Published On: Mon, Nov 23rd, 2020

Prohibition and Covid-19; Part One: War on the People

Last week, UK Government announced defence spending that would not only make up a shortfall in the military’s equipment budget, but allows for major investment in non traditional areas of “defence”. The Guardian cited defence sources, who said that the net budget of £16.5bn over five years would allow for “modernisation without making painful cuts”. The Ministry of Defence, The Guardian also reported, would have “been forced to cut back on aircraft and lose the use of its own hospital ship unless the gap had been plugged.” This is significant, because it shows that the emergent requirements in a new sphere of conflict has priority over old fashioned capability.

Now, while on the face of it, a need for a “National Cyber Force of hackers”, and a “Space Command”, and an “new agency dedicated to artificial intelligence” can very well be rationalised as a response to the changing battlefield that foreign foes are forcing by their own developing capability, but at the same time these new arms of British military could also provide a solution to another age old problem, also expressing itself in an evolved way, which is the rebellious domestic population.

This characterisation of the purpose for the new budget for UK military spending suggests itself as self-evident when one makes even a little inquiry into it, and speaks to a governing class concerned about hurriedly securing itself against a sizeable element from amongst the governed which, thanks to the Covid-19 hoax, have become painfully aware of how they are ruled in a particularly aggressive and abusive way that is severely detrimental to their interests, as UK Government clearly pursues some other agenda completely at odds with them. There perhaps hasn’t been such a drastic and complete schism, following from the revelation of the UK Government’s method regarding Brexit, between the executive body and the people it rules for hundreds of years, and comparison with the situation that existed before and led to the Civil War is perhaps not unreasonable.

As isolated individuals, we cannot see exactly how much of the population have been agitated to hostility against the UK Government so that it feels suitably threatened to allocate resources in a programme of defence from them, and we are somewhat disadvantaged by the way that corporate-media always presents the lie of the consensus in majority. That being said, we can get a picture from the UK Government’s behaviour. The following, from The Guardian, is reportedly a portrayal of the genesis of the spending announcement; it’s probably fair to say that a decision that has been a long time in the making was suddenly and abruptly come to:

Insiders said the defence funding, which will be detailed by Johnson when he speaks to the House of Commons on Thursday, had been put together at breakneck speed as Downing Street seeks to reassert control after last week’s No 10 meltdown, which led to the departure of chief aide Dominic Cummings and his ally Lee Cain.

We should also notice that selling the Covid-19 has not been smooth sailing for UK Government; so, for instance, we may have noticed how it, through its operatives, has had to regularly denounce conspiracy theory that is damaging to its purpose. To do this is actually an act of desperation, because the last thing that anyone perpetrating a crime wants to do is draw attention to it, and essentially such noise from UK Government is complaint about being found out. The ultimate example, that can be presented to the reader, of the UK Government conducting itself this way must be that of Neil Basu, the Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations of the Metropolitan Police Service, and the National Police Chiefs Council lead for counter terrorism policing, who publicly called for a debate regarding making conspiracy theory regarding “Covid-19 vaccine” a criminal offence.

Furthermore, while UK Government is always superficially very confident, despite the telling betrayals of behaviour, we can make a good guess that it has repeatedly seen failure by its own measure in the course of executing the “Covid-19” hoax, and is suitably aghast. We note the decision to drop clapping for “key workers”, described in an FBEL article[1] as “a very sophisticated instrument of psychological warfare”); we note UK Government has had to scamper ahead of lockdown being made redundant  due to the scorn that enough people in Britain showed it in its first manifestation [2]; we note that UK Government has been hindered by the Dolan Judicial Review [3], which has also served as a dampener of lockdown in November† in that it seems to have made it impossible for schools to be closed.

There is more than enough to indicate to us that UK Government understands that it is insecure in an information war, and thus insecure in how that translates to the situation on the ground, and in fact about the situation on the ground. We can suppose, then, that the new defence budget is actually a response to the situation. We could go further, and say that it represents the acquisitioning of capability for a new phase in a war against the British people, after an assessment of operational deficiencies during a first phase – and as extreme as this statement might seem, there is justification for it.

The activity of the 77th Brigade is something that has been discussed in these pages before[4]; its suspected involvement in executing the hoax by shaping perception towards that end would mean that the British Army has been waging psychological warfare upon the British people as if they were a population conquered in a war, and under military occupation. Moreover, on the streets, with the use of its militia, or the police [5], UK Government has been seeing how much it can get away with in terms of treating the people as if they were an occupied population – and the author gets the impression that lots of forces are nervous about this, and concerned about breaking the actual law when enforcing the legislation. On this subject, there is a connection to what we can call a strategic application of the legislation, rather than an administrative one – and the terms are about to be explained – for the purpose of achieving objectives from a position of strength, as a military would do in the fighting of a war.

