Geopolitics & Empire: Just to go to a step further, where do they want to take us? I feel like we’re still in the eye of the storm, operation COVID-19 is not yet finished, by any means. You write,
“As a result global institutions like Bretton Woods, UN, IT corporations, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle are being militarized as we speak. What they have been authorized to do to Russians today, they will do to you tomorrow. And there will be no appeal precisely because the policies were formulated and implemented in secret. Your bank account, your automobile, your every action can be shut down by these hidden forces. The oppression of citizens in Canada, New Zealand and Austria was the frontline of this war against the citizens of the earth. Now something far worse is slouching towards Kiev to be born or shadow government lurks behind the titles, US government, German government, NATO, World Bank or UN. And they will be able to seize everything you possess and put you in jail without any due process.”
Putting Us in a Ghetto
A lot of people talk about the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset, techno-fascism, global technocracy. I like the term “algorithm ghetto,” because it’s putting us in a ghetto. They want to create this global government, or global totalitarian system, wherein all nations are run like this. And if you don’t think the way the system wants you to think it’ll just shut you off, you can’t go to work. Your permission to travel will be shut off locally, or internationally.
Where I used to work, all the teachers had to get injected or they lost their job. I know people who were fired because they refused to be injected with what I call Pentagon Juice because it was the Pentagon ‘s DARPA in 2012 which created that mRNA tech.
Your further thoughts on their end game,
what they’re trying to achieve.
And in all countries, we see countries like Russia, you touch on this again, that it’s the struggles in nations like you see in Russia they’re implementing some of this stuff, China, every nation to different degrees.
So what’s their end game?
defang the population
Emanuel Pastreich: Right. Well, I think their end game first is to defang the population. I think that’s number one priority. They may not have a complete consensus among the global elite on what the end game is. This is my speculation; some elites want to reduce the World population by 95%. Others are more open to having a large slave population. And so it’s not clear whether their goal is that the population should be three billion or 500 million, or whatever. And these different goals are related to the confusion about what climate change is, and how catastrophic it is.
If you embrace the view popular among many globalists that climate change really is catastrophic and we’re not going to be able to live on this planet for a variety of reasons, then obviously you have to bring a population down to about 400 million because the planet will not support more people in the future.
If you don’t believe that scenario, if you think Earth’s ecosystem is more or less stable, then obviously you can tolerate more people. It’s not clear, what will happen, even for the elites.
But the basic assumptions are the same: we will create a false sense of democratic process and liberalism, then confuse citizens with a false multicultural, gender, good feeling rainbow flag show as a way to fool people for the period until we get them to the next stage.
And when we get to the next stage, when citizens are confined to their homes, and at any moment the so-called “government” can shut off their credit cards, or if you go outside, a drone or tracker might target you. At that point the super-rich will not have to care about what you think any more, right?
When we’ve gotten to the next stage, then at that point, all the feel good, “multi- culty” stuff can go in the garbage because then we have essentially implemented the final stage.
And at that point we will be looking at the real third world war, which will be quite brutal. I also want to note that I think that Israeli high tech companies among others may be playing a major role in this process.
Control Systems
But if we look at the know-how for QR codes and geo-fencing and all these systems of control, that Israel was the pioneer in this field and that many of the programs that are being used in the United States, in Oklahoma and Louisiana, are based on Israeli models for social control. The Israelis have expertise that they built up in the occupied territories. On the one hand, there’s the DARPA studies, the RAND studies in the background, but the Israelis were expert on how to control people and monitor them 24/7.
The cutting edge was in Israel, and now they found a global market for it in this COVID-19 operation. It has brought enormous profits for these specialized private Israeli firms all over, including places, probably everywhere. It’s been documented in the case of the United States, but my guess is in places like China, or even in Russia, that there’s substantial amount of outsourcing of these control systems, IT systems.
Probably we have a symbiotic relationship between big tech, Amazon, Cisco, Google, Facebook, the big players, and then the specialized firms, say like Black Cube, these Israeli IT intelligence firms, that do the initial work, and some of the dirty work.
Geopolitics & Empire: Just to get a little geopolitical, get your thoughts on, you mentioned World War III, there’s Ukraine and China now. Basically the big three powers, the US, NATO, Brussels, EU West, and then the pull of Russia and China in the Taiwan issue, and Ukraine. And as you said, all governments seem to have been penetrated by these IT private intelligence-
Emanuel Pastreich: For sure.
