A decade of dissent: we are the 99%!

In the latest part of my retrospective essay on ten years of The Acorn, which I edit, I look back on its content in 2020. The online document covering the entire decade can be found here.

The Acorn began 2020 merrily pursuing the same issues that had interested us in previous years.

We reported on a battle in Amsterdam to protect a green space threatened by the Schiphol Area Development Company, on Indian forest dwellers’ movements, and growing opposition to a massive sand and gravel quarry in Essex, England.

We also warned about the further industrialisation of our food, with the announcement of “the fruit of the future”, which would be artificial and “made out of 3D-printed cellulose skins and filled with a healthy mix of vitamins and minerals”.

We asked: “Is this the future we really want? If not, what are we collectively going to do about it? These are surely the big questions for the decade to come…”

Coverage continued of the Yellow Vest rebellion: “No sooner had the Gilets Jaunes revolt in France begun, at the end of 2018, than the corporate media confidently informed their public that it was running out of steam and would soon disappear.

“At the start of 2020, not only has the revolt not disappeared but it has evolved and grown into something even more powerful and widespread.

“A huge movement of strikes and protests against the regime’s ‘work-until-you-drop’ pension ‘reforms’ has swept across French society”.

In February anti-system activists, including Gilets Jaunes, invaded the Paris HQ of BlackRock, taking the police by surprise and barricading themselves in the building for the whole morning.

We commented: “This infamous multinational corporation, very close to President Emmanuel Macron, makes billions in profits on privatised pensions.

“Coincidentally, of course, Macron’s neoliberal regime is pushing through controversial pension ‘reforms’ in the face of massive opposition”.

I can add today that BlackRock is part of the global racket operated by the Rothschilds, the bankers of whom Macron is famously a (former) employee…

In other news, we announced that the so-called “green” agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF) was coming under attack as its annual January Davos summit got underway.

“A new international campaign has been launched which alleges the WEF is guilty of spearheading a bid by corporations and financial institutions to ‘monetize’ nature on a global scale.

“An online statement from the ‘No Deal for Nature‘ alliance, whose slogan is ‘life is not a commodity’, has already won the support of several academics and campaigners”.

The campaign was warning that the package of policies known as the “New Deal for Nature” was being promoted not only by the WEF, but also by the United Nations (UN), the World Bank and the controversial WWF.

The UN had admitted it wanted to “advance a new political agenda” involving “increased promotion of innovative financing that supports green infrastructure”.

We noted that the New Deal for Nature “is an entirely corporate phenomenon, which uses the language of ‘sustainability’ to promote a 21st century version of the state-backed capitalism historically favoured by the Fascist and Nazi regimes.

“We hear talk of ‘exponential opportunities’, ‘the investment of trillions of dollars’, and a ‘transformation unlike anything humankind has experienced before… a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres’.

“One thing that is totally clear to us is that this scam is corporate to its core. It has nothing to do with either ‘nature’ or ‘people’ and everything to with racking up state-facilitated big business profiteering, exploitation and control”.

‘Betrayal’ by Mario Sánchez Nevado

Even at this stage we were coming under attack from “anarchists” who objected to us exposing the fake-green climate scam as well as, it appeared, US-led imperialist designs on Iran.

A sniffy individual from Freedom Press in London told us: “Sorry but I have very little time for conspiracy theorists, and you have proven time after time that you are one. Will give you a mute now, can’t see why I should bother any more”.

We remarked that we had great difficulty in identifying with so-called radicals who “appear to be incapable of critical thinking or independent thought, preferring to adhere slavishly to the latest groupthink orthodoxy, even when this makes no sense at all”.

This phenomenon was, of course, soon going to get considerably worse!

By the time the March edition of The Acorn came out, something had changed in the world and we were writing about “fighting the coronazi clampdown”.

We were, a little prematurely, encouraged by news of rioting in Brussels and looting in Sicily and Panama and declared: “Resistance looks set to spread as the clampdown continues”.

