This is an introduction to a series of articles entitled 'Astroturfing the way for the Fourth Industrial Revolution'.
Here are the links to the other parts:
1) Dr Gail Marie Bradbrook: Compassionate Revolutionary… for hire?
2) Political Charities and the Brave New World of Professional Activism
3) Green Gail and the Technocratic Industrialists: Citizens Online’s Digitopian Nightmare
4) Extinction Rebellion and the Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
5) #XRSpaceJunk 5G & Citizens Online: Industry Agents, Digital Acolytes and State Agitators
For a current update on our research, read our latest article here:
6) UN-Extinction: A Guide for the Perplexed
Some Inconvenient Truths about Extinction Rebellion and the Climate Mobilisation movement
A message in a bottle...
Dear Reader,
We’d guess that you were drawn to open this link for one of two reasons:
- You’re sympathetic to the goals of Extinction Rebellion and the broader ‘climate mobilisation’ movement, and want to know why we’re criticising it.
- You’re suspicious of or opposed to the same, and are looking for evidence to bolster your sentiments.
Before going any further, know that our motivation for producing this piece of research is as follows:
We’ve been involved in environmental activism for some years, are personally acquainted with people in the networks we’re discussing, and fully support their goal of protecting our planet’s ability to sustain complex life. With that said, we’ve felt for some time that the groups that make up the ‘climate activism movement’ are majorly amiss in how they’ve been going about achieving said goal, which led us into doing in-depth research into their activities. We’ve been consistently amazed by what we’ve been finding, and as a result feel obliged to share this with others.
We have put hundreds of hours into creating this presentation, without the prospect or expectation of financial reward; our only hope is that it serves as a wake-up call to the many well-meaning people who’ve accepted what they’ve been told at face value about what stands behind these groups. We appreciate that those of you who’ve found a sense of shared purpose and camaraderie through participating in them will likely find it difficult to engage with what we’re presenting. We can only assure you that our intent in doing this is not malevolent, and suggest that you suspend any initial judgment, examine the material thoroughly, and try not to allow your discernment to be clouded by a sense of group allegiance.
And to those who are reading this because they aren’t aligned with these groups: we believe that much-needed criticism of the environmental movement in no way negates the basic premise of environmentalism: that humans cannot go on destroying and polluting the soil, water and air of our home indefinitely. Human beings, like all life forms, are inextricably linked to our environment, and what we do to it, we do to ourselves. If for some reason you’ve been led to believe otherwise, we’d suggest looking into the subject more deeply.
The Investigation
What we’re presenting here is a complex ecosystem, so before we can arrive at a big picture, we’ll need to look at various aspects in turn. Let’s not beat around the bush: there’s a fair bit of material here. If you want to appraise it properly and understand how we’re being misdirected, then you’ll need to set aside some time to do so. After all, the 'educational' system and mass media have been drip-feeding us with pernicious lies for all of our lives; hence it takes a certain amount of commitment to deconstruct and then re-examine those truths we hold as self-evident. (Please note, we have used hyperlinks to provide further background for our claims.)
The greedy bastards who are, ultimately, the subject of our investigation, have in many cases been in this game for multiple generations; and their forebears took care [1] to capture the press, schools and academia a long time ago. In recent years, things have decentralised somewhat with the advent of the internet, but the simultaneous erosion of people’s attention spans has compensated for this, and serves these parties very well. You are of course welcome to close this window and go back to checking your Facebook feed, watching Netflix, or whatever else it was you were doing before you came here; but for those prepared to take a walk with us through this perplexing landscape, there’s work to be done.
At this point it’d be worth giving a brief insight into what led us to embark on this journey ourselves. Having been actively involved in environmental and land rights campaign groups whose membership directly overlapped with that of the Climate Camp, Occupy and related movements - which in many ways prepared the ground for the current groups - we already had a bad taste in our mouths from what we’d witnessed in those circles. Which is to say, that what was passing itself off as 'horizontal non-hierarchical consensus-based decisionmaking' was in our experience anything but; leading us to ask ourselves further questions, and pay attention to what the rare dissenting voices that dared to speak up had to say. Hence, when the buzz around Extinction Rebellion began to circulate through our networks, we were already on the lookout for signs of it being (yet another) controlled opposition group. And find them we did.
