The Green Gulag
The former Soviet Union was one extensive prison ecosystem obscured behind a crude, cruel and vulgar iron curtain. Within the vast territory of the USSR there was an archipelago of formal prisons storing a myriad of offenders. They were warehouses of expendable labor units. If they were not common criminals of the robbery, murder, and rape variety, most of them were in the gulag colonies because they voiced skeptical views of the Communist Marxist/Leninist or Stalinist ideology. Communist deniers or communist skeptics in today’s vernacular. They would not conform to the ideas made flesh by the revolutionaries who were promising a utopian vision of equality, fraternity, and prosperity for the working classes. Those not in the formal prison system were never-the-less prisoners with just enough tastes of freedom, which every totalitarian ecosystem serves up to keep the elites of the revolution at the top of the privilege pyramid. This continues today in what is left of the Soviet promise called Russia but remains veiled as Churchill described by “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
Carl Jung said it best when he stated that people do not have ideas, but that ideas have people. For 75 years the ideas fermenting in the Soviet Empire intoxicated tens of millions of serfs with the spirits of security, stability, and equality promised by an elite vanguard of ideologues. These intellectuals enchanted and bewitched the illiterate Slavic masses with a myriad of words in their manifestos, their manuscripts, and their orations. Their rhetorical skills were sublime and terrifying. They infected audiences with their parasitic idea viruses to quote Professor Gad Saad. And those that could not be so beguiled or contaged, were conscripted through fear and terror punctuated with indiscriminate murder.
This vast tapestry was woven together with an evanescent diversity of truths, half-truths and lies. It was a miracle it held together as long as it did and is a monument to human gullibility. It is also no wonder that the term “slave” arises from the Slavs themselves. They seem to have a genetic predisposition to servitude. Even now, Russia’s residents, especially the Muscovy descendants celebrate doing penance under Tsar Putin and the Russian Orthodox church. And lest you forget, Stalin was a seminary student who knew what was required to manipulate a gullible and illiterate audience. To this day, Stalin deserves sainthood in many Russian’s eyes.
My father did a six-year stint in one of the Soviet gulags, because he came from a family of Ukrainian Kulaks, and he had a sardonic wit. He survived, but the middle brother never came home. The eldest brother, not imprisoned, managed to escape to America as did my father after first becoming a German prisoner of war on top of his adventures in a Soviet timber harvesting resort. They had not yet heard of “forest bathing.” Safe zones for snowflakes were not even whispers on the horizon. After all, this was Siberia, the frigid timeless expanse of nullity.
This is why I have standing to write about the Green Gulag. I am the epigenetic expression of an original Gulag survivor and escapee from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My mother was a Ukrainian peasant who survived the Holodomor, or “holodovka” as she referred to it, the little famine. Even safe zones and trigger warnings would not have shielded anyone from survival cannibalism.
My green credentials: I have spent the past 50 odd years working as an artist and naturalist in the environmental wildlife genre. I do not represent wildlife as do conventional painters and sculptors. I present it live, working with raptors, and as The Bard wrote, “In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy a little I can read.” Little enough and well enough to share it in the following paragraphs.
The Green Gulag is a 21st Century upgrade of the old Soviet model: Call it Gulag 2.O. Now, however, this gulag is found all over the world obscured behind a sophisticated, subtle, and seductive green curtain. Who does not want to save the world? The “New World” gulag has eliminated the walls, fences, and machine gun turrets guarding the formal prisons. Instead, it has woven a technocratic curtain that imprisons the minds of the gullible and the naive waifs of a civilization so spoiled by the seeming triumph of “man over nature” that its beneficiaries have lost all direct contact with reality. We are “screened” into compliance and eagerly contribute to our own debauchment under the never sleeping eye of Google. Tik Tok, Instagram and other social media applications record and publish the success of this great panopticon. Fifteen minutes of fame is just another click away as an infinite diversity of fanciful images dance across the green veil. That is all it takes for this digital Potemkin village to seduce the zero attention span herds who posture, preen, prevaricate, and pout before the ever-watchful electronic eyes. Plasticity is imbued into human flesh. Again, the idea is made flesh.
Westerners have rapidly evolved into macro plastic people fed a micro plastic diet of convenience, convention, and chemistry. Our ideas, our principles, our lifestyles, our cultures are hollow spaces wrapped in Saran.
