Emanuel Pastreich discusses the ills of U.S. Empire, the sham of American elections, and how academia has been utterly corrupted. In reality, politics is determined via false flag operations which cause mass trauma (e.g. 9/11). The goal of Operation COVID-19 was the totalitarian takeover of local and central governments around the world by the power elite, IT companies, and private intelligence firms. The technocrats have been learning how to modify behavior through experiments at DARPA, RAND, and Guantanamo Bay. Israel was the pioneer in developing these technologies for social control. He explains how nations states seem to have conflicts while simultaneously cooperating symbiotically via multinational corporations. Finally, he talks solutions.
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TRANSCRIPT
Geopolitics & Empire:
Geopolitics & Empire is joined by Emanuel Pastreich, who serves as the president of The Asia Institute and as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. He declared his candidacy for president of the US as an independent in February of 2020. Welcome to Geopolitics & Empire, Mr. Pastreich.
Emanuel Pastreich:
It’s an honor to be here.
Geopolitics & Empire:
I came across your work recently, your writing and your interviews, and I thought I had to have you on the show because you have many unique insights and you’ve got a fascinating life experience. It is hard to peg who you are because of your interesting background. If you could just briefly maybe tell us, who is Emanuel Pastreich?
Emanuel Pastreich:
Right. Well, that’s a tough one and I’m maybe not the most qualified to explain myself. I came from a relatively establishment background in the United States. I’m still wearing a tie, and I was a professor of Asian studies, so I spent a good part of my life in Korea and Japan, and I studied Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. When I was at the University of Illinois back in 2000, 2001, I became quite committed to opposing the totalitarian rule in the United States, which continues to the day. And as a result of my efforts with others, I ended up being basically unable to work in the United States and living in Korea from 2007. Tried to come back to the United States once in 2019, which was not successful.
I’m back in the United States after three years away; just arrived a week ago. I am trying my best to address real issues in the United States and to puncture a hole in the blanket of hypocrisy and fraud that has wrapped around every aspect of American society, and, by extension, around the world. I want to talk about real things.
I had declared in February, 2020, when I saw what was happening with this so-called Biden-Trump election, that I would run as an independent candidate for president and address real issues, not with any particular leftist or rightist perspective. I tried to just scientifically address what were the problems in the United States. And that caused a lot of problems, but it did give me the chance to get in the habit of giving talks, speeches, which has now become my primary means of expressing myself.
I hope we can return to politics based on intellectual inquiry, on a moral commitment, and on real engagement with citizens, as opposed to a fraudulent “feel good” approach to blanket marketing.
Geopolitics & Empire:
I purchased your book “I Shall Fear No Evil.” I think people can download it for free. You touch on most of your points in that book.
I agree with much of what you say. And maybe we can start with what you touched on: what’s wrong with the US?
I’m from Illinois, I’m from Chicago, and 20 years ago I saw a lot wrong. I’m a history major, former teacher, former professor of history, I could just see the cycle of history.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Where were you teaching?
Geopolitics & Empire:
Well, I taught abroad in Kazakhstan and in Mexico. That’s part of the story. I decided to leave the United States. When you’re born as an American, you never imagine we were an empire. I thought we were just a country, the United States, and then you realize there is stuff we get into like 9/11, and other things. The reality is we’re an empire, and we’re the biggest empire in the history of the world. So we are starting all these wars, killing millions of people.
There’s a lot of good that America has done, but a lot of bad too. We have to be fair. There’s the militarism. And we’re bankrupt financially–you talk about that. I also think that spiritually we’re bankrupt.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Intellectually too.
Geopolitics & Empire:
We’re at each other’s throats. Then there’s the techno-authoritarianism. I might get you in into trouble. In April, I believe the Department of Homeland Security told PayPal to shut off my account. I’m banned from using PayPal.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Well, congratulations.
Geopolitics & Empire:
And so if you could tell us basically, what’s wrong with America as you see it?
Emanuel Pastreich:
Well, to some degree it’s a cyclical process. If you have any institution, any government or empire and it runs 250 years, you start to have these institutional contradictions and collapse. To some degree it’s because of the institutions that were originally set up no longer correspond with the reality of how decisions are made, or how the economy works. I happen to like the US Constitution and I refer to it. It’s not a perfect document, but it gives some basic principles for governance, which I think are quite unique.
It was a unique, successful experiment in history. It doesn’t mean the United States was successful, it just means that concept of constitutional government where they took some of the essence of what was discussed in Greece and Rome and tried to take the empire out of it. That was the concept behind the United States. It was a noble experiment that offers much for us.
However, it was flawed from the beginning. Obviously slavery, the destruction of the native peoples, also the idea of real estate and how it was imported here and enclosure, all that part of the project was obviously flawed. But we did have some good aspects to the United States, which sometimes were positive for the world.