Geopolitics & Empire: These are transnational elite networks. But at the same time we see rivalry between US, China, Russia. How do you explain this apparent contradiction? What’s Putin’s vision as you see it, or Xi Jinping’s vision, and where might things go?
Emanuel Pastreich: Right. Well, one of the major problems we have in politics and in journalism is that our intellectual capacity has been so degraded. People don’t read books; they don’t understand philosophy. If you go back in 1960s or back to the 1940s, a lot of people who were engaged in journalism or in discussions on politics in universities. They knew, they read Kant and Hegel. They knew about Aristotle or for that matter, about Confucius, and they had an understanding of the epistemological and ontological problematics that lie behind politics. All that has all been cleared out.
So we’re stuck with the politics of bad guys and country-to-country confrontations. And because our minds have been so simplified, because the schemata we use are so crude, it’s hard for us to think three-dimensionally about how you can have conflicts between nation states and at the same time have cooperation between multinational corporations, et cetera.
I would say they’re basically four axes.
One is the nation state; it hasn’t disappeared, probably won’t. It has an enduring quality no matter how outdated it is. It appeals to part of the human brain by saying, I have a country and I belong to it.
The second is the multinational corporations which follow their own rules. They fight with each other, and sometimes they hate each other, but they’re not following the trajectory of the nation state. And we see this increasingly to be the case because of the IT revolution, if you will.
The third is the ethnic group, the sense of being whether it’s Caucasian or Chinese or Indian. We have these transnational ethnic groups which span the world. And increasingly we have populations of Indians in the United States or in South Africa, or wherever, who work together in their own way.
Ethnic groups do not necessarily correspond with the reach of the multinational corporation, but they are significant.
And the final axis is class.
Class, as we know, has been intentionally I think stamped as being a Marxist communist concept that is forbidden. In fact, the idea of class is an essential issue in politics in society, John Stuart Mills talked about it. It was not a Marxist concept.
I think it’s really important for us to take that association with Marxism out, to say we can talk about class and class interests without embracing a Marxist perspective, and that class should be front and center of our analysis.
It’s very hard to understand the what’s going on without getting those four different players right. And what we’re seeing is essentially an interference pattern between these different factors.
So to answer your question, I’m sorry it took so long. I think someone like Putin or Xi Jinping is not so free in his decision making process.
In some ways, I think the compromise they make is they get to be on TV and make it look like they make decisions, but, in fact, they basically have to play to the needs of these multinational corporations and billionaires, wealthy individuals in their country and around the world who are pulling their strings. And that that’s increasingly the case.
I wouldn’t say the nation state has disappeared, and there are bureaucratic entities which are focused on the particular nation like Russia or United States, but I would say increasingly transnational forces are quite significant.
And finally, this phenomenon is not totally new. The first world war followed the same trajectory basically.
We had the contradictions of these jointly- held petrochemical, steel weapons manufacturers, places where British, French, Russian, German owned stakes in weapons manufacturing in each of these countries in 1914, making profits off of wars. That was essentially how the first World War unfolded.
Of course, that war changed in nature once you had millions of people dead and you could no longer pull that game off. But the initial start of the first world war was basically another,
I don’t know if false flag’s the right word for it, but basically the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was not a totally clean thing and it certainly didn’t need to end up in a world war.
It became a world war because of the financial interests baying for war and was these extremely wealthy families who had bought into arms manufacturing who drove the process. That’s what led to the Russian and the German Revolution in 1918, 1919.
Geopolitics & Empire: Just on the issue of Marx, I’ve been classified as a “commie,” when I am nothing of the sort. I feel just like you. It’s a very useful to employ Marxist analysis. I’ve had many leftists and Marxists on the show to have them break things down, and to use analysis of class as well.
Obviously, I’ve met people in the US, Americans who were upper class, rich, who would refuse to talk to me because I was local. Literally we’d be sitting at the table and they don’t talk to me, but then someone else comes along who’s from their class and they can’t shut up.
The two of them go talking, but they won’t talk to me because I’m a lower class. Obviously this is a reality.
There was one point I think where I agree with most of what you’re saying, the wasn’t one point I didn’t agree on, but I know I’m not here to debate.
Emanuel Pastreich: Well, I’m curious-
Geopolitics & Empire: It’s in your book where you talk about the climate security threat, and I think you were talking about ending the use of petroleum and coal, the war economy.
Emanuel Pastreich: Do you think I went too far?
Geopolitics & Empire: No more cars and fewer airplanes. I think the issue that we see people like the Klaus Schwab and globalists saying that as well. What’s your take on the climate security issue?
