Vacant Possession (of Ireland)?

There are two particular categories of money which have afflicted Ireland. One was dirty money, which is the kind of money that’s swishing around the economic system . . . tax-dodging money from the corporations. And that, of course, means that we, the people of Ireland, including me, including you, James, have been living off immoral earnings for years. The second category is fake money, which is being used to counteract the effects of that, to try to keep some kind of false equilibrium going.

2024? A year of frustration and of failure to build on the foundations of the early years of the Resistance. The year when the long dreamt-of returns of Donald Trump to the White House was met by long faces within a Resistance becoming more preoccupied with ideological vindication and personal agendas than actually saving their countries. All part of The Plan?

2025? A new beginning, the start of a journey, a spiritual awakening? Terminal disaster, as the Jeremiah’s all-too cheerfully insist?

In this, the last (recorded) conversation of 2024 (conducted on New Year’s Eve) and the first (broadcast) of 2025, James Conway and I consider the battlefield of the War Against Humanity as we approach the fifth anniversary of the global Covid coup. It is neither a particularly upbeat nor downbeat conversation, but one that addresses some of the likely pitfalls and setbacks of the coming year, in a spirit of realism and self-preparation rather than of pursuing definitive predictions or judgements.

‘All of this fake money is converging in a balance sheet, in which one day — and it won’t be too far removed — when Mr Fink, the CEO of BlackRock will arrive and he will sit down with the principals of our Government — God help us! — and he will says, ‘Howye lads? Well, I’ll tell ye what now: I’ve been around the place. We’ve had a few days down the west and down in Cork and we were looking at everything. And, you know, we did a bit of a tally-up on the whole thing, and we were thinking maybe the whole thing could be worth — I dunno — it could be worth maybe €250 trillion, or something of that order. But the downside of it is, lad, these chits here, you know, jaze lads, you’re really sticking the boot in here — we’re looking at maybe fifty per cent more! Of debts. Now that gives us a bit of a problem. Now, obviously we represent ninety-four per cent of the creditors involved in this, and we’ve been doing consultations. And what they’re basically saying is — ‘Look, I’ll tell you what: We’ll write off the additional fifty per cent if ye’ll just vacate the property at the earliest possible . . . We’d like vacant possession of Ireland.’

But, before you listen, a word about Hope:

2025 is the year promised from the beginning as the endgame of the ‘Covid Project’, so named publicly in 2020 by the World Bank. As we enter it, this year might in a certain light seem to hold out the promise of a new beginning — a return to the path of freedom and democracy — or a final undoing: the slamming of the door on the adventure of Western civilisation. For a goodly portion of that five-year period, there was at least the hope offered by a resilient Resistance movement, but in recent times, despite a couple of significant breakthroughs, this has started to fray and undo itself. In many places, negativity has replaced hoping, and fatalism swallowed up trust in humanity’s capacity to respond to the action of the human spirit. This mood of ‘pessicism’ (my word for it — a deadly mix of pessimism and cynicism) — has extended to damning even the recent election result in the United States with a collectivised slough of despond. It is as though the ‘realism’ created by a self-insinuated mythology of the omnipotence of humanity’s enemies had lodged in the minds of civilisations’s last defenders so as to have them see every chink of hope as some kind of trick.

Our situation is riven by paradox. For Ireland in 2025, the best hope of longterm recovery may be a total economic collapse, brought about by the withdrawal of the corporations which have been destroying my country for at least thirty-five years, but radically so in the past decade, with multiple assaults on her Constitution, the moral evisceration of her Fourth Estate and the installation of a permanent government fuelled by one idea only: control and capture of the population.

This overall picture is complicated by the nature of the new and spurious reality that has been constructed in the past five years, not only around the lives of our neighbours, but also in their heads and hearts. It is a deceptive, confounding picture, imposed, like the Covid coup, more or less in a globalised lockstep, and for five long years dividing the peoples of our countries within themselves, blinding a majority with a misdirecting version of reality, while all the while shrinking the hopes of those who remained sighted. Another paradox here is that it is those who continued to hope from the outset, and worked to realise those hopes, that now seem to be most demoralised. While this moment seems to offer opportunities that, had they arisen at any earlier time in that five-year period, would have been hailed as famous victories, the problem now is not so much the omnipotence of the enemy, but the ‘omniscient’ despondency of many of our friends, who, after five years of urging us to faith and hoping have paused now to tell us that not much is possible.

Although remaining all too aware of the damage down to their world and the minds and hearts of our neighbours, we need to alert ourselves to the danger that, at the moment of the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity, we will lose hope that the drift of things might be turned around.

Realism is necessary and good, but can be taken too far. The future promises to be at least somewhat dark, and may well so transpire. But whether and how long this darkness is to last will depend not on our enemies but on ourselves. Without hope the possibility of catastrophe will turn into an absolute, self-fulfilling certainty.

We make our own futures using tools like trust and hope — prudence and caution too, of course — but of the two ‘sets’, the first is the more vital. Without hope we shall wither; without trust we shall rust away. Even lacking both prudence and caution, we should have a chance of living on to a better day.

We need to remove ourselves from the province of ideology, and returns ourselves to common sense and to the use of our own tools to judge reality in the way we have always done. Everything we know, understand or believe comes to us through the application of our senses, drawing conclusions from what he see and hear and applying these to new facts and circumstances. This is how we not merely comprehend and manipulate the present, but how we build the future. We seem to be losing that capacity in our Resistance movement, as a result, perhaps, of having placed more faith in the cunning and wickedness of our enemies than in ourselves. But to cut a deal with evil by which we would settle for knowing merely that the worst was coming would be a massive betrayal of the future generations whose very existence depends on us.

We must not be dragged down by the crushing cliches and prejudices of those who tells us the battle is already lost.

it comes down to whether or not you believe the human race, qua human race, still has agency in the world, or whether you believe the predators who have been breathing down our necks for the past five years are so all-powerful and omniscient that it doesn’t matter what happens or what we do — we are doomed regardless. I refuse to believe that, and not on account of some Pollyanna impulse to hope even when hope is ‘lost’, but because I do not accept that any earthly power is omnipotent or all-knowing, or that any evil force can prevail in the face of good men taking action. If we discount the possibility of our having any material effect on events or their outcomes, we risk lapsing into a mood of fatalism concerning the future and what remains of our lives.

I decline to be browbeaten into defeatism. I disdain to believe that the world is fundamentally that different from the way it was when we last felt we could understand it. I recognise the vile things that have occurred, and the evil that lies behind them, but I cannot accept that the forces we have been confronting have become so refined and efficiently orchestrated that all we may now do is pull the blinds and lie down to await the knock upon the door.

Many times in the past five years I have invoked the name of Václav Havel, the late, great Czech/Czechoslovak playwright and philosopher, who led the resistance to communism in his own country for many years, spending several terms in jail for his activism before eventually becoming the last President of Czechoslovakia in 1989, and the first President of the Czech Republic, from 1993 to 2003. Havel always emphasised that there is a distinction between hope and mere optimism, a point he addressed in the book-length interview, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala, (‘an intimate history of Czechoslovakia under communism; a meditation on the social and political role of art, and a triumphant statement of the values underlying all the recent revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe’) — published in 1986, three years before the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it’s a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

We look forward to 2025, then, not because the omens are necessarily good, but nor do we shudder because they are bad. We look to it in hope because the alternative is to deny a central element of our personal ontologies.

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