But over the last 50 years, we saw the militarization of the economy and then this move towards a radical expansion of financialization and privatization. And in that process, I think, we also have to take note of the end of the Cold War, which has been celebrated in what we’re force fed in media and in academics. But the end of the Cold War was essentially the end of an opposing perspective in the world. Basically during the Cold War (I’m not saying Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China got it all right) socialist nations at least offered a different perspective, were able to suggest that things like class struggle, the concentration of capital, and ideology were topics to talk about. These were things that were important in their newspapers and universities. And when the Soviet Union and China basically went over to a modified neo-capitalism, with a little bit of socialist characteristics mixed in the drink, then we lost that other perspective in the world.
And as a result from the 1990s on increasingly these ridiculous ideas about economics spread. In the United States, or in Japan, or in Germany in the 1970s—through the 80s even, there were professors of economics who took Marxist economics as a major part of their approach to economic theory. There are zero people like that now, except for bloggers.
We’ve lost this potential for other perspectives. It’s not saying that Marxism is perfect. I’m not a Marxist by the way, but I’m sympathetic to Marxist analysis. I think that addressing class issues and finance and ideology is critical. And so we now are in this position in which consumption, growth, exports are assumed by basically everybody to be essential for the wellbeing of people, or that the stock market has a relationship (other than parasitic) to the lives of ordinary citizens.
These things are accepted as truths, right? They’re talking about a rise in the stock market as good for you.
And we have in the United States now these cardboard messiahs, whether it’s Bernie Sanders, or AOL, or Donald Trump who come up with these quirky ideas about what economics is, or how we can be more progressive, concerned with working people.
But essentially they buy into the entire economic money system and they’re not interested in saying, “Why don’t we make people independent from money?” They’re not trying to say, we can support ourselves.
We don’t have to spend money. People in the 19th century, most of them didn’t use money. They used it only when they went to market once a month to buy things they needed. Some metal products or certain items like clocks. But basically in their daily lives, they were able to support themselves and their communities were able to support them. That is real economics; that’s positive.
Actually that’s the real meaning of market economy. It has become a horrible term that’s been so distorted. Market economy means you go to the market in your community and you sell carrots, or the chairs you made, and you exchange them with your neighbor who is selling butter, or fabrics or whatever. And you have this mutual support system.
Now market economy means Google and Facebook and all these techno tyrants, which print up their own money by devaluing our money, and they control the entire system. They set up these IT systems (like the technology we are using now) in which we are forced to communicate with each other, to exchange, to buy things through them. They control the means of production, means of distribution, means of sales, and the means of communication, and increasingly the ideological structure itself. They produce these false conservatives and these false progressives whom we are supposed to buy.
Geopolitics & Empire:
That was my next question. We’ve got an oligarchy in the US and I think it’s just as bad as the Russian oligarchies and these foreign dictatorships. I think the issue for us is that because Americans are more prosperous, we care less—as long as we can buy our nice cars, iPhones, and other stuff. We don’t really care about our oligarchy, but they’re just as bad, if not worse.
You mention sham elections. I agree with you; just to read a quote from your book, you say, “I say that if we do not have an election in which someone like me can be a candidate, can have a chance to be covered in the media, that we are not holding elections but rather holding an impressive sham. We have no intention of recognizing any such sham elections. In fact, until there is an election in which someone like me can get proper attention and the chance to be on the ballot, we will not recognize any of these elections.”
Just a quick thought on the elections. As you say, on our left, our right, we’ve got fake conservatives and a fake left. No one is anti-war anymore on the left.
Emanuel Pastreich:
That’s true.
Geopolitics & Empire:
There’s a handful on the right, but they all stay within a certain bounds. None of them have ever crossed the red line.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Right. Well I think the decision to run as independent candidate for president was a serious one. I take it quite seriously and I put a lot of work into the speeches. The preference to my book is out in 40 languages. I don’t have Croatian, but I have many other languages—many from Central Europe for that matter. It was a campaign both in the United States and also globally meant to say, let’s have an alternative view.
And we’ve been basically blocked out. I think that American elections were always flawed. I wouldn’t say there was a perfect time, but there’s been a catastrophic collapse of the political system over the last 20 years. And the result is these sham elections, as I was suggesting in my recent post.
Now politics is determined not by elections, but by false flag operations, like 9/11 or COVID-19 or these mass shootings, whatever, these are how politics are determined, not by voting at the ballot.
In order to move beyond, to go back to some logical, scientific, rational process, I think we have to look back to the founding of the United States, or other countries, and recognize that the basis for the United States in the beginning, and the ways in which it was successful, were based on revolutionary thought, recognized that the United States is a revolutionary country.
