Caught Between the Great Satan and the Deep Blue Sea

Since the beginning of the year, some rather unusual changes have transpired between the Democratic Alliance and the United States. The public brochure on the trade deal in question lists a few items of interest. PepsiCo bought out Pioneer foods, so now Sasko, Weetbix and most of the pasta and pap in your local store, are now owned by America. Google’s $150m high speed fibre cable to Cape Town is on there, as is Amazon’s three new cloud data servers. There are some export-friendly deals too, in SA medical device manufacturing, and food supply.

Wesgro is responsible for much of the aforementioned deals struck and they have, in a relatively short time, brought a great deal of investment to our shores, totalling R7.8bln, most of it at the National Investment Summit (which Ramaphosa naturally took credit for). MEC David Maynier and Deputy Consul General Will Stevens were interviewed on Cape Talk emphasise the deal as a commitment to “deeper integration” across most major economic sectors. What was interesting, was that they mentioned a concerted effort by major American corporations to invest in the Western Cape in the middle of the economic crash.

America has now become the number one foreign direct investor. But they have less than half the share of provincial foreign trade that the UK or the Netherlands does, and still less than Germany. What this indicates, is a desire to consolidate economic influence and interdependence in the future. So far so good.

But why South Africa? Objectively, SA is one of the worst places to invest in the world. Our currency is crap, our government is corrupt, violent crime is rampant, regulation and taxation is aggressive. And while the DA has a great track record in resisting the forces of entropy, they have rather limited powers.

For the most part, investment and trade is a positive thing. But the major trade deals struck are with companies which are, for the most part, pretty evil. I have been suspicious of a number of these deals, but what drove me to finally put this little article together was an act of propaganda so blatant that I could not ignore it.

Making Friends and Influencing People

The Western Cape just received a global award for the best COVID response out of every public service in the world just the other day. Now, far be it from me to condemn the DA’s governing policies, after all, they are the closest thing to a reprieve from the unrelenting gangrape the population experiences under ANC rule. But the best crisis response in the whole wide world? Whatever your leanings on COVID response politics, skeptic, believer or radical, Taiwan and South Korea undoubtedly had the most swift, efficient and surgical interventions of any country in the world. They were so far ahead of other nations in responsiveness and competence in implementation it isn’t even close.

So how did the DA get this prestigious award, and from whom, exactly? Well, it comes from the World Economic Forum, of course. Okay, let me be more specific. It’s an organisation called Apolitical, which is pushing global governance, which means the centralisation of policymaking to be consonant with the interests of the Anglo-American establishment. It was founded by two members of the WEF, whose backgrounds are quite interesting. One is a Gates Scholar in bioinformatics who grew up in Botswana and Zimbabwe, and the other is a specialist in the use of government policy to manipulate human behaviour. Also in attendance are former DA MP and Harvard fellow Lindiwe Mazibuko, Congolese lithium raider and Dutch royal house member the Duke of Parma, and of all people, Epstein’s Lolita-express buddy Stephen Pinker.

In 2019, Apolitical nominated SASSA (reminder) in the category of “citizen centred” innovation, for opening a WhatsApp line for complaints (lol), and NW province conservation department for making a website available for digital applications. This raised my eyebrows a little. Clearly, out of all the local governments in the world, these could not possibly be competitive options. However, this practice forms a very useful function – padding the CVs of favoured connections.

The use of networking and talent-spotting among ideologically aligned supporters of global governance is deployed the world over by the WEF, to ensure that their peculiar and draconian goals are achieved everywhere by well-placed politicians and commercial actors. The list is quite diverse, and includes superficially conservative but ultimately loyal Dan Crenshaw, as well as convicted terrorist and BLM founder Alicia Garza.

Manufacturing Consent

One of their policy goals is the control of public speech through digital platforms. There is only a very small crowd of news media companies and tech platforms in the whole Western world, making the information infrastructure easy to steer from the top, even if public opinion has a large turning circle. The primary mechanism by which thy aim to achieve this is the curbing of “misinformation” – that is, hidden central committees decide on what the truth is regarding important political power narratives, and any deviation is aggressively censored.

While we are used to it now in defence of public health policy, these directives to control online speech have been employed before for a number of other partisan political issues, from elections to “Russian disinformation” (lol – RANDcorp are shameless), but Obama-era state department advisors Cass Sunstein (of “Nudge” fame) and Adrian Vermeule are well known for having developed the strategy of inciting and manipulating online communities of conspiracy theorists to use them for strategic ends, in a strategy called cognitive infiltration (gee, does that remind you of anything? Or maybe… this?).

