From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 17 No 6 (Dec 2023)
What are the main characteristics of this “new normal” of enduring crisis? First and foremost, a generalised acceptance of the idea that we can no longer afford to organise our societies around a stable set of rules, norms and laws. Rather, the constant stream of new threats – terrorism, disease, war, natural disasters – means that we must be constantly ready to rapidly adapt to an ever-changing scenario of permanent instability.
– Thomas Fazi
Permacrisis signals not only a loss of faith in progress but also a new realism in relation to what people can cope with and achieve. Our crises have become so complex and deep-seated that they can transcend our capacity to understand them. Any decision to tackle them risks only making things worse.
– Neil Turnbull
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
– Attributed to Winston Churchill
There has never been a time in history free from crisis. But the last several years have introduced a relentless parade of crises, one after another, with less and less time to recover, in an all-out snowballing assault on the mind, body, and spirit that leaves people drained, depressed, exhausted, and in a permanent state of high-cortisol fight-or-flight.
Welcome to the new normal of “permacrisis.”
Energy crisis. Financial crisis. Housing crisis. Drug crisis. Unemployment crisis. Homelessness crisis. Disaster crisis. Food crisis. Climate crisis. Geopolitical crisis. Immigration crisis….
If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Permacrisis
The Cambridge English dictionary defines permacrisis as, “A long period of great difficulty, confusion, or suffering that seems to have no end.” Permacrisis was voted the ‘2022 Word of the Year’ by Collins Dictionary to recognise that year’s numerous challenges. Although there have always been difficult times, recent years have seen more of them occurring more often, and the toll on humanity is physical and psychological.
Each crisis also appears to be a means to an end for some group of power players. Mass shootings in the United States predictably lead to pushes to disarm the public. Virus outbreaks lead to forced lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the suppression and censoring of information that questions official narratives to protect key government and corporate players. Geopolitical conflicts lead to governments overtly and covertly plotting against other countries – and using your tax dollars to do so – while ignoring national issues. Natural disasters lead to cries of horrific climate change and a push for zero carbon footprints and programs that benefit the elites more than the environment.
Never – ever – let a good crisis go to waste, especially when the public is now conditioned to the “new normal” of permacrisis that cannot be put back into the Genie’s bottle. It’s the Hegelian Dialectic on steroids, with the cycle of problem, reaction, solution on an exponentially snowballing loop. They create the problem, engineer the reaction, and force their solution. We have little to no say in it all.
It’s a permanent state of suffering made up of a bubbling cauldron of ingredients, a recipe for disaster for everyone except the powerful elites behind what many say are manufactured crises or who take advantage of every natural disaster they can milk something out of.
They feast from the cauldron while we slowly starve.
Crisis: Why Choose Just One?
- COVID-19
- Ukraine/Russia
- Natural disasters
- Energy squeeze for net zero
- Interest rates/financial instability
- China/Taiwan
- Mass immigration/migration
- Climate change fear-mongering
- Animal viruses, mass cullings & food shortages
- Trump on trial in the US
- Mass shootings
- War between Israel and Palestine
Add a complicit mainstream media, including social media platforms, acting in lockstep as mouthpieces for an agenda that seems hell-bent on total destruction, with crises piling on top of each other and burying the populace beneath the weight.
It’s no longer just one natural disaster, geopolitical conflict, or viral outbreak with a few months or years for recovery before the next thing hits.
Polycrisis
“Polycrisis” is when several events occur in tandem with much less time in between for people to catch their breath. Nothing will ever return to normal because these crises happen so often that the public is already immersed in the next one by the time the truth seeps out.
Who cares if COVID was leaked from a lab or that the “safe and effective vaccines” are causing untold injuries and death? Who cares if the World Health Organisation has a 10-year pandemic plan, of which COVID is part of their quest for global health domination?
COVID was “so yesterday’s news.” We are too busy now fearing for our lives from this, that, and the other thing and virtue signalling our support for the crisis du jour on social media to pay attention to new facts and information or demand justice be served for the sins of the past.
Bye-bye Ukraine/Russia, hello Israel/Palestine. Epstein’s client list? Who’s Epstein?
Two Types of Crisis
There are two main types of permacrisis/polycrisis.