That’s the core where we start. And we have to say that the Declaration of Independence notes very clearly,
“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Our two founding documents are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. You not only are entitled to, but you have a moral obligation to oppose this system, to overthrow it, and to create a system which is democratic, transparent and accountable.
That is my position when I am running as a candidate. I would love it if people vote for me, if they put me on TV, and if I got attention like Donald Trump, or these bedridden people like Joe Biden.
But that’s not my purpose. My purpose is to be revolutionary. And so I believe the best way that I can affect politics, that we can affect politics, is to take a stand and to say, “This is the truth. This is what needs to be done.” I’m not interested in whether the New York Times or CNN will cover me, because they’re so corrupt and so useless and dangerous, that as far as I’m concerned, we should lock them all up too. I have no interest in pandering to them.
And I would also say that that was the major mistake made by so many people in the United States over the last decade (as we fell into late imperial decay): they thought, I have this good idea, what might be a good idea, and in order to realize that idea, I’m going to compromise. I’m going to downplay it, going to soften it up a little bit, modify it in such a way that, one, the New York Times will mention me, and two, some wealthy donor will give me money.
And my position is to say, I’m not going to do that. And that this is the only way to achieve real change in the United States, and globally, to draw a line in the sand.
It may seem pointless. You might see me as someone who is a failure. I was not able to work in the United States from 2007. I have been unemployed for long periods of time, which was not all that pleasant. But I think that my actions were more politically meaningful than if I had compromised on 9/11 and other issues and tried to play the game here in Washington D.C.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Just one real quick question on 9/11, not to go in depth, just get your big picture take. One of my subscribers recently tuned to the email list told me they’re signing off because I believe 9/11 was a false flag operation. And I’m like…
Emanuel Pastreich:
It’s so obvious
Geopolitics & Empire:
For me you’re not a serious person if you can’t take on the false flag operations. My response to him was that in graduate school in Geneva, Switzerland I was taught about this type of thing. It is a basic historical fact. The Roman Empire did it. Nazi Germany did it.
Emanuel Pastreich:
I would even say it is an ancient tradition.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Russia has done it. It’s a basic military strategy. NATO has done it. Japan has done it, Israel has done it, Turkey has done it. Tell me a country which has not run the false flag operation.
But just real quick, you mentioned previously, but also in one of your writings, you’ve written the false flag “serves as critical tool in American politics by creating mass trauma in the population that inhibits the formation of organized resistance or the possibility of rational intellectual discourse.” And so just your quick take on 9/11.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Well I think that in that respect, 9/11 was extremely successful. Basically it shut down the American mind.
We need to use Hermann Broch’s term “the sleepwalkers” to describe our ruling class. We see people who are intellectuals, who are extremely well educated. They read books. They are lawyers, doctors, businessmen, but they’re incapable of conceiving of what is happening. They’re basically sleepwalking through history, unable to conceive of these higher-level traumatic shifts in governance.
And so 9/11, is most representative in that respect. If you’ve taken one semester of physics in high school, you can figure out that this event was impossible. It cannot possibly be true. I watched it. I was in the US, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign at the time. I saw it. I was not a physics major. I thought, this is not possible. Something else is going on here.
But there’s no way that if two (if it’s what happened) airliners crash, it’ll cause three buildings that made of concrete reinforced with steel to collapse. It cannot possibly be true.
But I think looking back on it now, that that was the whole point; the point was, just like with COVID-19, to force-feed the population a story which was not credible from the beginning. And the purpose of that was to degrade the ability of citizens to think for themselves scientifically and co-opt an entire class of intellectuals.
I’ve written about this topic using the ideas from Julien Benda’s classic book “The Treason of the Intellectuals” from 1927.
That was a large part of 9/11, and of COVID-19. This large class of privileged intellectuals, people like myself, decided –and I saw this at the University of Illinois and elsewhere– that they would go on with this incredibly stupid, unbelievable, argument on physics and on geopolitics to explain this trauma.
They went along with it. They took the money. There are always going to be some intellectuals like that, but the fact that there were so many for both 9/11 and COVID-19 who were willing to buy the story indicates something deeply wrong.
I have a classmate who’s a teaching at MIT and I talked to her, and talked to her about COVID-19 at the very start. She was just following the rules. I know that she’s smart enough to know that it just doesn’t make any sense scientifically.
As I put it in one of my articles, technology buried science in a shallow grave. We have a system in which technology is mistaken for science. We moved towards this “sciencism,” as opposed to science. In sciencism the truth is determined by experts at Harvard or Stanford, or wherever, as opposed to by a rigorous investigation of phenomena.