We are diffused into a cloud of abstractions wherein all references to the classic western virtues have vanished from virtually all the institutions that used to propagate them. Definitions have dissolved, boundaries and borders have evaporated and the trillions of connections to the overarching organic realm have been cut by a thousand scalpels wielded by just as many incompetent and fatuous intellectuals and scientists. Politicians weave these resplendent shreds into the emperor’s new clothes. As Richard Weaver wrote in his Ideas Have Consequences back in 1948, “This explains why precultural periods are characterized by formlessness and post cultural periods by the clashing of forms. The darkling plain, swept by alarms, which threatens to be the world of our future, is an arena in which conflicting ideas, numerous after the accumulations of centuries, are freed from the discipline earlier imposed by ultimate conceptions. The decline is to confusion…Our ideas become convenient perceptions, and we accept contradiction because we no longer feel the necessity of relating thoughts to the metaphysical dream.”
One of the great, if not the greatest current confusions is climate change. It is emblematic of the cognitive bewilderment by which the green gulag has hidden all manner of deceptions in plain sight. Examples are everywhere enabled by ignorance and sloth. Suddenly, by political fiat, the trace gas that synthesizes most of our green world from water and sunshine is designated a toxic substance. And as Dr. Iain McGilchrist reveals in his epic work, The Master and His Emissary, this is a triumph of a vast bureaucracy engendered by the left hemisphere’s delusions. The modern masses are unbalanced by lifestyles built on surfaces without substance. The ever-present screens inject them with dopamine surges refreshing at the speed of electrons flowing through hard and software. Integration into the unified field of behavior as sensed by the balanced perceptions of both hemispheres in a healthy human brain is impossible. Much of our city citizenry is sick. Maybe our great material successes have simply neutered our right hemispheres and acquiesced to our left hemisphere’s clutching avarice.
Human sexes are undifferentiated. Even Supreme Court judges cannot or will not define the differences between men and women. Science promises to upgrade what millions of years of evolutionary adaptations have refined and distilled to create. Science has become hubristic, and its acolytes are fêted everywhere. Industrially propagated plant-based meat substitutes are promoted as if cows, pigs, sheep, and goats are not plant based. This is a triumph of propaganda over science. To quote Eric Weinstein, “we live in a managed reality.” We are asked to pretend, to pose, and to prevaricate when the organic real world in which we move and have our being does not correspond with our abstractions and models pontificated as reality. A confederate, complicit and compliant press reports the chimera as our beneficent reality and trumpets itself as savior across the heavens with a fundamentalist’s fervor. The digital towers of Babel are climbing into the heavens on an ever-ascending spiral of algorithms. Cloud based, of course, and becoming the face of God!
There is no climate crisis. There never has been. The grandiose green Ponzi scheme Potemkin village we are living in, erected out of a coggery of lies, half-truths, and hypocrisies is subsumed within a cognitive crisis. A crisis promulgated by educational systems whose elite and diverse commissars have achieved enormous powers and status through plagiarism, affirmative action hiring based on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Academia, business, the military, press, and government have been colonized by a mob of DEI & ESG squatters. These institutions have become intellectual and ethical ghettos. Evolution, expressed through Nature’s discriminatory meritocracy, has been corrupted by the sublime delusion of equality. And as Alan Watts reminded us, America’s underlying epistemological contradiction is that our republican form of government cannot exist in a universe that a good many thinks is ruled by a monarch: The Lord of lords, and the King of kings. To paraphrase Trotsky, within the green gulag, where the only employer is the New Green Deal, opposition means death by slow starvation, and behind the green curtain the cancel culture thrives and will even eat its own if they dare depart from the consensus dogma of the hour, the day, or the month. In America, by default or design, we have elected our way into this quagmire. When anyone can become president, that is exactly what you get.
The Green Gulag no longer needs to be hidden in a vast Siberian emptiness. It now resides in the heart of densely populated cities across the globe inhabited by masses of vacuous men and women of the First World. The whirling blades and the glimmering shimmering surfaces mesmerize the obedient into somnambulistic compliance. Chanting “Net Zero” the congregants of this new religion sacrifice the poor and middle classes to the climate gods. Silicon Valley Saints fund seeming technological miracles to produce natural gas out of sunshine and breezes as startup Terraformer claims, while harvesting subsidies galore as reported by Doomberg. A feudal future awaits all but the climate industry’s oligarchs and the royalty of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. Net Zero by 2050 would create nitrogen starvation and sacrifice four billion people to the cause. The Azteks could never have dreamed of this stuff.
