It is just over a week since Anthony Oliver’s ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ was posted on the RadioVW YouTube channel. In that time, it has had over 30 million views on that site alone. Oliver then created an ‘X’ (Twitter) page, which now has 400,000 followers, with ‘Rich Men’ having had over 26 million views there. Multiple other social media accounts have shared the song, and Oliver has suddenly discovered that he is the voice of a major slice of both American and Western society. His song has become an anthem of our time. The song is a lament for people broken by a hostile system, by a system geared to the demands of the eponymous rich men north of Richmond. The song’s background is provided by the economic, social, and cultural impact of a globalisation process that is decades old, a process that is accelerating. For the last 50 years, blue collar workers in the USA have seen stagnant real wages. The middle-classes have been squeezed out of existence, and what was once an achievable ‘American dream’ for many has vanished in the face of deindustrialisation, inflation, and taxation. The same applies to workers and the middle class in much of the Anglosphere and western Europe. The consequences have been catastrophic.
After his sudden fame, Anthony Oliver has spoken about the stories he has been told by his fellow countrymen. The stories are of community breakdown, family collapse, drink and drug addiction, hopelessness, and the realisation that no-one is coming to the rescue. What has happened to our homelands is that the political mainstream, the traditional parties, now pay no attention whatsoever to the people. Always secondary in their calculations, the mainstream has jettisoned the people altogether, recognising that power lies elsewhere. It is corporate capital that dispenses power. No one believes that the US President, a confused old man, controls anything. The charade surrounding the replacement of the UK Prime Minister also showed how limited the supposed democratic system is, with the Conservative Party’s own elected candidate being replaced by a place man. Biden, Sunak, Macron, all of them are little more than the appointed face of very powerful corporations. Firms such as Blackrock and Vanguard, whose worth is over $9 trillion, and $7 trillion respectively, whose power is held by management, are truly global. It is the Blackrocks and the Vanguards that have stripped the manufacturing capacity of much of the USA, investing in low wage, high social control, China. The supposed ‘free markets’ of the West are, in fact, absolutely dominated by corporations enjoying monopolistic and duopolistic powers, operating in a symbiotic relationship with governments and states. The corporations have absorbed both regional political power, such as the EU, and national centres of power, including the USA. Power ‘has become unmistakably corporate and globalist, unmoored from any national state, [and] it becomes ravenous in its search for independent rival powers and demands obedience becoming distinctly totalitarian’ (Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion, p.83). That obedience is demanded in the cultural and political arenas, where compliance is a prerequisite of participation, of ‘inclusion’, and dissidence is increasingly punished with legal force.
We see constant examples of the cultural and political power of the corporations. They fund most nongovernment organisations (NGOs), supporting, enabling and defending political and cultural change that they approve of – mass migration, population replacement, tax-payer funding for Net Zero and military technology, LGBT anti-family policy and propaganda, anti-nation policy, global governance structures. The COVID ‘emergency’ provided an example of the use of a global panic (which, strangely, was focused largely on the West and China) to practice mass psychology warfare, introduce draconian controls in societies supposedly characterised by individual liberties, and begin to refine global governance techniques. Along with this exercise in totalitarian control came the mass expropriation of the people. As small, and medium, businesses went to the wall, the corporations grew, and COVID saw the greatest ever transfer of wealth from the middle classes to corporations and the stratospherically wealthy. This is the pattern for the future. The implication for nations and peoples is dire.
In terms of the economic consequences for workers and the middle classes, insecurity will be the norm. Wages will continue their decades-long stagnation; taxes to pay for endless war, global ‘emergencies’, reparations, etc, will continue to rise; housing costs, a large element of which arises as a result population replacement levels of mass immigration, will cripple the employed and stifle the formation of young families. The social and cultural attack on people will continue to ratchet up. Schools, universities, firms, society, will be thought-controlled by ranks of ‘Diversity and Inclusion Managers’, the Commissars of corporate capital and its mainstream political puppets. LGBT ‘inclusion’ will continue to morph into ever-greater demands for the normalisation of depravity, increasingly aimed at children. The police will enforce this, as they have already, with enthusiasm. The mainstream media will continue to pump out non-stop propaganda designed to alienate every person from all the ties – family, people, nation, history, culture – that have grounded them in the past and given life meaning and inter-generational continuity. We see the effects already, the damage that Anthony Oliver sings about. What we are witnessing is an all-out assault on the West, on Europe, on our peoples. The globalist corporate-political alliance aims to destroy all ties that hold us together. They seek ‘the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man to man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state’ (Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power).
It is nearly a century since T. S. Eliot published The Hollow Men, his reflection on the hopelessness of the post-First World War world, spiritual decay, and perhaps, redemption. Today we can see in the decline and decay of our great cities; the alienation of our European peoples from their birthright; the attack on the traditional family; the replacement of everything, including our peoples, by something that is alien or of less value; the epidemic of opioid abuse in the USA in particular, but also in Europe; the hostility and hatred that the mainstream politicians, media personnel and university academics have for the people; the conditions that are creating the new hollow men and women. Yet, as the response to Anthony Oliver’s anthem shows, there is a desire for a total change, and new start. The ‘rich men north of Richmond’ will be shocked. It is time to resist.
0 Comments