That started before 9/11. You can trace it back. In some ways it started with Oklahoma, which was the precursor to 9/11. I think if we hadn’t had the trauma of the Oklahoma bombings, that 9/11 would’ve been harder to pull off. And finally, I would conclude by saying that many of these things they’re planned out. DARPA (defense advanced research projects agency) and RAND and other agencies–now there’s a proliferation of these think tanks or consulting firms—planned these traumas. From the 1960s on they carried out a whole series of studies in psychology, mass trauma, et cetera, in which they essentially came up with these classified plans, some of which have been declassified, most of which have not. The plans describe how to transition a population from one state to another over time through the use of mass trauma.
And that’s what 9/11 was about. Oklahoma was the first point of mass trauma, then 9/11, then COVID-19–and there were a few others in between.
On the one hand the operations had very specific agendas, what they were trying to do in the short term. But there is a larger agenda, which is to create a totalitarian state, on in which people are not aware, as you mentioned, that the system is totalitarian.
There’s a radical alienation between the reality on the ground and the manner in which ruling class intellectuals, who set the tone and the message, perceive the world. We live in a fantasy world in which we are told this is how the United States works. And then there’s the reality of how it really works. Basically they’ve become two unrelated realms.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Just to comment on the academic aspect, I worked in education, in academia here in Mexico, and just as you described it, I find it sad. Most academics, all they care about is their money, their salary, their wages, and their career. I want the truth. I had my classes taken away from me when I taught at a high school and at a university. And the trick was that it’s harder to get fired from the high school than it is the university.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Interesting.
Geopolitics & Empire:
After one or two semesters they took away my courses at the university on international relations because I was talking like you are. Eventually there was a new person who took charge and he didn’t know my way of thinking. And so I got my courses back. It’s just really sad. It just goes back to the fact that the people want the money, they don’t care about the truth.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Well, I’ve seen that. Certainly many academics now, and I see this in my colleagues, people who I used to be quite close to in another lifetime. Consider the priority to be getting grants. And so grants are the goal, certainly not scientific method, right? They must go along with what grantors want. And that process no longer involves any sense of public good, or of government or institutions that are run for the public good.
We have the Drew Faust, the previous president of Harvard. When she retired, she was appointed to the board of directors of Goldman Sachs. Unprecedented in American history. But it’s telling. So the priority for these research institutes and their administrators is their ability to suck up to global capital.
That is what it’s about. And so obviously if we’re talking about Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, or other Blackstone, or other private equity, these guys are sophisticated. They hire consulting firms and tell them how to modify teaching and academic research at Harvard over time so that it serves their purpose, essentially they help to cover your tracks for you. You do not modify intellectual discourse in too explicit a way. You throw in a little bit of multiculturalism here, a little bit of gender theory there; you talk about how unfair it is that poor people are not doing so well, but you don’t identify the process of how we got here.
It’s become, I think it’s a major, major industry, this whole distortion of reality in advertising, public relations, consulting, and then on beyond that in research, academics, journalism, and the basic principles of discourse now. It’s a form of prostitution.
I like to talk this trauma in terms of incest, rape, and prostitution, the three fundamental traumas in human relations, in sexual relations–sexual relations have profound symbolic power in our society.
And all of them, incest, rape and prostitution, have their equivalents in our political world and in our intellectual world. And that’s what we’re witnessing. Increasingly we’re talking about all of those. Incest is the false flag, the internal compromise in which the compromise is so profound for the victim that it can’t even be addressed. Rape is similar in that it brings the person into this relationship which was unwanted, but in a way which is so embarrassing (and sometimes involves some mutual attraction), that it becomes so horrific that the individual cannot even conceive of what happened.
And so in many cases of rape in the real world, people never report it because they think it is so demeaning to the self and they can’t even confront it in themselves.
In the case of prostitution, that which should be expression of concern, or affection, or love, or commitment to family, becomes a means of making money, a service. And we see such a distortion all across our society, especially in education. Rather than teachers being concerned with society or with students, or with family, it becomes just a means to produce money. Maybe you are not selling your body but you are selling your soul.
Geopolitics & Empire:
I wanted to have you unpack COVID-1984, as I call it, and basically the same thesis I’ve held from the very beginning, January, 2020, you put into words, I never viewed that there was a pandemic at all. My theory is that it was planned, this whole event. It was either some low key bio weapon or it was entirely manufactured from whole cloth. Either way, there was no pandemic. We just could have just gone on with our lives normally.
You wrote recently on your Substack, and I recommend people read this article, the links will be in the description. You say, “Operation COVID-19 was a global coup d’etat disguise as a pandemic that was launched against China and the world in December, 2019. And that continues onto the present.”