To understand this, we’re going to consider a lengthy extract from Fabian Franklin’s work, What Prohibition has done to America, and that’s why this article is the second in this Prohibition versus Covid-19 series.

What I wish to dwell upon at this point is the conduct of those who… are carrying on the enforcement of the Prohibition law. They are not carrying it on in the way in which the enforcement of other laws is carried on. In the case of a normal criminal law… those who are responsible for its enforcement regard themselves as administrators of the law… But the enforcement of the Prohibition law is something quite different: it is not a work of administration but of strategy; not a question of seeing that the law is obeyed by everybody, but if carrying on a campaign against the defiers of the law just as one would carry on a campaign against a foreign enemy. The generals in charge of the campaign decide whether they shall or shall not attack a particular body of the enemy; and their decision is controlled by the same kind of calculation as that made by the generals in a war of arms – a calculation of the chances of victory. Where the enemy is too numerous, or too strongly entrenched, or too widely scattered, they leave him alone; where they can drive him into a corner and capture him, they attack…

What is left of the idea of respect for the law… when it is openly admitted that the Government… deliberately overlooks violation of the law by millions of private individuals… for fear that… by doing otherwise [it] would further excite popular resentment against the law?…

Now it may be replied to all this that a certain amount of laxity is to be found in the execution of all laws; that the resources at the disposal of government not being sufficient to secure the hunting down and punishment of all offenders, or executive and prosecuting officers and police and courts apply their powers in such directions and in such ways to accomplish the nearest approach possible to complete enforcement of the law.

But the reply is worthless . Because the enforcement of all laws is in some degree imperfect, it does not follow that there is no disgrace and no mischief in the spectacle of a law enforced with spectacular vigor, and even violence, in a thousand cases where such enforcement cannot be successfully resisted, and deliberately treated as a dead letter in a hundred thousand cases where its enforcement would show how widespread and intense is the people’s disapproval of the law.

There are many instances in which a law has become a dead letter; where this is generally recognised no appreciable harm is done, since universal custom operates as virtual repeal. But here is a case of a law enforced with a militant energy where it suits the officers of the Government to enforce it, systematically ignored in millions of cases by the same officers because it suits them to do that…

If the laws against larceny, or arson, or burglary, or murder, were executed in this fashion, what standing would the law have in anybody’s mind? Yet in the case of these crimes, the law only makes effective the moral code which substantially the whole of the community respects as a fundamental part of its ethical creed; and accordingly even if the law were administered in any such outrageous fashion as is the case with Prohibition, it would still retain in large measure its moral authority.

But in the case of the Prohibition law, an enormous minority, and very possibly a majority of the people regard the thing it forbids as perfectly innocent.

As an aside, the point about legislation becoming dead letter is an important one, and echoes the message from these pages that defiance of lockdown renders it redundant.

Franklin’s observations have current currency. The reader will no doubt have seen police presence at some types of rallies and protests during lockdown, and then have seen them perform a stand down at other kinds (i.e. allow a protest to run its course without intervention, even when there have been acts of violence). Although there has been extensive coverage of this at FBEL (see footnote [1]), to communicate in short hand, people who have been protesting against the lockdown get the rough treatment. The ultimate expression of this strategic enforcement of Coronavirus Restrictions Regulations is perhaps the arrest of Piers Corbyn when the charges had to be dropped by Sheffield police because of how the Crown Prosecution Service decided that the legal test for a prosecution had not been met.

Of course, Corbyn has been arrested more than once, and he consistently argues that the arrests were unnecessary, unlawful (because of the right of freedom of assembly) and in fact illegal, because of exemption in the Coronavirus Restrictions Regulations for political protest – and he would be correct. Moreover, his claim that the arrests were politically motivated are justified through the framework laid down by Franklin. All things being equal, the law suits that Corbyn is now bringing against the Metropolitan Police and South Yorkshire Police for “wrongful arrest, unlawful imprisonment and assault”, should meet with success.

Corbyn’s case is high profile exactly because he is suffering from strategic enforcement of the Coronavirus Restrictions Regulations. Even so, it does not stand alone as showing that the agents of UK Government have a preference in the way there is enforcement – far from it. During the first lockdown, millions of people will have found themselves, on foot, outside of their homes for reasons not permitted, and unchallenged by police. Police have very noticeably shied away from being involved in requirements for customers in shops to wear a face covering, but (evidently) there is and has been an effort to make a presence felt on public transport infrastructure (including road blocks to deter driving).