Emanuel Pastreich: I really appreciate you bringing that topic up. And it has been an issue previously for me because things that I wrote a while ago regarding the response to climate change and to the petroleum based economy are now read in an entirely different way. Sadly, that legitimate agenda has been taken over by people with a totally different intention than myself.
My intention was, at multiple levels. First, energy independence, I.e. produce your own energy and reduce your use of energy. And second was that to eliminate the role of petrochemical corporations and those banks related to them, to end their political influence.
That would allow us to make policy, whether it’s how we run our communities without being force-fed automobiles and freeways and other things which we didn’t have before and that we don’t need. They’re very destructive.
My approach was multifaceted, it’s not simply to say that climate change is going to kill us all, but also say that automobiles are dangerous, that petrochemicals are bad for you and for the environment. And that forcing us to use petroleum is basically a hidden tax for the benefit of multinational corporations.
Every time you have to use plastics, you have to use automobiles, to live because of the way corrupt politicians have designed your city, then you’re being forced to support this totalitarian system.
But to come back to the issue of climate change, what I discussed with Josh the other day. I started out by saying, I don’t know, my knowledge is limited, but I have read now quite a lot on the subject, and I’ve taught a class on climate change. And I think there is sufficient evidence to say that is a general phenomenon, that we’re seeing a major alteration of the climate. However, to say that it’s because we have too many petroleum driven cars is not the case. The climate change is a complex phenomenon. It involves the misuse of land, misuse of water, spread of deserts as a result, the destruction of the oceans by micro-plastics, a variety of factors.
And then there is the collapse of biodiversity, which many scientists say is a much more serious threat than the alteration of the climate. There are multiple factors involved, and unfortunately the discourse in academics and in the media has been simplified and reduced to a cartoonish way.
So on the one hand you have Greta Thunberg and Al Gore and other people who the corporate media feeds to us, people who give this incredibly simplistic vision of what needs to be done.
Their solutions do not address class, do not ask who owns Exxon and how do they use the corporations to make money, how their profits are related to foreign wars. None of the real politics or economics is mentioned by these climate messiahs. The assumption in their words is that politicians are insensitive and they don’t listen to the people, and they don’t know what’s really happening. That is definitely not the case. Politicians know exactly what’s happening, but they have their masters to serve.
And so the analysis that is offered to us by most of the environmental climate change NGOs is a base blatant fraud.
But regarding the concern that we will face a catastrophic alteration of our climate, of our biosphere, that might lead eventually to human extinction, that concern I would not dismiss. I would only say that it appears that the exaggerated scenarios in which people claimed that we’ll all be dead in 10 years or 20 years, 30 years, that those scenarios appear to have been wrong.
But it doesn’t mean we won’t all be dead in 1,000 years or in 500 years. I think that’s not acceptable either.
On the other hand, we have Donald Trump and others who say that all discussion of climate change is a fraud. They say that it is fine to use fossil fuels, that we are being misled by this fake IMF, World Economic Forum agenda to believe things which are totally false.
I don’t buy that at all. I think that that argument against climate change as a threat is also funded by corporate interests, and most notably that when they criticize those drawing who are drawing attention to the threat, to the environment, to the climate, they attack those cardboard figures like Greta or Al Gore. They don’t go after books like Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction” or these rather complex, carefully written research that describes a complex dangerous phenomenon in the climate.
And so the reason why people are skeptical of climate change is that climate change has become like “scientism” or for that matter “COVID-19.” Climate change is being defined for us by a tiny group of self-interested people who are backed by global finance. And their purpose is not to end climate change, but to use climate change, again, as a trauma, a deep psychological mass trauma, that will allow us to move people to somewhere politically that they would never go naturally.
And that is to a system in which money is controlled by multinational banks through their fronts, their NGO fronts or their so-called “global governance.”
Geopolitics & Empire: We’ve covered the main points. One of my last questions for you would be what should be our response to all of these things, the plans of the crazy global elites.
My purpose is twofold, trying to resist, just as you suggested, to fight back politically, to speak the truth, and to organize. But also the second part is preparing for worst-case scenarios. If my banks account is shut down and I can’t use money anymore and I’m going to starve to death, well, then I have to start preparing.
There are a lot of people fleeing down here to Mexico where I am. There are people leaving urban areas for rural areas. They’re creating their plan Bs, getting a plot of land with water and food, creating networks, decentralizing, using technology as well.