You say that, the reality is that a tiny group of key players representing the super-rich in the US and in China coordinate closely to promote COVID lockdowns in China. And you say that everywhere they were applying this digital dictatorship. This is my interpretation. All the nations did it. I was living in Kazakhstan, I fled through the US to Mexico. I observed the creation of the “algorithm ghetto” social credit system, the “electronic concentration camp” passports, QR codes, and mandatory injections. And in some places you couldn’t even buy food without it. It’s like the Book of Revelation. You can’t buy or sell without the mark.
Emanuel Pastreich:
That’s true.
Geopolitics & Empire:
I some places they say you can’t even go to the public park without vaccine certificates. I can see that it’s a global elite that has no allegiance to nationality. It’s the US elite, it’s the Chinese elite. And they use, as you said, these private tech IT companies that are already embedded within all of our countries. We’re basically being run by big tech. Could you tell us more about how you see COVID?
Emanuel Pastreich:
Well, I think you’ve described it quite accurately there. I maybe just add a few words to say how it works. I think one of the key aspects of this takeover has to do with the concept of government. So we’re being fed this narrative by the controlled opposition that says government is bad, inherently bad, and all the bad things happen because of evil politicians or bad government. Now, obviously, government is bad these days, but if you say that government cannot possibly serve a purpose, meet the needs of the people, that this is a nihilistic and depressing perspective. I think that view is being force-fed to us by those power elites in order to discourage us from trying to organize ourselves and to create government. That is the first thing I would say.
The second part is the takeover of local government, and central governments, around the world by these IT companies. So, whether it’s in Sichuan province or it’s in Oklahoma, local governments are lobbied and then intimidated, bribed and threatened, in order to get these IT companies to run government for them. So whereas you previously had government officials, good and bad, who basically made the decisions based upon various pressures from around them in the community, now you have just one or two government officials, the president or the governor, or whatever. And their job is to outsource the budget to these IT companies who run everything for them. This happened to universities; it happened elsewhere.
This is a profound transformation. So essentially when you see a message that says, the government does this, or this is the government, or this QR code is scanned by the government, in fact, there’s no government behind it. It’s not government in any sense of the word. It’s a totalitarian dictatorship run by these global IT companies.
And they have some tricks to hide their tracks, but it’s not that hard to figure out. Basically Amazon, Google, Alibaba, there are 10 or so big players are taking over the world. And then there are smaller customized players. For example, as I mentioned, in Israel we have Black Cube and other customized private intelligence firms that facilitate the transformation. I think they were very much involved in what’s happened in China. I was criticized for this for not giving the evidence for this transformation in China, but just take my word for it.
I’d be happy to give you the evidence at some future date. But they also were very much involved in it.
And so we need to combine the evidence from these precedents. On the one hand, we have the research from DARPA and from RAND from the 1960s and 70s, how to modify people’s behavior and also how to take over basically the government through this privatization drive. Then we have the research from Guantanamo Bay and the so-called torture programs after 2001 in which experiments were carried out (Naomi Klein describes this in some detail) on how to modify behavior through isolation, i.e social distancing, masks, and other forms of repeated ritual behavior.
These rituals associated with COVID-19 are meant to be meaningless and fraudulent, and most importantly, the person involved at some level knows that the rituals (like wearing a mask) are fraudulent—but he still does them. And that action of participation in one’s own destruction degrades the ability to resist. So you can create very passive environments through those policies.
Those two strategies were combined with some understanding of AI and how it could be used to induce a passive, narcissistic, self-indulgent and decadent culture among people, especially in the mid-level ruling class. I discussed this in my article, “the terrarium economy.” We see in America this fake ruling class, people who went to Harvard and they become lawyers and doctors. They own three million, five million, $10 million in assets and a house by the beach or in France or in Italy.
They think they’re the ruling class, but it’s a fraud. The ruling class are these people who control basically the means of production and they control the nature of money. Those people are worth hundreds of billions. We don’t even know how much they’re worth because they make it up for themselves.
But for those people, the billionaires, the difference between a lawyer who has $10 million in assets and a homeless person is the difference between a roly poly and a spider. We are all bugs from their perspective. They know, based upon the reports they receive from their private intelligence and strategy teams, that by creating this false terrarium economy wherein there’s an imagined ruling class headed by someone like Biden, and it also contains a lot of poor people in it so as to create a visible little conflicts among us, that you can blind people to the fact that the whole system is all enclosed and controlled by this elite group.
And finally, much of the analysis that could be helpful for understanding economics is prohibited.
I hate to stress Marxist analysis because I’m not really a Marxist, but I’m also practical. Whatever approach works I will use—as I told Josh Jadwin the other day.