Right from the start of Covid, The Acorn wasn’t mincing its words.

“We don’t want your ‘new normal’. We don’t want the ‘smart’ fascist future you have been trying to sell us for so long and which you are now trying to force upon us with lies, fear and all your infrastructures of control.

“We don’t want to be little submissive cogs in your machineries of greed and exploitation. We don’t want to be told how to live and what to think.

“We want you to know that we are free and will remain so unto the grave. We want you to realise that when our time comes, we will make you pay for what you are doing to us. And we want to remind you that there are very many more of us than of you”.

We wrote: “There had already been signs, before the coronavirus panic, that neoliberalism was shedding its fake-democratic mask and was preparing to switch to fascist mode. And now we are well on the way. The global ruling elite have declared war on our freedom”.

And: “These are not easy times in which to be alive if, like us, you cherish freedom and truth. The last few months have seen us dragged into a nightmarish totalitarian world.

“No sooner had ‘lockdown’ been lifted, than masks were imposed. The spectre of a compulsory ‘vaccine’ hovers darkly on the horizon.

“All this symbolism of submission, of craven conformism and dehumanised obedience, would be hard to take at the best of times. But when all of this naked authoritarianism is justified by blatant lies, the situation becomes still more outlandlish”.

As we should have suspected from previous exchanges, the “anarchist” response to the Covid coup was generally shocking, as I explained in a couple of articles on the Winter Oak site and another in The Acorn, where I expressed my disbelief at how supposed freedom-lovers could “suddenly become authoritarian robots, mindlessly repeating the lies and demands of the system”.

But we weren’t entirely alone in our stance and The Acorn ran a piece by our anarchist comrades at the South Essex Heckler, who warned: “People who may think they’re doing the right thing by supporting restrictions on movement and gatherings, as well as increased tracking and surveillance are actually supporting the creation and enhancement of an apparatus that will completely screw our lives and freedoms”.

We also featured a contribution from Marion, a long-time anarchist from Brighton, who commented: “I wonder when anarchism stopped meaning people taking charge of their life and started meaning submitting to whatever the authorities decide is right”.

We reported how, in the face of the craven Covid compliance of much of the “left”, the wave of angry opposition to the Covid coup was flooding across the usual political divides, notably in Germany.

And we added: “In the USA, there have been sizeable protests against the shutdown. The flag-waving and pro-business elements in this libertarian wave are a little off-putting for us, to be honest! But the determination of large numbers of Americans to stand up to tyranny is heartening.

“Could it be that, from now on, the only political fault line that really matters is between those who support and bow down to the new life-crushing global techno-dictatorship and those who rise up to resist it?”

In August we were expressing hope that people were finally seeing through the lies and “are ready to stand up to the 21st century tyranny of newnormalism”.

While we focused on London demonstrations, we reported significant protests in Madrid, the Canary Islands, Warsaw and Montreal.

In September we wrote: “From Belgrade to Montreal, from Dublin to Warsaw, from Auckland to Hull, thousands upon thousands of people are saying ‘no’ to the capitalo-fascist new world normal.

“We are delighted to report that so many protests are breaking out, that we can hardly keep up any more…”

These included Covid resistance in Croatia, Switzerland, USA, Canada, the UK and France, where the Gilets Jaunes were back on the streets.

On September 27 we brought out a special Acorn photo report of a massive London demo by our friend Max Hogster, entitled “We are the 99%!”.

We noted that the Met Police had assaulted the peaceful crowd on the basis that a “risk assessment” had been breached and we commented: “They seemed blissfully unaware of any irony in weighing in with truncheons to attack perfectly safe and healthy people under the pretext of protecting ‘health and safety’!”

In October we homed in on Italy: “‘Libertà, libertà, libertà!’ they have been shouting across the peninsula, from Lombardy down to Sicily. ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom!'”.