Events that may be engineered for a specific outcome – think of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Information that contradicted the official narrative, with revelations about Building 7’s mysterious collapse, passports found unscathed in the rubble, CIA connections to the terrorists, covered-up connections to Saudi Arabia, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and much more. The clear evidence that US President George Bush and VP Dick Cheney – following the strategy of the neoconservative think tank The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – used the horrific attacks to invade not only Afghanistan but also Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein despite his total lack of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. There were so many unanswered questions to suggest the US government knew of the attacks and may have been complicit in allowing them to happen.
9/11 ushered in an unprecedented period of surveillance, curtailing of freedoms, and a push for tyranny in the United States with The Patriot Act, which never would have passed into law had the public not first been terrorised and traumatised – so much so that they willingly begged for their freedoms to be restricted to keep them safe and secure. That push for tyranny is only getting worse, and on a global scale, simply because the public accepted it the first time.
Israel and Palestine are currently doing the war dance after the brutal attack by Hamas on 7 October. As the leaders of Western nations rushed to defend Israel, massive pro-Palestine protests were occurring in every city across the globe. Both sides have been wrapped in a long-range conflict. Few understand it was the Israeli government and Mossad (their version of the CIA) that helped create Hamas in the late 1980s to fight their primary threat at the time, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). While there is no excuse whatsoever for the horrific October 2023 attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent years bolstering up Hamas in the Gaza Strip to cripple the power of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government from succeeding in establishing a Palestinian state.
In this case, a problem (Abbas et al.) created a response (empower Hamas) that led to a solution (Hamas turns against you) that drastically backfired for Israel – and the end result may be World War III and no doubt a boon to the coffers of the military-industrial complex.
The only difference between this and 9/11 may be the intention. While 9/11 felt engineered with a specific intention in mind, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict seems rooted in a domino effect of terrible past power plays and decisions pitting one enemy against another, proving that “the enemy of my enemy” isn’t always my friend… for long.
Writing in his Badlands Media Substack, Erik Carlson wrote of the recent Hamas attacks: “Some believe no one has been killed and it is all fake. Some believe all of it is real. Others believe some of it is real and some is propaganda. While yet others, like me, believe some is real, some is propaganda, and all of it is a contrived effort to create a bigger war.” Add into this mix the onset of new artificial intelligence-generated fake images and videos, which will make it doubly hard in the future to decipher the truth of events in faraway places.
Another type of permacrisis is when events unfold naturally but are taken advantage of for a specific end goal. These are the natural disasters used to forward a not-so-green agenda or global pandemics that bring about forced vaccination and lockdowns to curtail freedoms.
Sadly, larger crises outweigh smaller crises when governments point the propaganda machine at threats to their long-term interests. Who cares about a small-town chemical spill that poisoned an entire town (which recently happened in the US), when China – we are told – might invade Taiwan? Local, regional, and national instability takes a back seat to global instability, not because our leaders are looking out for the population at large, but because they are looking out for vested economic, military, political, and corporate interests.
It’s this exact instability that keeps people sick, stressed, and distracted from the World Economic Forum’s attempts to force upon us their Great Reset with its digital wallets, CBDCs, total surveillance, climate lockdowns, forced vaccinations, SMART city prisons, social media censorship, mass media lies and deceptions, and landgrabs so that we will own nothing and need them for everything.
Crises that concurrently impact us at the same time leave people reeling and drained, emotionally and physically. People lose loved ones, lose livelihoods, and suffer the fight-or-flight stress of always being hypervigilant and at the ready. With non-stop surges of cortisol and adrenaline, it’s a wonder we can still function. This may be why depression, anxiety, and other stress-related diseases like heart attacks, strokes, cancers, and auto-immune disorders have skyrocketed in the last few years.
We are at the precipice with nothing to do but jump or perish. Our psyches are taxed to the point of no return. We cannot take much more until we are forced, and the cycle repeats.
They want us divided and angry. They purposely ratchet up the violent rhetoric between two sides and push us to choose one, even if both are awful choices. Then, they can swoop in to save the day and claim they are “uniters, not dividers,” even though they divided us all in the first place.
If there is peace and quiet for too long, they fear we might regroup, restrengthen, and revolt. If we have ample time to gather our thoughts and enough of us share notes, the danger for the powers that be is that we will wake up, en masse, when too many of us have worked out how we are manipulated by this insidious cycle.