Marxist economics can be extremely helpful. I don’t think we should dismiss it just because we have some bias fed to us by the controlled opposition. We’re trapped in this system wherein the ideology is controlled by these people, as is the means of production, the means of distribution, the means of communication, and money itself is controlled by them.
And they’re dumbing us down. I think we have supercomputers doing this. They’ve calculated how fast or how slow to move towards the totalitarian system, how to create false conflicts like how Trump is excluded from Twitter, or whatever—all irrelevant. But it works because people’s thinking has been so degraded by technology. In fact, technology like Facebook or Twitter is designed to degrade your ability to think.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Just to go to a step further, where they want to take us, because I feel like we’re still in the eye of the storm, operation COVID 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.
A lot of people talk about World Economic Forum, the great reset, techno fascism, global technocracy. I like the term algorithm ghetto, because it’s putting us, and I think they want to create this global government or global totalitarian system where all nations are run like this. And if you don’t think like 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 DARPA in 2012 who 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?
Emanuel Pastreich:
Right. Well, I think their end game first is to defang the population. I think that’s number one priority is that they may not have a complete consensus among the global elite on what the end game is. This is my speculation, some people wouldn’t just kill 95% of the population. Others are more open to having a large slave population. And so it’s not clear whether the population should be three billion or 500 million or whatever. And this is related of course to the confusion about what climate change is and how catastrophic it is. If you embrace among the globalists the idea 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 it can’t support that number of people.
If you don’t believe that or you think it’s more or less stable, then obviously you can tolerate more. It’s not clear, I think there’s not a total decision consensus to say we all globalists agree that we’re going to kill off this many and we’re going to keep as slaves this many. There is some debate. But the basic assumptions are the same, that we will create a false sense of democratic process and liberalism, false multicultural gender, good feeling rainbow flag stuff as a way to fool people and for the period until we get them to the next stage. And when we get to the next stage, if you’re in your house and at any moment the so-called government can shut off your credit cards and if you go outside a drone will shoot you dead, then we don’t have to care what you think, right? We’ve gotten to the next stage and then at that point, I think all the feel good, multi culty stuff can go in the garbage because now we have essentially implemented the next stage.
And at that point then I think we’re looking at the real third world war, which will be quite brutal. I also want to note as I said in my paper, in my article on Opium War, that I really do think that Israel played a major role in this process. I’m not saying that, my father is Jewish, so I can’t blame everything on Jews, any more than Marx could do so. But I think that if we look at the know-how for QR codes and geofencing and all these things, that basically Israel was the pioneer in this and that many of the programs that are being used now globally in the United States and places like Oklahoma, Louisiana were based on Israeli models for social control. And the Israelis have an expertise that they built up. On the one hand, there’s the DARPA studies, the RAND studies in the background, but the Israelis were quite expert in how to control people and monitor them 24/7.
And the cutting edge was in Israel, and now they found a global market for it in this COVID-19 operation. It’s been 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, for example, in Louisiana and Oklahoma. 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 some sort of, how do we say it? Symbiotic relationship between Big Tech, Amazon, Cisco, Google, Facebook, the big players, and then the specialized, say like Black Cube or these others, these Israeli IT intelligence firms, which 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 poll of Russia and China, 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:
… 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 then where things might go?
Emanuel Pastreich:
Right. Well, one of the major problems we have in politics and in journalism is just 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 1940s, a lot of people engaged in journalism or in discussion in universities. They knew, they read cons. They knew about Aristotle or for that matter, Confucius, and they had an understanding of these epistemological and archaeological problematics behind politics. And 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, 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 at the same time that you have cooperation between multinational corporations, et cetera.
And so 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 to say, I have a country and I belong to it. The second is the multinational corporations which are, they follow their own rules. They fight with each other and sometimes they hate each other, but they’re not following the trajectory of the structure 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.
It doesn’t necessarily correspond with that in the multinational corporation, but it’s significant. And the final is class. And 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 as an essential issue in politics in society, Mills talked about it. It was not a Marxist concept. I think it’s really important for us to take that out to say we can talk about class and class interest without embracing a Marxist perspective, and it 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. 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 are not so free in their 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, it’s not totally new. The first world war followed the same trajectory basically. We had the contradictions of these joint held, in 1914, petrochemical, steel weapons manufacturers in which British, French, Russian, German owned stakes in weapons manufacturing in each of these countries, making profits off of wars. And that that was essentially how the first World War unfolded.
Of course, it changed in nature once you had millions of people dead and you could no longer pull that off. But the initial start of the first world war is 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 in it and was these various different extremely wealthy families who had bought into arms manufacturing. That’s what led to basically the Russian and the German Revolution in 1918, 1919.
