought as the authenticity of
the Bible, not to mention God’s linguistic ability, could be
questioned and even mocked, then everything was on the
table—including, in Nietzsche’s case, God Himself.

With the death of God—or of a god—Nietzsche sought liberation from the
moral jiu-jitsu of Jesus: that weakness was strength; that victimhood
was noble; that renunciation—of love, sex, power, ambition—was the
highest form of attainment. That Nietzsche’s rejection of God was
accompanied by his rejection of Richard Wagner, whose music dramas are
based on the moral elevation of rejection, is not coincidental; the
great figures of the nineteenth century, including Darwin and Marx,
all born within a few years of each other, were not only
revolutionaries, but embodied within themselves antithetical forces
that somehow evolved into great Hegelian syntheses of human striving
with which we still grapple today.

Wagner, the Schopenhauerian atheist who staggered back to Christianity
and the anti-Semite who engaged the Jew Hermann Levi as the only man
who could conduct his final ode to Christian transfiguration,
Parsifal. Charles Darwin, ticketed for an Anglican parsonage but
mutating into the author of On the Origin of Species, The Descent of
Man, and all the way to The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the
Action of Worms. Karl Marx, the scion of rabbis whose father converted
to Lutheranism and, like Wagner for a time, a stateless rebel who
preached that the withering away of the state itself was
“inevitable”—and yet the state endures, however battered it may be at
the moment.

It’s fitting that the “Great Reset of capitalism” is the brainchild of
the WEF, which hosts an annual conference in the Alpine village of
Davos—the site of the tuberculosis sanatorium to which the naïf Hans
Castorp reports at the beginning of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, The
Magic Mountain. Planning to visit a sick cousin for three weeks, he
ends up staying for seven years, “progressing” from healthy individual
to patient himself as his perception of time slows and nearly stops.
Castorp’s personal purgatory ends only when he rouses himself to
leave—his Bildungsreise complete—upon the outbreak of World War I, in
which we assume he will meet the death, random and senseless, that he
has been so studiously avoiding yet simultaneously courting at the
Berghof.

Central Europe, it seems, is where the internal contradictions of
Western civilization are both born and, like Martin Luther at
Eisleben, go home to die. And this is where the latest synthetic
attempt to replace God with his conqueror, Man, has emerged: in the
village of Davos, in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland: the site
of the annual meeting of the WEF led by the German-born engineer and
economist Klaus Schwab, born in Ravensburg in 1938, the year before
Hitler and Stalin began carving up Poland and the Baltics.

Once more into the breach, then: behold the present volume. In
commissioning sixteen of the best, most persuasive, and most potent
thinkers and writers from around the world to contribute to our joint
venture, my principal concern has been to offer multiple analyses of
the WEF’s nostrums and in so doing to go poet Wallace Stevens’s
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” a few better. Then again,
given the surname of the WEF’s chief, perhaps a better, more potent
literary citation might be Margret’s little ditty from the
Büchner/Alban Berg expressionist opera, Wozzeck (1925): In’s
Schwabenland, da mag ich nit—”I don’t want to go to Schwab-land.” Nor,
as Hans Castorp’s journey illustrates, should anyone wish to visit
Davos-land if he prizes his freedom, his possessions, and his sanity.
To the Great Resetters, we are all ill, all future
patients-in-waiting, all in dire need of a drastic corrective regimen
to cure what ails us.

In these pages, we shall examine the Great Reset from the top down.
The eminent American historian Victor Davis Hanson begins our survey
with “The Great Regression,” locating Schwab’s vision within its
proper historical context. He is followed by Canada’s Conrad Black and
America’s Michael Anton and their views of capitalism and socialism,
with not a few attacks on conventional, osmotic wisdom that will both
surprise and enthrall. Britain’s Martin Hutchinson outlines the
contours of the Reset’s “Anti-Industrial Revolution,” even as the
American economist David Goldman confronts both Schwab’s notion of the
“Fourth Industrial Revolution” and China’s immanentizing its eschaton
in real time, along with the Red Dragon’s commitment to the upending
of Western civilization and its own Sino-forming of a post-Western
world.

American writer, editor, and publisher Roger Kimball tackles the
implications of a neofascist Reset in his essay, “Sovereignty and the
Nation-State,” both of which concepts are under attack in the name of
“equality,” its totalitarian successor “equity,” and the political
consequences of our re-embrace of Rousseauvian concepts as applied to
governments. British historian Jeremy Black discusses the misuses
toward which the study of history has been and will be put to by the
Resetters. The late Angelo Codevilla contributes what alas became his
final essay, “Resetting the Educational Reset,” to sound the tocsin
about the dangerous left turn of the once-vaunted American educational
system, now reduced to a shrill, sinistral shell of its former
dispassionate glory.

>From Down Under, the Philippines-born Richard Fernandez twins two
eternally competing faiths, religion and science; the American-born,
Australian-based political sociologist Salvatore Babones contributes a
remarkably clear explication of the kinds of transportation feasible
under the “green energy” regimen the Reset seeks to impose upon us,
and its practical and social implications. Writing from Milan, Alberto
Mingardi, the director-general of the Istituto Bruno Leoni, gets to
the heart of the Great Reset’s deceptive economic program with an
essay concerning faux-capitalist “stakeholder capitalism” and its
surreptitious replacement of shareholder capitalism in the name of
“social justice.”

The Great Reset, however, is not strictly limited to matters
financial, pecuniary, or macroeconomic. Social and cultural spheres
are of equal importance. James Poulos looks at the Reset’s unholy
relationship with the predatory Big Tech companies that currently
abrogate the First Amendment by acting as governmental censors without
actually being commanded by an act of Congress or, increasingly, an
arbitrary presidential mandate. From British Columbia, noted Canadian
author and academic Janice Fiamengo weighs in on the destructive
effects of feminism upon our shared Western culture while, on the
lighter side, Harry Stein examines the history of American humor—which
in effect means worldwide humor—and how the leftist takeover of our
shared laugh tracks has resulted in a stern, Stalinist view of what is
and what is not allowed to be funny.

The British writer Douglas Murray has a go at the permissible future
of Realpolitik under the panopticonic supervision of the Reset, the
Chinese Communist Party, and the Covid hysterics, while the American
journalist John Tierney lays out the road to civilizational serfdom
that the unwarranted panic over the Covid-19 “pandemic” has triggered
during its media-fueled run between 2019 and 2022. My contribution, in
addition to this Introduction, is an examination of the Reset’s—and,
historically, elitist tyranny’s—deleterious effects on Western
culture: the very thing that gave birth to our notions of morality and
freedom.

At its heart, the Great Reset is a conceited and self-loathing
central-European blitzkrieg against the cultural, intellectual,
religious, artistic, physical, and, most of all, moral inheritance we
have received from our Greco-Roman forebears. This has been latterly
shorthanded, with the rise of “wokeness,” to “white” culture.
Typically racialist, if not outright racist, the cultural Marxists
behind wokeness insist on reducing humanity to its shades of skin
color and then claiming that although all skin colors should achieve
in exact same proportions to their share in a given population, some
skin colors are better than others and any skin color is preferable to
white. It’s a deeply repellent principle that masquerades as a
perversion of Judeo-Christianity but is in fact a simultaneous attack
on individuality and merit that seeks to roll back the scientific and
cultural advances of the past two millennia, wielding both science and
culture as weapons against our shared technological and moral
heritage.

The goal, as always, is power—the eternal fixation of the socialist Left…