Feeding Time for the Eloi

A representative sample

Last week:

"The first step is to establish a sense of unease, a feeling, (and make sure it is never more than a vague feeling) that we need looking after, that the world is hostile and more complex and incomprehensible than we had suspected."

I've been compiling information on Vision Television and their board members, trustees, sponsors, donors, structure, tax status (isn't journalism glamourous?) and I thought I would share some of my little findings.

I wanted to make sure that we all know that I'm not making these theories up out of my wee head.

A good example of the tribe, whom I'll call Trudeaupians for brevity's sake, is Dr. Gordon McIvor. He joined the Board of Directors of Vision TV in 2002 and was recently named to the position of Chair of the Vision Television Foundation. He is also president of the Couchiching Institute, a globalist, multiculturalist think tank that has an annual conference to discuss the meaning of nationhood, citizenship, globalism and business ethics in the new supra-national borderless world. (A world, I might add, into which you and I are not invited.)

I will not bore you with the details of his CV, but suffice to say he is pretty well a cookie-cutter-stamped specimen of the kind of men who are leading Canada - men who are probably best represented by the likes of Maurice Strong. PhD Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France, president, chairman and director of a half dozen associations, transnationalist and globalist business clubs etc, etc, etc.

A leader of men, in the post-revolutionary world. Mover and shaker.

He gives us a sample of the kind of ill-defined dis-ease with which he and his tribe have been at pains to invest us. The old rules are no good any more. The old way of doing things is what got us into this (carefully vague and undefined) mess. We need men like Dr. McIvor to help us out. A global vision...

Address Delivered by Gordon McIvor
Canadian Institute, Wednesday, March 24, 2004
“Integrating Social Initiatives and Causes into
Corporate Marketing Strategy”

If I flip through the pile of newspapers and magazines sitting on my credenza, the covers represent a virtual rogues gallery. Of course there are still a lot of good CEOs out there who quietly succeed without bending the rules. But it does appear at least, that an alarming number of leaders, who were once looked up to and respected, are now mired in controversy. And alarming headlines don’t stop with the business pages – questionable political agendas, youth gang wars in schools, the threat of terrorism, bureaucratic bungling in the face of starvation and pandemic illness -- not to mention the havoc we are wreaking on the environment, which is actually more terrifying for the long term than any of these others. Just last Friday there was a devastating report in the Star and the National Post on a study warning that we may be in a sixth major period of extinction comparable to the late Triassic disruption 200 million years ago.

A veritable feast of hazy, indistinct and indefinable threats all neatly bottlenecking down to a global catastrophe. A panic-button, in other words. His world-picture is almost a caricature of the kind of hypnotically induced fear, helped along with a group of unwords, against which there is no defense for the little people and no solution, except of course, more government. Bigger, more controling government. Government that can both be the solution and the generator of more problems, for which the only possible solution is more and bigger government.

There is no enemy whom we can see or name. There are no Nazis or Stalinists. Instead we are presented with ghosts: global terror threat; youth gang violence; bureaucratic bungling; starvation, pandemic illness; environmental disaster. Notice something else? The only threat on the list that is a person and not just an unword is the rich businessmen, "unscrupluous rogues" who have become rich without mandate and (let's jab awake the envy nerves) at our expense.

None of these are directly identifiable things. Who can point to "youth violence" or "environmental disaster"? I can point to a young offender, but of course he is a victim of the evil system and so cannot be dealt with directly. I can point to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, but, despite what Mayor Ray It's-everyone's-fault-but-mine Nagle might have us think, no one could have done anything about it. One weathers the weather and when it is over, one comes out and picks up the bits.

These "threats" are of the same order as the one the Gauls used to fear: the sky falling on our heads. Problems that have no parameters, no definitions, no faces, no solutions. They are claxon words meant to paralyse us into docility. A siren set at a frequency that makes our muscles go limp and our minds quiet.

A vague, unnamable, faceless threat. A global threat. And one, most importantly that acts as Orwell's war against Eurasia. A bottomless pit into which to throw money and around which to build more government.

The solution?

Well, in the speech quoted above, it was Michael Ignatieff as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Next week, it will be someone else.