Geopolitics & Empire:
Just on the issue of Marx, I’ve been classified as a kami, which is nothing of the sort. I feel just like you. It’s a very useful Marxian analysis. I’ve had many leftists and Marxists on to have them break things down, and use 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 in their class, 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, war economy.
Emanuel Pastreich:
Do you think I went too far?
Geopolitics & Empire:
No more cars and fewer airplanes. I think the issue is, I see what we were talking about earlier, we see some of these people like the Klaus Schwab and all these people saying that as well. What’s your take on the climate security issue?
Emanuel Pastreich:
I really appreciate you bringing that up. And it has been an issue previously because things that, I wrote that a while ago, the issue about the response to climate and to the petroleum based economy. Sadly that agenda has been taken up with people with a totally different intention than myself. My intention was, at multiple levels, 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 it, their political influence. So we make policy, whether it’s how we run our communities without being force fed automobiles and freeways and other things which we didn’t used to have and we don’t need. They’re very destructive. It’s 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 it’s basically a hidden tax for multinational corporations.
Every time you have to use plastics, you have to use automobiles, whatever, 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 to the issue of climate change is 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 simplistically because we have too many gas, petroleum driven cars is not the case. The climate change is a result, it’s a complex phenomenon. It involves the misuse of land, misuse of water, spread of deserts that result the distraction of the oceans from microplastics, a whole variety.
And then in the collapse of biodiversity, which many scientists say is a much more serious threat than the alteration of the climate for us. 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 whatever, Greta, what’s it? Thunberg, is it the name? And Al Gore and other people who give this incredibly simplistic vision of what needs to be done. And it doesn’t touch class, it doesn’t address who owns Exxon and how do they use it, how is it related to foreign war? None of that is there, it’s just to say, and of course the assumption is that politicians are insensitive and don’t listen to the people and they don’t know what’s really happening, which is definitely not the case. Politicians know exactly what’s happening, but they have their masters.
And so that analysis that we see in many, and say most of the environmental climate change NGOs is a base blatant fraud. But the concern of a catastrophic alteration of our climate, of our biosystem that might lead eventually to human extinction, I would not dismiss that. I would only say that it looks like these exaggerated scenarios in which people say, we’ll all be dead in 10 years or 20 years, 30 years, that this seems pretty clear 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. On the other hand we have these Trump and others who say that all discussion of climate change or alteration is all a fraud. It’s fine to use fossil fuels. 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 is funded also by corporate interests, and most notably that when they criticize those drawing attention to the threat, to the environment, to the climate, they attack these cardboard figures like Greta or Al Gore. They don’t go after books like The Sixth Extinction or these rather complex, carefully written books which describe a complex dangerous phenomenon in the world. And so basically the reason why people are skeptical of climate change in my opinion is, that climate change is 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 being backed by global finance. And their purpose is not to end climate change, but to use climate change, again, as a traumatic, a trauma, a deep psychological mass trauma that will allow us to move people to somewhere 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 I think the main points. And then one of my last questions for you would be our response to all of these things, these crazy global elites. My response is twofold, is trying to resist as you talk about politically fight back, to speak the truth, organizing, but also the second part is preparing for worser case scenarios. If my accounts are getting shut off and I can’t use money anymore and I’m going to starve to death, well, I have to start preparing. There’s a lot of people fleeing down here to Mexico where I am. There’s people leaving urban areas to rural areas. They’re creating their plan Bs, plot of land with water and food, creating networks, decentralizing, using technology as well. And so, what do we 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. You’re not going to elect somebody, whether it’s in Mexico or United States, who’s going to be, your Mexican president was 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 my book, I only had two commercial publishers that were willing to publish my book, Fear No Evil, and that was 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. That’s the first thing.
So that means we have to create our own system. And what I advocate, I’ve written about this now at length, is to say that a lot of us are in serious trouble, but we need to come together and to support ourselves and to create our own communities which are institutionalized. So you, me, a couple other people say we form our own government, we have our own constitution, we’re committed to each other, and we create our own economy where 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 probably what’s most difficult about it is that it means essentially giving up hope in all these false promises that have been made to us, that we thought the UN, MeToo included, United Nations or United States or European other organizations, that they could play some positive role. And that we really have to build from the bottom up, from basically you, me, 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, basic means of production, that in fact, in the long term, that forms the solid foundation for something which is independent. And that by contrast, we have so many thoughtful people, progressives, whoever, who they’re trapped in the system, to some degree that’s true of me.