And so, what do we need to do? What’s your advice? How do we move forward now?
Emanuel Pastreich: Right. Well, the first point I would stress is that the current system in the United States, and globally, is so corrupt, so infected, that it cannot be reformed internally.
I think we all have to recognize this fact. You’re not going to elect somebody, whether it’s in Mexico or in the United States, who’s going to be a savior. President Lopez Obrador in Mexico is one of the better politicians out there in the world, but what he could do was quite limited by the system in which he’s working.
And by the way I should mention that only two commercial publishers that were willing to publish my book “Fear No Evil” and they were in Mexico and South Korea. I’m very grateful actually to the Mexican people for supporting me back then, two and a half years ago.
So that means we have to create our own system. I‘ve written about this now at length. We need to admit that a lot of us are in serious trouble, but we need to come together and to support each other, and to create our own communities which will then be institutionalized.
So you, me, and a couple other people should say we form our own government. We have our own constitution, we’re committed to each other, and we will create our own economy wherein we produce our own food, we create our own utensils and instruments, and we are essentially independent.
Now, of course, the powers that be want to shut this down and they’ll use extreme methods. But if we get to a critical mass in our country, in our region, in our country, and globally, they will not be able to do that. That doesn’t mean they won’t be able to kill some of us, but I think they will not be able to shut down such a movement.
But I think what’s most difficult about this is process is that it means giving up hope in all these false promises that have been made to us. We thought that the UN, the United States, or European Union, or other organizations, could play some positive role if reformed.
But we have to build from the bottom up, start from you, me, and our neighbors; come together and say, we’ll help each other, we’ll grow food or build things, make our clothes, whatever it is. And that although it seems incredibly backwards and inefficient and counterproductive to go down to that level, control the basic means of production, that in fact, in the long term, that action will form the solid foundation for something which is independent.
And that by contrast, we have so many thoughtful people, progressives, whoever, who are trapped in the system, to some degree that was so true of me.
They’re dependent on the money given to them by progressive thinking, rich people, and they’re unable to address real issues. So if you had to choose, you’re better off being independent.
I’m not just an independent candidate for president, but when I was in Korea, essentially unable to work in the US, the last year I lived in Yeosu in the south of Korea, we had a tiny apartment. I lived minimally with my friend who’s on the second floor, and we cooked together, we cooperated in everything. Our costs were very low, and we were able to sustain ourselves and to be politically active.
It doesn’t require money to be politically active. In fact, most political action does not require money. But we’re fed this line that somehow, unless you have millions of dollars flowing in like Bernie Sanders did, or whatever, that you can’t be politically active. It’s a fiction.
In fact, I think the real revolution will come when people snap out of this narcissistic view of success for me, and finally realize that cooperation and mutual support are the foundation of political action and then start to create their own truly independent communities, which will be the building blocks on which we create something new.
I don’t want to say it will be a totally new system because it will be based on moral philosophy, ideas about governance that go back thousands of years.
In that respect I’m not a Marxist, right? I don’t say, throw away everything and we’re going to engage in some radical modernism. I think that if anything, we need to go back to governance as it existed before. And in the United States, the native peoples like the Iroquois people had tremendously sophisticated ideas about governance that were based on long-term sustainable development, for that matter we find such wisdom in China as well.
It’s hard to imagine now, but there were ideas about economics in which you looked at where you’re going to be in 200 years, not next month’s returns on your stock.
And that sort of revolutionary change at the conceptual level, must be goes together with the establishment of an independent community. The independent community changes the economic means of production and support. And the intellectual philosophical revolution says clearly that growth and consumption are bad, that frugality is a virtue, and that intellectual depth, spiritual depth, is far superior to consumption, going to movies, traveling, whatever. You can sit in your own room, in little space, and have profoundly deep, philosophical, spiritual experience from reading books, talking to people, creating art. It doesn’t take money.
In fact, that brings me to my final point. I think we have to end the money economy, to recognize that we humans have lived on the earth for millions of years with minimal use of money. And that even until the 1930s, most people supported themselves at the local level through mutual support, not money. You got butter from your neighbor, carrots from another neighbor, you gave your potatoes in barter, that sort of exchange. Some of it included money, but much of it did not.
You produced energy from a windmill or from a water mill or from your horse, or your cow, or your own manual labor. And you were basically economically independent. You needed some money on the weekends if you go to the market to buy some specialized products.
But I think it’s entirely possible, and preferable, to pull ourselves out of this digitalized monetary system, which is the primary tool used by the global elite to pin us down and to slowly ease us into slavery.
