From ancient times until the advent of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, countries and states around the world were ruled by the elites, whose wealth was accumulated by the exploitation of those they ‘ruled’ over. The discoveries of Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei, and the philosophies of great men like Hobbes, John Locke and Rene Descartes, began a revolution, however, that came into full flower in the middle of the 20th century.
Descartes is famous for the coining of the phrase cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) and in his Discourse on the Method of 1637 he posited for systematically disbelieving everything unless there was a well-founded reason for accepting it: the foundation on which REAL science is built.
The Age of Enlightenment followed the Scientific Revolution, roughly between the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and the French Revolution of 1789.
“The Enlightenment featured a range of social ideas centered on the value of knowledge learned by way of rationalism and of empiricism, and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity, constitutional government, and the formal separation of church and state.” (Wikipedia)
Such matters were discussed in coffee houses, Masonic lodges, literary salons and scientific academies. Its central pillars were religious tolerance, individual liberty and opposition to the absolute power of monarchy and the religious authorities.
James Hargreaves invented the steam-powered spinning jenny in 1764, which started the automation of textile manufacturing. James Watt invented his steam engine in 1776; an improvement on Thomas Newcomen’s attempt in 1712. Watt’s steam engines fast became a feature of many cotton mills
The Industrial Revolution started to gain pace. Mines used man/donkey/horse-drawn wagons on rails until Stephenson’s steam-powered “Rocket” locomotive carried passengers over the 13 miles or so between Stockton and Darlington in 1825. In 1830, the Liverpool to Manchester Railway was opened and began the replacement of UK’s canal transport system and the export of its railway engineering expertise across the world. The Morse code telegraph system between New York and Los Angeles was opened in 1861.
The “Great Stink” of 1858 motivated the authorities to do something about sewage and civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette supervised the construction of a sewage system that opened in 1865. It is still in use today. Isambard Brunel built railways, bridges, tunnels and iron-hulled ships throughout the 1800s. One of his ships was the first to be propeller driven, in place of paddle wheels.
So many important inventors, inventions and innovations have improved our prosperity and lifted great swaths of our populations out of poverty over the past 200 years. With all these advances societies have come alive and enjoyed live and recorded music, radio, theatre, the cinema and TV – and recently the introduction of social media.
Though ‘correlation is not necessarily evidence of causation’, there is surely sufficient evidence that compulsory education of children gave a kick in the pants to the progress of nations. How else could the Wright Brothers’ flying contraption in have evolved into the Boeing 747 only 66 year later in the same year man landed on the moon? How else could Einstein elucidate his Theory of Relativity in 1905 and Rutherford and Niels Bohr explain the structure of the atom, which contributed to the development of nuclear energy and ‘the bomb’. And how could Babbage’s “Difference Engine” of the 1820s have evolved into the computer we know today? None of those developments would have occurred if the landed gentry, city toffs, the mill and coal-mine owners and royalty had been able to continue to maintain their communal hold over the ‘great unwashed’.
The United Nations was founded in 1945 with the intent to maintain international cooperation and coordinate the actions of member nations (Wikipedia). Its offshoots, like UNESCO and the WHO, and partners like NATO benefit from financial contributions – bribes if you like – from many ‘influencers’, such as Bill Gates and George Soros.
Many politicians around the world share a common interest, too, not only in the UN and its many offshoots – ask Helen Clark, Jacinda Ardern, et al, – but also the owners of gigantic organisations like Blackrock and the shareholders and directors of worldwide corporations who attend Davos in Switzerland to worship at the feet of the World Economic Forum.
Yet, what class are these ‘politicians’ whom we now elect? Compared with all those practical-minded go-getters, inventors, thinkers and magnificent contributors to the betterment and welfare of mankind, who were steeped in a knowledge of science, technology, engineering and maths, most politicians in the Western countries are dullards possessing only qualifications in airy-fairy subjects like sociology, commerce, Māori studies and communications (Hello Jacinda!). But calculations and decisions made by a structural engineer can be accessed and checked years later and held accountable for a design failure that can prove catastrophic both in financial terms and loss of life. Yet: accountability for politicians?
These ‘qualified’ politicians have introduced a plethora of restrictive laws over the myth of ‘global warming’; they categorise what has been normal speech for centuries as ‘hate speech’; they favour certain groups who are indoctrinating school children into perverse ideologies and claimed that ‘The Science’ dictated shutting down the country, destroying the economy and criminalising citizens and workers, while secretly giving a favoured few a ‘pass’ on a substance that was not subjected to the rigorous procedures and tests required for new medicines.
Are these people fit to govern our countries?
While viewing a British attack in 1915 during the first world war, German General Max Hoffmann is alleged to have said the British were “lions lead by donkeys”.
“I believe we could lose up to 10,000 men if we mount a full frontal attack on their trenches, General.”
“Only that? A full frontal attack is probably worth giving a shot then. Signal the frontline chappies that the balloon’s to go up at dawn.”
That typifies the cavalier attitude of most Western politicians today; it’s a ‘collectivism’ that ignores the rights of the individual and groups of individuals, and it’s the precursor to full-on communism. Collectivism is certainly a contributing factor to the disintegration of health and other public services, both in NZ and the UK. ‘They’ are not interested in hearing voters’ complaints against their schemes until it causes them trouble at the polls. And even that probably no longer applies, given the relationship between the governed and their governors in recent years, and the momentum they have already built up chasing WEF objectives.
Contrary to the best interests of the electorate, our political representatives (we pay their salaries) and their so-called ‘civil servants’ have sold us down the river on a path that has been dictated by offshore interests.
The synchronised approach to Covid taken by the leaders of cooperating countries is surely a clue as to just how ‘democracy’ has been replaced by a top-down sort of managerialism, a form of despotism. When one adds other such scares, as ‘global warming’ with its many demands, the threatened arrival of ‘bird flu’ and ‘monkey pox’, the wokeness, including the throwing around of empty accusations like ‘racism’, ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘hate speech’, which are now apparently crimes and thus prosecutable, into the mix, then one can only suspect that it’s a connivance between our politicians, their puppet masters and their wealthy supporters. All in pursuit of the five hundred million target for the population of the globe, requiring the destruction of the world we know and a return to the desperate, poverty-stricken slum-like 16th-century London. Despite the amazing advances of the past 500 years, we will end up back where we started.
Where are our rights right now? They are wherever you are willing to draw that line and say DO NOT come across that line or I will kill you. THAT is where your rights are. They will get away with what you allow them to get away with. And until you draw that line and are willing to die for it, they will just keep taking and taking and taking, until there is nothing left to take and it’s all gone. And you are a slave.
William Cooper