The pattern is clear to see: enforcement is targeted at certain concentrations of people, never routinely so that there is causation of resentment in as broad a sweep of the population that it would be possible to create, thus proving that the policy does not in fact have consensus justification, and with the aim to prosecute on ground where the police feel the safest to do so: police have no general right in the law to stop and interrogate an individual, but “under the general law there is a power for a constable to stop a car being driven on a road” (see the article labelled [6] in the footnotes). Likewise, what people are wearing or not in a supermarket or a shop is a matter for the private owner of the premises; on the contrary, the British Transport Police already have jurisdiction on the nation’s railways.

There is much evidence, then, for why we can say that the enforcement of lockdown has been about establishing a show of being effective, and allowing the population to volunteer into acquiescence, and it has not been about establishing enforcement as a matter of course; to talk about it in the terms that Fabian Franklin uses, it has been strategically enforced, and not administratively, and thus the conduct amounts to warfare upon the people.

This brings us neatly to the issue of the new defence budget announced on November 19th by Boris Johnson. Being impossible to escape our notice is the fact that its true nature is disguised by a touch of cuteness on the part of UK Government, which enables propaganda to sell the budget as a collective national enhancement, and thus to stimulate emotional reaction of the “Rule Britannia!” type which was written of in the FBEL in the article, The Rule Britannia! Psyop, And The Times At Its Source. The Sun duly presented the budget announcement primarily as a pledge to beef up Britain’s navy, with an article regarding the issue leading with the following:

BORIS Johnson has today announced a huge £24.1billion war chest to transform our armed forces and become Europe’s Naval superpower once again.

And while it is true that the next sentence actually dabbled in the hard reality…

The biggest investment in defence since the Cold War will be used to create a new space command, cyber force and artificial intelligence agency, the PM proudly declared today.

…the immediate presentation, after that, of a number of images of modern naval ships, captioned with the information that plans for the acquisition of eight Type 26 Global Combat Ships, five Type 31s, an unmentioned number of Type 32 frigates and multi-role research vessels, would be realised by dint of the award of so many billions of tax payers’ money, showed that the editor wanted the reader’s imagination mostly gripped by an idea of traditional projection of power, and it being done in the shared interest. Of course, a discussion involving such equipment potentially already being outmoded by good, surface to sea missile and electronic warfare systems – the type of which Russia and Iran and their military clients are in possession of – would not feature in a piece trying to divert from the sinister aspects of the budget, by crude appeal to base patriotism as if it were the 1930s. Indeed, the people who created this Sun article did all the necessary tub-thumping in the portion nearest to the headline, perhaps knowing that the audience would soon after give up reading to go back to watching the television:

In a defiant speech outlining an exciting vision for the nation’s post-Brexit future, the Prime Minister declared the ‘era of retreat is over’ and he would give the nation’s defences their biggest cash injection for decades.

Unsurprisingly, the meat of the subject does not feature in the article until its tail end, where a detail appears to unlock the whole issue:

Downing Street warned that threats to the country would no longer be confined to a distant battlefield, adding Britain’s enemies could reach people “through the mobile phones in their pockets or the computers in their homes.

It’s clear that UK Government is concerned with fighting an information war – and not actually necessarily against a named foreign foe, who will actually be serving as a rationale for a fight that will be against a completely different enemy. At FBEL, there is no need for another occasion of explanation that domestic competition to official narrative is the UK Government’s enemy, and if that can be dressed up as being  acting as an agent of a foreign power, it can be persecuted in the name of national defence without reference to a right to freely speak truth to power. Please refer to the previous article about the 77th Brigade listed in the footnotes.

The Sun piece goes on to reveal that of the financial resources going to the three non-traditional areas, “The largest chunk of the extra money will be spent on a ‘space command’ that could launch Britain’s first rocket in 2022.” The reader is asked to note the use of the word “could”, and if this immediately inspires ideas that the agency will be about throwing money after pie in the sky, then this would mean having the correct intuitive reaction. The space force, it is said, will be tasked with defending satellites in orbit. Maybe, because it is not clear from the coverage, this is where there will be the deployment of “inexhaustible lasers” (as promised by Boris Johnson, as some part of the package) – presumably  powered by the more direct exposure to solar energy (an arrangement which undoubtedly still won’t upset the narrative about manned spaceflight), or else this needs a lot of explaining.

Indeed, this is not the place to enter into the contentious issue of the limitations or otherwise of near earth orbit space travel as it is presented by government agencies (and professional hucksters). Our interest is how it could be connected to a war waged by government on its people – and there is one. Spending on space – and the British tax payer is about to be made to spend billions on it – is about inspiring submission to the ruling class, and it is about wasting blood, sweat and treasure in a manner that would replace war as the method; it is about achieving and maintaining control. The issue was discussed at length in the FBEL article, Be Not Surprised: Trump Pledges Continuation Of “War-System Alternative” Space Scam, when the US announced plans for its own “Cyclone Rangers” – as the author proposes all space forces should be known.