But the battle for freedom had also broken out on the streets of Barcelona, Prague, Warsaw, Brussels, Berlin, Dublin, Toronto, New York, Brisbane and Melbourne.

We added: “There have been dangerous outbreaks of democracy in places including Leeds, Belfast, Edinburgh, Bournemouth and Liverpool, which saw two protests in two days. And, of course, the big events in London continue”.

And we remarked: “Our international revolt against the would-be slavemasters will come neither from left nor from right, but from below!”

The next issue appeared in December and we related: “Since our last Acorn bulletin came out, there have been thousands on the streets of the UK. This has not just been in London, but also in the likes of Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool, Brighton, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Neath, Stroud and Bournemouth.

“All over Europe, too, people are rising up against the 0.001% and their police state. From Rome to Leipzig, they have been showing their dissent”.

We listed resistance – and repression – in Berlin, Paris, Montpellier, Nice, Bordeaux, Florence, Cosenza, Reggio Calabria, and Genoa, with protests sweeping Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Albania, Ireland, Austria, Serbia, Argentina, Malawi, South Africa, Australia and the USA.

In parallel to all the demonstrations there had been direct action, with 5G phone masts torched in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands.

We said: “If we all hold our nerve in the face of everything, we will prevail! Together, in joy and determination, we will defeat the dictatorship”.

The last bulletin of the year also announced the creation of Winter Oak’s Great Reset page, featuring a link to the much-read essay ‘Klaus Schwab and his Great Fascist Reset’, which had been published that October.

The Acorn continued to keep readers abreast of matters not directly related to Covid, such as calls to physically oppose the EU-China Summit being held in Leipzig and news of resistance to the HS2 rail line between London and Birmingham, described by campaigners as “one of the largest and most damaging infrastructure projects our country has ever seen – representative of everything we are seeking to change within this toxic system”.

We also reported that Wangan and Jagalingou tribal warriors in Australia had served mining giant Adani with an eviction notice for illegally trespassing on their land with its Carmichael Coal Mine, declaring: “This eviction notice marks the start of a new phase of our resistance to Adani’s destruction of land, water and culture”.

But much of our coverage clearly tied in with our opposition to the Great Reset and its Fourth Industrial Revolution.

We plugged the forthcoming “Three Days Against Techno-Sciences” gathering in Italy, included an article about resistance to 5G from our regular contributor Jan Goodey, looked at research into Bill Gates by Jacob Levich and cited Vanessa Beeley’s warning that behind the COVID-19 drama was “an entire pharmaceutical complex potentially protecting its own interests over any genuine concerns for the health and welfare of global populations”. This involved The Gates Foundation, the World Bank and the British Government, she said.

We referred to a very thorough analysis by Iain Davis on the Off-Guardian site presenting evidence “which strongly suggests the State and the MSM, adhering to a globalist agenda, have colluded to mislead the public into believing the COVID 19 threat is far greater than it actually is”.

And we quoted Quarantyranny, a remarkable 30-minute video from the Book of Ours team in the USA: “This is a war. Not a war on a pandemic but a war on the people. This is corporate authoritarianism. This is fascism. We are nothing more than torture victims at the hands of these emotional terrorists”.

We also pointed people towards translations of the work of German Covid dissidents and 22 medical experts whose opinions on Covid contradicted the official narrative, provided info about the environmental dangers of all the disposable face masks as well as the ill effects of wearing them and introduced Alison McDowell’s crucial insights into the “new game where the poor can be gambled on as investment commodities”, aka impact slavery.

The Acorn also recommended an article by Gregory Sinaisky on ‘Fabricating a Pandemic – Who Could Organize It and Why’.

He wrote: “Foundations often collaborate closely with the CIA, but it would be incorrect to say that the foundations are controlled by the CIA. It is rather that same people who control the foundations, also control the government – including the CIA.

“The plutocrats have huge resources and many thousands of trained professionals to perform these tasks. Therefore, they are very likely to have the appropriate tools required to create a false pandemic”.

[Audio version]