And the most powerful weapon at the moment is gatekeeping and fact-checking. Gatekeeping was invented by Kurt Lewin as a method of narrative manipulation in 1943 (today it is often referred to as credentialism), as well as sensitivity training, the main mechanism of ideological indoctrination in institutions today. The modern model of fact-checking though, was pioneered by bloggers in the United States only in the 2000s, but were soon taken over by American intelligence and big tech. All major fact-checking organisations now meet to coordinate strategy and tactics at the Poynter Institute, which provides blacklists for Facebook, Twitter and Google, and it is funded by them, as well as George Soros and the Koch brothers. And in case this was secret knowledge, Google is integrated with the CIA as part of a programme called the Enduring Security Framework, which used this vast infrastructure to fan the flames of the Arab Spring.

And just recently, the DA invited Facebook, Google and Twitter to parliament to come and prune our public sphere. This was framed as criticism, so that the public can feel they are in control while their private conversations are monitored and public ones are censored, a media strategy employed in the United States to legitimate the privatisation of first-amendment infringement. It isn’t as if there aren’t already global actors intervening to target undesirables on SA twitter, like the rather creepy Atlantic Council (that’s NATO intel and propaganda to you) employee Jean LeRoux, who spends an inordinate amount of time enforcing the Atlantic perspective on South African online discourse through snooping and ideologically selective fact-checking.

But this is part of a broad attempt to enclose the South African public in the 4th Industrial Revolution, which isn’t really an industrial revolution at all. There have only been three industrial revolutions, the last of which was in solid-state computing. What the 4IR is, is a vast global policy coordination project for total monitoring and control, such that the only people anywhere in the world with any decisionmaking capacity over any important policy will be a consortium of central bankers, tech companies and Western governments, led by the United States and the UK.

It means the full digitisation and lifelong tracking of all human beings, and the removal of every aspect of their legitimate independence from government policy. All small and medium-sized enterprises will be crushed and consolidated into transatlantic supply chains, and the entire global economy can be centrally planned with modern monetary theory, so that the UBI tokens handed out can be designated for targeted spending in order to limit material consumption in a matter preferential to corporate interest and Malthusian population control directives.

And the DA is fully behind it. But why?

Public Opinion

My intuition is that they simply do not believe they can afford not to. The Western powers are a large enemy to make, and their ideological positions are absolutely unquestionable online. Dissidents have their access to finance cancelled, or if they are dangerous enough, kidnapped and tortured to death. If those enemies are governments, they fund revolutions, economic sanctions, drone strikes and sabotage. Wielding the vast majority of the English language media, they are capable of running centrally coordinated propaganda campaigns of unprecedented sophistication and ruthlessness. The combination of these strategies is generally referred to by its recipients as hybrid warfare.

But that’s the stick. Why are the DA so hungry for the carrot? Well, that much is obvious. The SA economy is tanking, and the autonomy of provincial actors is under threat from a whole slew of new legislation from Pretoria, which aims to end the independence of local governments and empower total central planning including the arbitrary confiscation of any private property. The ANC is so predatory, and so destructive, that the DA-run Western Cape is having to build its own power stations, water desalination plants and independent policing measures, in the face of an all-out assault from the ANC, including the protection of violent gangs, organised land invasions, and the intimidation of public officials.

In the meantime, a growing call for Cape independence, as well as the recent legalisation of independent candidates for local elections, means the DA are highly likely to face significant challenges from the right in the coming municipal elections. While John Steenhuisen’s DA has declared themselves for nonracialism, the dimensions of global governance they are signing up to mean that their pledges to oppose land reform and racial discrimination ring hollow.

As is well-known, racial and sexual equity are unavoidable bylines of global governance, as is the infamous Sustainable Development Goal 10, by which the ANC is currently promoting their aggressive Expropriation Bill. Alan Winde’s recent enthusiasm in enforcing empirically discredited lockdown measures and mandatory masking shows his commitment, as do the increasingly frantic efforts to get their hands on vaccines, most of which have failed to pass reasonable medical testing standards for novel medical technologies, and have been part of a massive global corruption scandal.

The DA can also, if it plays its cards right, source funding for a national campaign, and receive preferential treatment by newsmedia, diplomats and credentialled organisations around the world, especially handy as the most important elections in a generation are coming soon. The potential for a coalition of liberal parties friendly to foreign capital’s ambitions will have many people salivating. But this also secures overseas career prospects should South Africa fail. For the governing class, this is a win-win.

On the other hand, it is a spiritual death-blow for black people the world over either way. The only thing South Africans can hope for, is for one more dispensation not entirely presided over by the Anglo-American establishment. Though that will require a profound act of will, and the ability to mobilise against two of the most powerful political engines the country has ever seen – black power, and foreign capital.

Perhaps this sounds frightening, and it will be tempting to throw in one’s lot with the Americans. But I know where I stand, and it is not with the spooks in Washington, that’s for sure.