The National Cyber Force is a joint operation, says The Sun, shared between the military and GCHQ, and will involve the deployment of hackers “who will conduct offensive operations”, adds The Guardian. This development is intriguing, because it perhaps suggests a progression in the information war from the tactics of a Twitter mob setting up or countering a talking point, the pressuring of social media to “deplatform” individuals and organisations, and even bombarding a source of information with requests at the server to create an obstacle to it being viewed, to actually interfering with the means to produce information by breaking into the data and the places where it is stored.

To be clear, the complaint is not that a defence force should not have a particular capability when hacking could disrupt the ability of a foreign foe to deploy equipment for electronic warfare, and we can imagine that breaking into the secure data stores of foreign governments is something that an intelligence agency, serving something remotely like its proper function, might want to do. The danger is in the interference in the production of information for public consumption that is threatening to an otherwise hidden agenda of government. We see how the UK Government, and British military intelligence is now irredeemably tarnished by the 77th Brigade, in terms of attempts to demonise, and marginalise counter information and the producers of it, and this must inform about how a British military unit dedicated to hacking would be used.

As for the Artificial Intelligence agency, it is said of it that it will focus on autonomous machinery. The thing about AI is that it looks to be not half as clever as is claimed for it. It would follow that AI warfare machinery is better where its inevitably being outwitted by a human combatant would not lead to its becoming an ex-asset, and a costly mistake. That means against an unarmed or low tech fighting foe. Of course, the reader will disagree if he understands that AI can live up to its billing.

To come at this from another perspective, then, while the UK military might have a problem recruiting in peace time, for a war against foes overseas  it undoubtedly could scare up and press recruits to become cannon fodder if it so wanted. Additionally, UK Government has never had any qualms about sending millions of people to their deaths. Destroyed human beings would have been cheaper to create than destroyed sophisticated machinery. So, AI is not about replacing human beings in war.

Meanwhile it could be argued that a small volunteer army would benefit from robotic enhancement, and the UK Government refuses to rule out cuts in personnel in the armed forces as a result of the spending on AI. Johnson, according to The Sun, suggested that people may be moved around within the armed forces, saying “there will be no redundancies” – although he also “refused to say whether troop numbers would be cut”. Even so, The Guardian reports that a final defence spending review in January and February is “expected to see cuts to the size of the British army”. What this all indicates, then, is the downsizing of human fighting capability in land forces.

Now, people who understand how the world works knows that in peace time, when Britain is not faced with a Cold War scenario with Russians threatening to pour across Europe, and therefore would need numbers on the ground (that tanks are now considered as being “rarely deployed” and thus are expected to be reduced in numbers is perhaps evidence of this), and the military’s prime purpose has become occupying snippets of stolen land in the name of Responsibility to Protect, and also, as part of that, directing mercenaries that are fighting, or even governing (or, tyrannising an essentially captured and occupied population) as a proxy for them, then a small land force enhanced with AI would be ideal.

But that system is entirely transferable to a domestic situation, with the police – or the militia – acting as the first layer of occupation. The difference between a domestic application and one in Syria would be the severity of that interface with the people. In a domestic situation, there would be a reliance on familiarity with police for smooth occupational governance, and a boiling frog tendency in the people to shrug off any new corruption of police or overreach of power. Although there could be a debate about how willingly the police are currently, even now during the execution of the “Covid-19” hoax, adopting the role required for the system the UK Government clearly has in mind, it can’t be denied that there is a requirement.

 

[1] Things Get Complicated With The Post-Coronahoax-Psyop Protests Psyop; And How The BBC Must Not Survive Covid-19 (link)

[2] The “Cummings Effect”: UK Government Scurries To Stay Ahead Of Lockdown Disintegration (link)

[3] Operation Flush The Turd (link)

[4] The 77th Brigade Must Go To Jail: Part One (link)

[5] The Police As Militia, And The “Policing By Consent” Deception (link)

[6] The Coronavirus Police State (2): The Illusion Of Police Powers Under Regulations 6 & 8 Of Coronavirus Restrictions (link)

† Moreover, the November lockdown is one in name only, as the reader will no doubt be able to appreciate from his own experience.

It's important to donate to FBEL - please see here to find out why
A PayPal account not required.
Displaying 4 Comments
Have Your Say
  1. theguvnor says:

    An interesting legal take here from Robin Tilbrook:
    [Link removed]
    It also has an interesting point about the first lockdown being impromptu when in fact a massive advertising deal (£120m approx.) was agreed 12th Mar for the propaganda exercise of getting the people on board. It is suggested that it would have taken weeks to tender and agree terms of any deal.