The first major clue came in the form of a presentation [2] given by Gail Bradbrook, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion (XR for short - the main British group advocating for Climate Mobilisation) at Off-Grid Festival a number of years ago, promoting her Compassionate Revolution/ Rising Up! concepts/brands. In it, she referred to Otpor!, the ostensibly 'grass-roots' instigators of the Serbian ‘Bulldozer Revolution’ of 2000, as ‘just a bunch of kids’. She also spoke glowingly of Gene Sharp, whose strategies were applied in that and each of the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ that subsequently swept through various parts of the globe, culminating in the Arab Spring, which in turn inspired many to participate in the Occupy movement.
Notice a pattern?
What she failed to disclose to her audience is the fact that Otpor!, the groups it subsequently spawned in other countries, and Gene Sharp, were all funded by the National Endowment for Democracy: an American NGO whose activities run parallel to the regime-change objectives of the US government, widely considered [3] to be a ‘plausibly deniable’ above-ground arm for CIA meddling. Another notable oversight from her talk was any mention of what replaced the corrupt governments that these activist movements toppled: slick neoliberals, passing 'reforms' that enabled the rapid re-organisation of their economies to suit western multinationals; and in the case of Egypt, the coming of the Muslim Brotherhood to power - later to be replaced by the military dictatorship of al-Sisi, which persists to this day.
Furthermore, it is now known (by way of Wikileaks’ ‘Global Intelligence Files’) that one of the leaders of Otpor!, Srdja Popovic (who after his success in Serbia went on to found CANVAS, a ‘revolution consultancy’ and receive substantial funding from NED for organising groups in other countries) is well-connected to STRATFOR [4], a private intelligence firm “that gathers intelligence on geopolitical events and activists for clients ranging from the American Petroleum Institute and Archer Daniels Midland to Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Northrop Grumman, Intel and Coca-Cola.”
STRATFOR is widely considered to be the private security division of the American intelligence services. Founded in 1996, STRATFOR came to prominence during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 when its ‘cutting-edge analysis’ provided everything that the mainstream news networks needed to know. The company’s geopolitical analysis on the ‘war on terror’ is head-lined by the likes of the Associated Press, Reuters and the BBC. Without going into great detail (that we’ll do later), an influential figure within STRATFOR named Ronald Duchin promulgated a formula for incapacitating anti-corporate activist movements, which Max Wilbert, in his book 'We Choose to Speak & other essays', describes as follows:
“STRATFOR advocates are dividing movements into four character types: radicals, idealists, realists, and opportunists. These camps can then be dealt with summarily: First, isolate the radicals. Second, "cultivate" the idealists and "educate" them into becoming realists. And finally, co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry. This is how movements are neutralized: those who should be allies are divided, infighting becomes rampant, and paranoia rules the roost. To combat these strategies, we must understand the danger they represent and how to counter them.”
As unlikely as this may sound to some of you, we would contend that isolating the radicals, educating the idealists into becoming realists, and co-opting the realists into agreeing with industry is precisely what the Climate Mobilisation movement is engaged in doing. Fear not - we'll be providing ample evidence for our accusation below, and in the articles to follow.
And lest you feel that we're placing undue emphasis on Gail Bradbrook's reference to the events in Serbia, we'd like to point out that Gene Sharps's long-time employee Jamila Raqib (who has now become the Executive Director of Sharp's Albert Einstein Institute, following his death) just so happens to sit on the Advisory Board of 'The Climate Mobilization' - a group set up by Extinction Rebellion's 'Director of Fundraising', Margaret Klein Salamon.
https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/advisory-board
Jamila Raqib.
In addition, if we look at the references/further reading list in XR co-founder 'Roger' Hallam's 'How to Win' [5] (on which much of XR's strategy appears to be based) he names Popvic's 'Blueprint for Revolution' as "the KEY TEXT!":
"A must read on how good organisation and a determination to have fun are the key to mass participatory action to bring down autocratic regimes – from the people who have done it, so you can’t argue with that! Again note that the context is taking on dictators – but as the subtitle implies – these mechanisms and techniques enable you to “change the world” – and increasingly they apply to the political realities of the western “democracies”."
Well, they certainly 'did it', we'll give you that much. Given that XR are promoting the ‘colour revolution’ model, it stands to reason that an essential component of this model would be (as it was with the 'colour revolutions') the financial backing of those who stand to benefit from the changes brought about by such 'activism'; as well as the collusion of the bought-and-paid-for media that serve those interests. And yes, that very much includes The Guardian - those charming cheerleaders [6] for ‘liberal’ imperialism. As it happens, it appears that this very same model is about to be rolled out in Venezuela [7], as America tries to install its puppet, Juan Guaidó, to enable more efficient extraction of Venezuela's oil resources
In 2011, Journeyman Pictures released a 27-minute documentary called 'The Revolution Business', which provides a rare view behind the facade of the manufactured 'colour revolutions'. Considering how closely XR appears to be following their lead, we reckon that you might do well to take a look at it.