They’re dependent on 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, 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, our costs were very low, and we were able to sustain ourselves and be politically active. It doesn’t require money. 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 or whatever, that you can’t be politically active. It’s a fiction. 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, recognized cooperation and mutual support as the foundation of political action and start to create their own truly independent communities, which will be the building blocks on which we create, I don’t want to say it’s 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 saying throw away everything and we’re going to engage in some radical modernism. I think if anything, we need to go back to governance as it existed before. And the United States, as I written, the native peoples like IO Okoi had tremendously sophisticated ideas that were based on long-term sustainable development, for that matter 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, I think will be the part that goes together with the independent community. Independent community changes the economic means of production and support. And the intellectual philosophical revolution says growth, consumption are bad. 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, 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 would be my final point, is that I think we have to end the money economy, 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. You get butter from your neighbor, carrots from another neighbor, you give your potatoes, that sort of exchange. Some of it included money, but most of it did not include money. You produce energy from a windmill or from a water mill or from your horse or your cow or your own manual labor. And you’re basically economically independent. You need some money on the weekends or if you go to the market and buy some specialized products.
But I think basically 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, that talk about basically what you’re saying in different ways with variations like a parallel society, parallel structure, parallel economy and that sort of thing. Where would be the best place for people to go to find out, I’ll include all of the links in the descriptions, but if you want to tell us where’s the best place for people to go to find-
Emanuel Pastreich:
Well, so obviously 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 people 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, Circles and Squares. I got 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 those. My field is Asia. I was a Chinese major. I studied Japanese for many years and Korean as well. And then I have, for my presidential candidacy, I have emanuelprez.com, and that has my speeches, my book in 14 languages, and then the prefaces in another 20 languages. And then my speeches in writings. And then I have the provisional government, Asia, USPROVGOV, in which I put down some of the basic concepts for what a provisional government based on the Constitution of the United States would be. And purpose of that is to say, obviously I can’t do it myself, but I can set at least a vision for what is possible that would inspire other people to do it.
The underlying assumption there is that we, at least a strategy behind that is to say, these people control everything now, how do you overthrow that? I think there’s 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 defines the United States. Other organizations which defy that basic understanding and agreement, which defines government, those are not government, they’re criminal syndicates. And so we need to identify among a larger, it’s already started, but a larger population of ordinary working people and intellectuals, this 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 they’re government, but if we look at them, they’re set up by Google and Facebook and Israeli private intelligence firms, et cetera. They’re not government in any sense. 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 this is profoundly unconstitution. They have seized control of the process of making law and enforcing law, both of privatization of police and military, and also the process of making policy within these political parties. Our position, I think the smarter position is 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, me, you, couple of my friends, we are the United States. 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. It’s not magic. It’s sort of, you might say a speech act is that the theory of the 1930s on literature, it’s like getting married, right? The priest says, I declare you man and wife, right? Now, this just doesn’t mean anything, right? But because of its ritual power and the way that it’s 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.
At the beginning, maybe people won’t take it seriously, but over time they will. And that we will build up from the ground up. But the underlying implication there is that most of these institutions, including universities and government and all sorts of organizations, they used to serve their function. 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 it objectively and gets beyond this trauma, I think it’s quite clear what we’re looking at.
Geopolitics & Empire:
As Tommy Jay said, 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 in, 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 there is hope and there are people who are really trying, the starting with you. We can really change things.
About Emanuel Pastreich
In the midst of the 2020 presidential campaign, muddied by hype and poisoned by corruption, a single candidate stepped forward to limn with unwavering scientific accuracy the decay that has crept over our society. Emanuel Pastreich declared in February, 2020, that only an independent candidate can serve as president in light of the collapse of political parties into warring crime syndicates. He presents us with a concrete plan to transform our nation in a series of eloquent speeches that assume we are citizens capable of action, not passive consumers.
Pastreich is the sole presidential candidate who speaks the truth and who demands long-term strategies for the real dangers we face. He continues his campaign for president to this moment and asks for your support so that he can protect you and defend you, regardless of the personal sacrifice involved.
Pastreich refuses to pin the blame on any one person, or group, for the moral decay, the degeneration of institutions and values in the United States, in international institutions and around the world. He suggests, rather that we return to the spirit of the Constitution and, like George Washington, Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln, like Eugene Debs, Franklin D. Roosevelt, or John F. Kennedy, discover the ethical foundations for good governance that have been buried in a shallow grave by public relations firms, investment banks, and legions of politicians and self-appointed experts.
Pastreich published a book of his speeches as candidate for president entitled “I Shall Fear No Evil” that makes his position transparent and compelling. Over the last year, Pastreich has given speeches, met with fellow Americans, especially those who are suffering the consequences of the profound moral rot in our country commonly labeled as “COVID19,” and presented a vision that is both inspiring and concrete.
With your input, with your help, he started to map out a positive direction for the United States, a future in which we move away from the dangerous culture of consumption, extraction and endless war that has infected the nation like a horrific virus and that has been amplified in our culture by the cunning tricks of dangerous parasites.
*Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: https://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