Behind this green curtain has arisen a vast bordello of science mavens masturbating their Holy Writ for all to see and hear as they court the public’s emotions to underwrite their next theorem of climate pornography. It matters little that their emissions are infertile if they titillate the scientifically illiterate masses into underwriting a vast menagerie of virtuous sounding schemes to decrease carbon dioxide while improving the environment with “free” energy. Climate change pimps, from Al Gore, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, Hank Paulson, John Podesta, Bill McKibben to John Kerry (naming but a few) jet around the globe with an assortment of Hollywood whores promoting the annual orgies called climate conferences as they enrich themselves at taxpayer’s expense. Any real science stands little chance of being seen or heard above the orgiastic announcements flaunting the next climate solution from carbon capture to blasting reflective particles into the atmosphere blocking sunlight. Consensus climate pornography is not science. It is abstract adulteress adulation with no connection to the natural realm. Algorithmic idols of the world unite to become artificial intelligence and bureaucratize organic knowledge. Maybe this is when those “other indigenous ways of knowing” arise to save our collective sanity? Would you buy an indigenously engineered bridge?
This encroaching gulag is delineated by enormous killing fields of spinning blades and highly polished surfaces punctuating the industrial colonization of wild spaces. Ancient forests are ripped out to erect gigantic towers that are promised to deliver green, clean, free electrons: another German final solution attempting to expiate one of their original sins named Communism, the spawn of Marx and Engels. The Jewish Holocaust solution being the other systematized industrial elimination of those they considered less than human, although they are not the first antisemites by far. They were just the most technologically advanced at the time. And don’t forget German efficiency.
In fact, these green schemes are created to profit very few by harvesting subsidies, and tax credits as the sage of Omaha announced, while the rest is just collateral damage to wildlife, wild spaces, and the middle classes’ wallet. Electron production from sunshine and breezes yields an ever-increasing loss by all economic, engineering, and environmental measures. Dead eagles, dead whales, bats, bugs, and devastated wild pristine spaces are just means to another utopian end. “Triumphs against the natural order of living exact unforeseen payments…the spoiled -child psychology is encountered almost solely in those people who have abandoned nature and who have signalized this abandonment by taking flight from country to city,” as Richard Weaver reminded back in 1948.
It is time to defund the green gulag. Fossil fuels, fission, and falling water, at this juncture, are the only means to maintain any modicum of the civilized world that hydrocarbons, gravity, and nuclear energy have engendered since the industrial revolution. In the 21st Century, Western cultures, in most cases, have rid themselves of human and animal slavery. Electrons now serve us better, more ethically with more dignity, and more equity on the path to a brighter future. Electrons labor without lament. They live to work. But instead of enslaving more electrons with Western engineering competency, efficiency, and economy to obediently serve humanity’s pursuit of more prosperous and meaningful lives, Thomas Sowell’s “anointed” elite are dragooning us back into the darkness while selling us scented candles to light the way. They prefer the ancient varieties of slavery. They cannot relinquish the old privileges of an aristocracy ordained by the King of kings. They covet status privilege and gather in tribal enclaves that echo their glory as they parade their trophies for all to see. In the game of musical thrones these elites want to be the one before which, the rest bend the knee.
Any unexpected gust of reality will extinguish our candles and plunge us all into darkness. The invasions of Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, and Israel are more than just gusts of reality. They are the darkling storm about to tip us into the abyss. There is no confusion in Ukraine and Israel about being invaded. They know what needs to be done. In America, however, the border invasion delivers millions of infectious agents throughout the country enabled by a completely corrupted hierarchy of consumptive parasitic bureaucrats. From the White House seeping down into almost all our houses the stench of prevaricators permeates the air. Treason has become patriotism, male becomes female, values are inverted, distinctions abolished:
“And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.”**
Shakespeare knew this from our not-too-distant past.
Must we repeat the tragic lesson? Is this all evidence of cultural apoptosis, or the suicide of the West as Jonah Goldberg wrote? And of this I also have an intuitive grasp better than most, I survived my own suicide to came back with this message: it is time to wake up or get Bud Lighted repeatedly as the green curtain smothers Western civilization beneath the smoke and mirrors of Net Zero. A world of fast fashion morality, ethics, and virtue has enveloped the West. The Green Gulag has hybridized a world-wide archipelago of totalitarian strongholds. Cross pollination between the communists, progressivists, jihadists, religionists, and technocrats has cultivated our current ideological gardens. There is one in your neighborhood, and you are inhaling its spores. Western civilization’s cognitive decline is almost complete, and of course, there is an app for that.
Within the Green Gulag we are witnessing a world-wide pogrom on reason.
Petro Alexandrovich.
*Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences
**Troilus and Cressida
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