One word describes 2018: exhausting.
It was exhausting because of its politics. It was exhausting for its excesses. It was exhausting due to its wanton and gratuitous display of impunity.
The larger perspective offers only cold comfort. The world is teetering toward totalitarian rule. Human rights are being pushed to a corner (nay, to the sewers), barrel of the gun on its head. Today, the imagined rights of the State have taken precedence over the inalienable rights of man and woman and child.
The concept of human dignity, on which these inalienable rights were shaped and formed, had taken a back seat for the more palatable idea of peace and order. Anything that goes against the official line suffers from persecution: anything from being Muslim to Christian, gay to lesbian, drug user to drug peddler, to say little of being poor and destitute, is fair game.
The boots of capitalist tyranny have begun to sound off its approach. We have been warned by the likes of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin decades back, but we refused to listen. Ironic that the penultimate defiance to Marx’s (or even Mao’s) tenets comes today from the largest and most powerful Communist regime: The People’s Republic of China.
No matter how deliberately we prepare ourselves to struggle against these bullies, to defy its grip on, and impositions over our lives, the inevitable has happened: a New World Order.
It’s goal? Behind its “noble” claims of fighting social ills such as drug trafficking and the threats of terrorism and insurgency, its hidden motives are quite easy to detect: Steal land, resources, produce and, when given the chance, our national sovereignty.
In order to achieve this takeover, conspiracy theorists believe these scoundrels in power must first consolidate their forces. Wholesale theft of large-scale resources and lands cannot be accomplished by one man or entity. No less a conspiratorial effort should start the ball rolling.
These rogues will have to work together (regardless of their seeming hatred for each other) to achieve their goals of global control. Tyranny, violence, murder, and genocide are weapons of choice. Laws and lies to propagate the imagined rights of the State over and above the rights of the citizenry will be used to pull the wool over our eyes. To render us unable to see: that’s the first step.
Second is to keep the numbers down. A bloated global population could work against their goals on two points: one, the continuing use of natural resources to cap the needs of the global population could put these tyrants’ goals in jeopardy. They have to have more for them and less for the rest of humanity.
The other, a global resistance.
Imagine 99% of the global population rising in protest against the wealthy and powerful 1%: that could be a bit of a tragedy. Hence, the necessity for government-sanctioned wars, genocides, wholesale death. This theory forms the crux of what has been hailed by conspiracy theorists as the world’s compass: The Georgia Guidestones.
The Georgia Guidestones stand with an elevation of 750 feet above sea level in Elbert County, Georgia in the United States. The message inscribed in these huge stones, written in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and Russian, maintains that world population, in order for humanity to survive and be “in perpetual balance with nature,” must remain within the 500 million mark.
While much of what is inscribed in the Georgia Guidestones encourage the rule of law, preservation of human rights, and rational thinking, tyrannies all over the world were said to have used the population number as an excuse for genocide.
We all stand as witnesses to the brutality of Myanmar state against the Rohingya, the annihilation of the Syrians by its own government, China’s crackdown against Chinese Muslims—the Uighurs, U.S. President Donald Trump’s white supremacist crackdown on American minorities, Israel’s conflict with Palestinians, Russia’s persecution of all things religious (against the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for one), and the Duterte administration’s war against the Communists, Lumad (indigenous people of Mindanao), the Catholic Church, and the Filipino poor.
You might have noticed by now that a major shift from a war against “terrorists” to a war against the marginalized has begun. Why the indigent and poverty-stricken? Because they are the easiest to vilify, kill and annihilate. They form society’s outcasts, the great unwanted. They are perceived as refugees—aliens and stateless–different on the whole, thus without means to protect their interests from those who fancy themselves the “mainstream”.
Are we today witnessing what several centuries ago were mere conspiracy theories? I’m just as clueless perhaps as most of you. As a journalist, I’m not one to believe in conspiracy theories. I am beholden to facts, those that can be proven without a shadow of a doubt. Something inside me, however, cringes each time I read the papers. It’s as if someone or something is wielding the baton and these rogues in government are all dancing to the tune. They all remind me of what had been said decades ago, along dark corners, in hushed tones.
No one in his right mind should believe these conspiracy theories, yes. But ask yourselves the question: Are they really that improbable?
The holiday season should give us pause. The world is standing on the brink of a battle the likes of which we’ve not known. The French kicked off its resistance against corruption and brutal taxation measures weeks ago, and the Yellow Vest revolt has now spilled over into Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Greece, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and even Canada.
Some are saying that the Yellow Vest movement is an Alt-Right movement formed to crush liberal democracy. Others, that it is the world raising a fist against bureaucratic corruption.
Whatever the movement tries to accomplish, this much is clear: world governments are positioning to seize what is not theirs to take—our own government, not the least. What are we, as Filipinos and as part of the global community of free nations, going to do about it?
Isang Mapagpalayang Bagong Taon sa ating lahat. G
