As IF Times

Who doesn’t despise politicians? It’s a profession as ancient as the “oldest” one and the similarities are quite striking. They both claim to make your life better; they tell you things you want to hear; but in reality, they both cost you money and in many cases, you’re actually worse off.  In reality, the true purpose of both of their jobs is to get you to use them again.

Nothing has changed much in our lifetime except that the compensation for being in the political racket has vastly outpaced the compensation from the more pedestrian ‘oldest’ profession. In fact the ability to enrich themselves is quite a remarkable skill since politicians are able to parlay somewhat nominal salaries into improbable fortunes during their terms.  They all seem to have miraculous money management skills; at least personally.

In practice, politicians come and go, at least in so-called democracies. The premise is that if the citizens are not amused with the activities of the incumbents, they get tossed out at the next election; provided of course that they actually hold an election.

If only it were that simple.  What politicians leave behind, even as they leave the active theater of politics are often an enormous legacy of bureaucrats that continue to operate without controls.  People who populate bureaucracies are fully aware that once a trajectory has been initiated on a program, then it becomes almost impossible to stop, even with changing political faces.

Bureaucracies have become effectively a fifth column. While ostensibly created to facilitate the wishes of politicians, with time, they become their own arm of influence, not accountable to the electorate.  This reality was brought into stark focus recently with the revelations of the expenditures of USAID, an organization created to “spread American goodwill”. There’s more than enough discussion of disclosures involving their expenditures over the decades in previous articles and elsewhere, so no need to enumerate them here.

Bureaucracies are a social and economic malaise that infects all nations of course.  In the possibly future 51^st state of Canada, the growth of public sector employees between 2019 and 2023 grew by 13 percent; 3.6 times the growth in the private sector. These kinds of bureaucracies serve to make life difficult for those having to deal with them.  Think the motor vehicle licensing station on a super scale.

But the activities of another more dangerous bureaucracy has revealed itself recently and that is the European Union.  Some may be aware that originally this body was formed to look after the economic interests of the nations within the European Union.  The main purpose was to ensure economic activities passed smoothly between nations and to create internal rules for such.  How big need this body be?  Each nation sends a few reps and you get some accountants to work the numbers.  That would seem logical.  But in a recent interview with Viktor Orban, the president of Hungary, he revealed that the EU bureaucracy now numbers over 30,000 employees.  So for each of the 27 nations represented in the EU, that amounts to over 1100 bureaucrats per nation. As an aside, the number of employees estimated at another world bureaucracy, the UN, numbers over 133,000.

Well you may say, it’s Europe, they love their bureaucracies, their holidays and their social systems, so it’s no big deal.  Of course, we can accept that, since they can spend their money as they wish.

Of more sinister issue is that the EU have expanded their area of influence to dictating policies to their member states that have nothing to do with trade, or that  involves non-members such as Ukraine.  Suddenly, the unelected bureaucrats are now directing political and military policies as well. Thus, rather than permitting member nations to retain their own identity, they are all being forced to comply with edicts issued by the unelected tyrannical bureaucrats effectively removing nations’ constituents from decision making.  This was starkly demonstrated recently when they decided to suspend Hungary’s voting privileges for reasons of ‘solidarity’; ironically supposedly fighting for European democracy.  They have confused themselves with NATO.

Suddenly, an organization that was formed to police agricultural and marketing policies internally are now mandating military expenditures to fight the imminent existential threat of Russia! The EU, a trade organization, has been allowed to morph into a political entity not beholden to the wishes of their own member nations.

As we’ve observed here in the US, the taking back of power and influence from entrenched bureaucracy will not be easy. The structures took generations to build and they cannot be dismantled without severe pushback from entrenched interests. We’ve seen the image of Musk wielding a chainsaw to this monstrosity in the US to the horror of bureaucratic beneficiaries.  It would appear that a bit of horror is needed at the EU.

link https://autistocrates.substack.com/p/aristotle-on-tyranny?utm_source=url

There’s an old saying that “there’s nothing new under the sun”.  For those interested, that line is taken from a passage of the Bible, under Ecclesiastes (1:4-11 for those researching)  In the passage, the reference was more about the consistency and predictability of life and of people.

The human experience can be viewed the same way of course and history has shown that basic elements of human nature always manifest themselves in almost predictable fashion.

As far back as Aristotle’s time, the reality of some people desiring to control other people has been a common trait among all societies.  In fact, he accurately describes the method by which tyranny takes over a society.

“Their first end and aim is to break the spirit of their subjects. They know that a poor-spirited man will never plot against anybody.”

“Their second aim is to breed mutual distrust. Tyranny is never overthrown until people can begin to trust one another; and this is the reason why tyrants are always at war with the good. They feel that good men are dangerous to their authority, not only because they think it shame to be governed despotically but also because of their loyalty to themselves and to others and because of their refusal to betray one another or anybody else.”

“The third and last aim of tyrants is to make their subjects incapable of action. Nobody attempts the impossible. Nobody, therefore, will attempt the overthrow of tyranny, when all are incapable of action.”

An essay discussing this is in the link above.

So, we can see that the methods by which tyrannically minded people use to control passive people have all but been prescribed since Aristotle’s time and likely before then.

This is an interesting perspective as we view the happenings of the world in the past two years through the constants of human behaviour. We refer of course to the chain reaction of events spawned over 2 years ago (!!) by a supposedly deadly virus.

Using fear as the big stick, the majority of the world’s societies fell lockstep into protocols which were implemented essentially at the behest of one man.  Truly amazing when you think about it.  An entire planet of 7 billion people had their lives uprooted by the utterances of ONE man. Fear of the unknown was the means by which entire nations were cowed into protocols that, today, are laughably comical.  But in the absence of real data, it was easy for the people who supposedly knew better to create rules out of thin air.

Fast forward to our present day, a full two years after the original alarm about a global catastrophe which would cause death on a scale only seen in video games and NONE of the projections have played out in any way whatsoever. Ironically, the real tragedies show up in the so called remedies to the virus.

What’s even more amazing is how the narrative has morphed seamlessly into protocols which have nothing to do with a generally benign virus.  Even as evidence piles up from nations worldwide that the ‘pandemic’ is over and that measures taken during the threat were proven useless, certain nations, notably the ‘free’ western nations of the US, Canada, France and Germany are doubling down on measures having no link to illnesses.  Odd how the virus is only deadly in wealthy nations.

To cite one example, the Canadian government took the extraordinary ( and illegal) measure of restricting citizens’ bank accounts if they were deemed to be anti-government operatives. This characterization would include a waitress who donated $10 to a freedom rally.

Clearly the agenda has moved from containing a virus to containing and controlling entire populations.  As we now know, the methods being used are timeless… and timelessly effective.