Historical Examples
It’s not hard to look back at historical events and see the problem, the reaction, and the solution and how it all played out for a certain goal or agenda of the involved parties. Given enough time and water under the bridge – and if we care to scrutinise the facts when they eventually come out – we can clearly see how crises are engineered for some goal.
Operation Northwoods
Operation Northwoods is a perfect example of how a crisis is used as a means to an end, in this case, in the form of a false flag event.
False flags are often at the heart of permacrisis because they work so well to fool the public into complicit behaviour and acceptance of acts by their own governments that they might never otherwise have gone along with. For example, a terrorist attack coordinated by a country’s leaders against their own citizens to place blame on a country they want to trigger a war with.
According to PublicIntelligence.net, Operation Northwoods involved a US government plan in 1962 to stage false flag terrorist attacks inside the United States and abroad to justify military intervention in Cuba.
“The plan called for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other operatives to commit genuine acts of terrorism in US cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro. One part of the Operation Northwoods plan was to ‘develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington’,” explains PublicIntelligence.net.
The document was signed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer and presented to US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara on 13 March 1962, who then presented it to President John F. Kennedy, who promptly shot the entire plan down. Kennedy was assassinated some months later. Decades later, the top-secret report was declassified as part of the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Review Board in 1997.
Vietnam War
While Northwoods was not given the go ahead to trigger war with Cuba, Vietnam was a different story.
US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was in charge of the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. He wrote about US foreign policy decisions in his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, admitting that the dangers the Vietnamese presented were exaggerated and that the loss of South Vietnam never truly threatened US interests. McNamara also explained that the theory about the fall of Vietnam causing a domino effect of countries falling prey to communism was entirely false.
“We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong,” wrote McNamara.
Those wrong decisions altered US strategy in late 1967, but it was too late for President Lyndon Johnson’s presidency to overcome the damage.
McNamara also referenced a false flag incident that took place in the Gulf of Tonkin, which gave him a blank check for the escalation of US involvement in the war, an escalation that would send tens of thousands of young American soldiers to fight, only to return home dead and wounded.
The question remains: did McNamara and others know they were “terribly wrong” at the time and let the crisis unfold anyway because war is always good for the pocketbook? And was the fact that Kennedy wanted to pull US forces out of Vietnam, not get more involved, the reason why the CIA had him assassinated?
At the time, anyone questioning the official narratives about the Vietnam War was labelled a communist sympathiser, and later a “conspiracy theorist.” Decades later, with all the new information coming out, it makes a lot more sense that conspiratorial forces did work behind the scenes to make sure the war continued – no matter what lies and manipulation were forced upon the public. In his dying days, McNamara had the guts to admit it. Of course, we also now know the CIA was running Operation Mockingbird, a large-scale program that began in the early years of the Cold War to manipulate domestic news media organisations for propaganda purposes.
The Power of Instability
The state of permacrisis and polycrisis create conditions of fear and instability that undermine a person’s physical, emotional, and economic security. There is no firm ground beneath our feet when we are rocking and reeling from one horrible situation after another. This leads to heightened hyper-vigilance and fear-based responses, a constant state of fight-or-flight from some external threat we have zero control over. The result is a compliant and submissive populace who will do just about anything to feel safe and secure again.
One of the most powerful ways permacrisis controls the masses is through reinforcement, which encourages particular behaviours. Positive reinforcement alone may be too nice to get the job done, and negative reinforcement, such as punishment, is too harsh for controlling people who might otherwise rebel. Intermittent reinforcement works like a charm by putting its victims in a sort of hypnotic ‘spell’, creating cognitive dissonance using doubt, fear, anxiety, expectation, and hope as weapons against the mind.
By mixing a tiny bit of positive reinforcement in with the negative, the person is kept unbalanced. Those small periods of general peace between crises, where we celebrate returning to normal, give us hope and breathing room again before the next round of negative reinforcement in the form of more fear, anxiety, and instability. This give-take and push-pull is what creates things like cult mentality, mob behaviour of going along to get along, trauma bonding with our ‘captors’, and Stockholm Syndrome.
The pain and suffering during each crisis leave us begging for just one crumb of relief to the point where we begin to side with our captors and abusers, even making excuses for their actions. In this manner, we accept even more abuse and crises if we can just get them to toss us a crumb of normalcy now and then.