As far as we’re concerned, there's nothing whatsoever spontaneous or grass-roots about the 'climate mobilisation' that's currently being promoted all over the mass media. Mirroring what happened with the 'colour revolutions', idealistic youth are simply being herded into pre-approved movements, to create the illusion of a popular mandate for what the ruling classes have already determined to be the best course of action for preserving their dominance and control: carbon taxation, ‘smart’ cities, the 5G/ internet of things surveillance grid, AI, depopulation, and new investment opportunities in what’s being called the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (‘renewable technologies’, dependent on very limited rare earth minerals and heavily polluting mining operations, combined with health-damaging microwave technologies), as well as ‘carbon capture’/trading scams.
If any of this is either new or doubtful to you, then an essential piece of preliminary reading is Cory Morningstar’s The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent [8] series. Her website contains a wealth of research into the collusion between NGOs and the agents of empire. While one may not share all of the author’s political convictions, this is irrelevant, since we can find no fault in her detailed indictment of contemporary environmentalists’ collusion with the ruling classes. Speed-read if you must, but if you want to be in with a chance of understanding this mess, then don’t neglect to look at her work.
Here it would serve to underline the following point, as expressed by a certain Gavin Nascimento: "The problem is not that there is a lack of money, food, water, or land. The problem is we've given control of these resources to psychopaths." Colluding in the schemes of those who have dispossessed you, which they've specifically designed to bestow upon themselves an aura of benevolence, is unlikely to yield much in the way of meaningful results. While climate groups make some token gestures towards serious economic reform, it's clear that these points are low in their list of priorities, and will be the first to be jettisoned for the sake of 'the greater good'. The dichotomy between 'nationalist chauvinist imperialism' and 'benevolent globalist imperialism' is an entirely false one; what neither of them challenges is the dominance of the rigged financial system that continues to concentrate the world's wealth into the hands of an extremely small number of people.
Captain Monobot and the Planeteers
Our own research has as its focus groups based in Britain, since that’s where we’re from, and in particular the group known as ‘Extinction Rebellion’. Riding on the back of extensive publicity in The Guardian, courtesy of everyone's favourite attack-dog [9] 'ethical' imperialist journo George Monbiot, as well as on BBC News, social media platforms and within activist networks, the movement launched itself very publicly on November 12th 2018 with activists glueing themselves to the doors of the Department of Energy offices in London, and spray-painting slogans on the windows.
They have since convened numerous nonviolent 'swarming protests' all over Britain, employing tactics designed to maximise visibility and media exposure such as the blockading of roads and bridges, and the resultant arrests of participants. They are demanding that “the UK government immediately declares a climate and ecological emergency; reduces to zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, and creates a citizens’ assembly to oversee these changes”. They have also encouraged people in other countries to take up their cause; the hope appears to be that the movement will 'catch on' in a similar manner to how the Arab Spring or 'colour revolutions' did, bringing nations to a standstill and thus forcing politicians' hands.
Their website [10] states that from April 15th, they intend to take their activities to the next level: "thousands of rebels will peacefully block streets in Central London – where the UK’s politicians, media, people and money are concentrated – until the government agrees to meet and seriously discuss the crisis with us."
"At 11am on Monday 15 April we are inviting you to gather in Parliament Square. We will take our message to the British Parliament and the Government asking for a meeting to seriously discuss our demands for emergency action. If there is no response we will set up camp in Parliament Square and several other key locations in Central London. Please bring a tent and food. (...) If there is still no agreement to meet we will split into groups and sit down in numerous roads going into central London, effectively blocking road access into the centre of the city."
There are a number of players involved in XR. To try and understand where this group has come from, and where it might be going, we’ve looked into their biographies and who they associate with, then branched out into related areas. The research will be released in a number of strands, beginning with our investigation into XR co-founder Gail Bradbrook.
Given that you'll very likely be hearing a lot more about XR in the weeks to come, we cordially invite you to our next article, where you'll be able to learn many things about them you'll quite likely not be hearing anywhere else.
[Click here for part 1]: Dr Gail Marie Bradbrook: Compassionate Revolutionary… for hire?
Please note that we also have a page on Facespook, which you can 'like' or 'follow' to be kept up to date on new articles (assuming that the Al-Gore-rithims permit it): https://www.facebook.com/UNExtinction/
SteemPresss'd from Nowhere.News : See Original Article @ http://nowhere.news/index.php/2019/04/01/astroturfing-the-way-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/