Geopolitics & Empire: They want to put us on their digital farm and get us off of our farm. And you echo a lot of sentiments from past guests I’ve had, who talk about basically what you’re saying, in different ways with variations like a parallel society, a parallel structure, a parallel economy and that sort of thing. Where would be the best place for people to go to find out more? I’ll include all of the links in the descriptions, but if you want, tell us where’s the best place for people to go to find out more.
Emanuel Pastreich: Well, the best way, the best starting point, is to be able to sit down with your own family and have a serious discussion about what’s happening in the United States. It trumps everything else. Because so many families are not able to speak honestly about what’s happening, or even to address the challenges that we face. We have to overcome this taboo, the forbidden truths, and have real discussions with family members, friends and neighbors. For my part, my little contribution, I hope, is to be a catalyst to get people to say: that’s the way to go. And, obviously, I’m here to support you. If you want to contact me, I’ll do everything I can to be helpful to you.
In terms of websites, I have my own blog, circlesandsquares.asia. I do a lot of writing in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and I have stuff in Spanish and other languages as well, which might be interesting to some. My field is Asia. I was a Chinese major. I studied Japanese for many years, and Korean as well.
And then I have a site for my presidential candidacy emanuelprez.com that has my speeches, my book in 14 languages, and then the prefaces in another 20 languages.
And then I have the US provisional government site, usprovgov.asia, where I present some of the basic concepts for what a provisional government based on the Constitution of the United States would be. And purpose of that site is to say, obviously, that I can’t do it myself, but I can set forth a vision for what is possible that will inspire other people to do it.
The underlying assumption there is that we must at the least have a strategy behind our actions. We must say to ourselves, “These people control everything now. how do you overthrow that?”
I think there are some basic principles in politics about how you do it.
The first is to say that they have no legitimacy, that the United States is based upon the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that those documents define the United States. Other organizations which defy that basic understanding and agreement of those two documents which define our government, those organizations are not government, at all, but they’re criminal syndicates.
And so we need to identify among a larger population –the process has already started—of ordinary working people, and intellectuals, the sense that this is our position: “We are the government.” Why are we the government? Because we follow the Constitution, we follow the rule of law, and we follow the scientific method.
Those people say that they’re the government, but if we look at them, they’re set up by Google and Facebook, and Israeli private intelligence firms, etc. They’re not government in any sense. The same holds for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. There’s not a word in the Constitution about the role of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. So if they are making policy, then that process is profoundly unconstitutional.
They have seized control of the process of making law and enforcing law, both because of the privatization of the police and military, and also because of the process of making policy within political parties.
Our position, should be, I think, to pull back and say, “I’m not going to engage. Well, I’m going to talk, I’d love to be on the show, but I’m not interested in compromising with these people.”
I’m going to say that me, you, couple of my friends, we are the United States because we follow the Constitution.
These people are running a criminal syndicate that is posing as the United States, but they have no legitimacy.
Now, this declaration in itself does not change things. It’s not magic. It’s sort of, you might say, a speech act as defined in literary theory. It’s like getting married, right?
The priest says, “I declare you man and wife,” right? Now, this doesn’t mean anything, right? Just words. But because of its ritual power and the way that the words are set up, it is transformative. It suddenly makes people committed to a lifetime together. And so something like that, to say, we declare that we are independent, that we follow the Constitution, that we are the government, that we are going to form a more perfect union amongst ourselves. That will be transformative.
At the beginning, maybe people won’t take it seriously. But over time they will. And that new consensus we will build from the ground up. But the underlying implication is that most of these institutions, including universities and government offices, and all sorts of organizations, used to serve their function, and they could serve their function again, but now they’re essentially criminal syndicates.
They do not have legitimacy in my eyes. And anybody who looks at the situation objectively, and gets beyond this trauma, will see quite clearly what we’re talking about.
Geopolitics & Empire: As Tommy Jay said, and so did Thomas Jefferson in the poster behind me, “Liberty begins with you.”
Emanuel Pastreich: Very true.
Geopolitics & Empire: There’s a lot to digest there, Emanuel. I’d like to thank you again for being on Geopolitics & Empire.
Emanuel Pastreich: Much appreciated. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak. I had a lot of trouble coming back to the United States. I just back in the US so I’m readjusting.
To be honest, for a while there, I thought I’d never get back to the US. I think that there is hope, and that there are people who are really trying. Starting with you, we can really change things.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.