This coercive persuasion creates a population of mindless zombies, numb yet holding onto a tiny sliver of hope deep inside that things will level off and get better. It succeeds in modifying human behaviour on a grand scale so that it is far easier for the powers behind the crises to execute their plans and reap the rewards without too much of a fight.
Until it doesn’t work anymore.
Stepping Out of the Crisis Matrix
Using the Hegelian Dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis, or problem, reaction, solution), we can see that the problem is the collective of puppet masters behind the permacrisis: the central bankers, too big-to-fail corporations like Blackrock and Vanguard, the royal families and old money with its privileges and power, the military-industrial complex, billionaire oligarchs like Bill Gates and George Soros, Klaus Schwab and his WEF minions, and the complicit mainstream media and the Deep States of all governments. The usual suspects.
The reaction is our succumbing to the fear they impose upon us, and the loss of freedoms as the elites push their thumbs down hard upon our heads. One only has to turn on the news to see how we are reacting to the problem of looming tyranny, fascism, and total control of our lives. We turn against each other instead of the ones oppressing us.
The solution to the problem we are reacting to is in our hands. It really is, and they know it. We are not powerless against the permacrisis agenda. We can do much to keep ourselves sane, healthy, and empowered. We can step outside the crisis matrix and create a new reality. We can demand our leaders remember who they work for and vote out those who have forgotten. We can boycott and protest and put our money where our mouths are.
We can spend less time on our mobile phones and social media exchanging barbs with those who think differently and more time cultivating our dreams and fulfilling our goals.
Hating and fighting those different from us or who hold different opinions keeps us weak and distracted. This is their plan. Right vs. left, black vs. white, male vs. female. The key is to learn to observe what is going on and take right action when needed, but not to engage in the emotional drainsuck – to be in the world but not of it. Instead of fighting against something, find out what you stand for. Instead of engaging in word and meme warfare, spread humour and happiness.
Staying healthy is the most revolutionary act we can partake in. When we care better for our bodies and minds and love ourselves and the people around us, we empower the world. We can do spiritual work like prayer and meditation, eat healthier, move our bodies, laugh more, volunteer, and create stronger communities. The elites hate it when we build community and support local businesses, farms, programs, and services because it means we don’t need them as much. They hate when we strengthen our human bonds. That’s why they tested us with COVID-19 lockdowns and hint at doing it again in the name of climate change. Locking us down in isolation makes us miserable, scared, and compliant.
Another Perspective
There is another way to look at permacrisis. What if it’s more like the labour pains of a pregnant woman that get stronger and more frequent just before the baby moves down the birth canal to be born? The permacrisis/polycrisis we are dealing with might be intensifying labour pains of the dying of the old guard and the pending birth of a new world – not the one the elites dream of but the one that we, the people, know is possible when we take back our power and sovereignty.
Maybe we are already winning, and they know it. As Thomas Fazi writes, “Our desperate rulers are clinging on to a dying world…. aside from being a ‘method of government’, permacrisis neatly encapsulates the panic of the Western elite: it is their global order, their dominant position in the global food chain, that is under threat.”
While imprisoned in 1930 after speaking out against Mussolini, Italian philosopher and journalist Antonio Gramsci famously wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth. Now is the time of monsters.”
It is up to us to slay the monsters.
Sources
badlands.substack.com/p/the-hitler-or-obama-youth
cnet.com/culture/dont-stress-but-permacrisis-is-the-2022-word-of-the-year
ft.com/content/937c4eb1-7240-481d-9775-71de7b8bb171
Marie D. Jones, Disinformation and You: Identify Propaganda and Manipulation, Visible Ink Press, 2021
Marie D. Jones & Larry Flaxman, Mind Wars: A History of Mind Control, Surveillance, and Social Engineering by the Government, Media, and Secret Societies, New Page Books, 2015
mckinsey.com/mgi/overview/in-the-news/is-the-world-on-the-brink-of-a-new-era
Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Vintage Books, 1996.
publicintelligence.net/operation-northwoods
resilience.org/stories/2023-01-03/from-polycrisis-to-permacrisis
theconversation.com/permacrisis-what-it-means-and-why-its-word-of-the-year-for-2022-194306
tfazi.substack.com/p/challenging-the-permacrisis-paradigm
timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces
unherd.com/2023/09/why-the-wests-elites-invented-a-permacrisis
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