Who is Milo Yanopoulos?

I hope these reflections are reasonably coherent. I have been so sore in the lower back and hips that I cannot sit at the computer for more than sort periods at a time.

Hopefully this will go some way towards explaining my reflections on my own past, as well as how I see current events.

What has happened to the idea of human “progress”?
Deconstructing Milo Yanopoupolis

Seemorerocks

It is Saturday morning here and I have plenty of time to reflect on things and little desire to go following after today's headlines. There has been a lot of discussion on Facebook of the Events at UC Berkeley and Milo Yanopoulis. There has been a chorus of people shouting and jumping up and down, calling him a white supremacist, a fascist and even a Hitler Youth child.

I wish to reflect on, and to a certain extent de-construct, some of the hype behind this.

I read something from a young American saying that they were "losing what little they had" with Trump coming to power. Do people really believe that all their problems started with the US election, or even on 20 January when Trump was inaugurated, and has nothing to do with anything that came before?

It seems to me that what people are upset and jumping up and down about is actually the loss of entitlement to an increasingly less easy lifestyle that has, with the collapse of capitalism,been maintained through the export of jobs to cheap labour countries, assaults on the environment, attacks on sovereign countries and –  endless bombing.

I am not judging people, but I am amazed at their amnesia.

Often I feel that there is little meaning in following the latest headline of the day or reading the latest article describing how climate change is happening more quickly and is 'worse than previously thought' - as if persuading people is going to make things better.

It is not.

What we can do is to try and live life as if it mattered, with as much love and compassion as we can muster and above all doing the things that give our lives meaning. For me in my diminished state, it is precisely following the latest headline that gives me meaning - so I shall continue while I can, despite frequent intentions not to.

I notice as I get into my 7th decade that I am becoming more socially conservative. In part that be a result of ageing and (hopefully!) greater wisdom. It also comes from reflecting on the state of society and the state of the planet.

I come from a very privileged background which gave me a free education which gave me the right to toy around with different ideas about changing the world. I was able to study whatever I liked (in my case languages and humanities) so I come with an in-built bias that these are desirable things and that everyone is entitled to a free, liberal education or whatever lifestyle they choose for themselves.

The changes in the last 16 years (since 9/11/2001) and especially the last 8 (since the 2008 economic meltdown) - as well as listening to people who can join the dots and make sense of things - have given me reason to reassess a lot of what I previously believed to be true.

The reality is that everything has been turned upsidedown.

This is, in the words of Michael C Ruppert, 'The End of More':

What can we look forward to other than the political, social, economic and financial collapse of society, to the rapid destruction of human habitat as the result of abrupt climate change, and the Sixth Extinction of which we are now part of?

The following words of a friend, Robert Atack are as provocative, shocking and lacking in compassion as you could imagine. For all that, they are true:

"Regarding the women's march, and their demand for human rights; The joke is human rights are a figment of our imaginations, there is no such thing as human rights. 

"Humans have the same rights as cockroaches which in the grand scheme of things is zero. 

"And with the environment fast approaching 410 ppm CO2, humans are very soon going to be extinct, humans have done in 100 years what last time took over 10,000 years – we have taken the atmosphere from about 280 ppm CO2 to 405+, last time this happened something like 96% of life went extinct, AND all the CO2 we have released via fossil fuels was happily sequestered below ground, … last time, this time round humans have filled the atmosphere with several periods worth of previous global warming gasses that had been removed from the environment, so this time around it is going to be a bloody sight worse than maybe any previous period of warming. 

"And it will not matter who is running this show, quite simply there is nothing we can do"

When I was in my formative years human civilisation was at its highest point, if by that you mean the physical ‘standard of living’ that it can give its citizens. Since the mid- 70’s it has all been down-hill.

The oil shocks of the 70’s and early 80’s were an early warning.

The infinite growth paradigm was given a new lease of life for another generation by off-shoring jobs, destroying one industry one another, cannibalistic mergers and takeovers, and commodifying everything right up to water and air. Until this day the whole rickety structure of the world economy is only kept afloat by raping the planet (literally burning it), aggressively redistributing wealth in favour of the 1%, and above all the wars and the forceful grabbing of resources.

I can see that the ideals of my youth – whether socialism, feminisim, the hippy movement  - were dependent on an economy that had plenty of surplus. Even the eastern European version of socialism was dependent on a growing economy. All of which is saying they were dependent on an illusion – that growth can go on for ever.

I don’t often think in terms of generations, but it is clear that my generation (the baby boomers) is probably the most cosseted in human history. My father went through the horrors of the Great Depression and had to fight in a war against Nazism and like many others was determined his children would not have to go what he (and previous generations) had to.

Now that we are looking down the barrel at collapse and the demise of our species along with the Living Planet and with the destruction of the likes of the labour movement by neo-liberalism, it seems that what used to be progressive movements have been co-opted by the ruling class for their own needs.

Now we have human rights organisations defending wars and the likes of the White Helmets in Syria. The media is nothing more than the propaganda arms of the State. We now have feminists in Germany chanting “Allahu Akbar” and defending the mass rape of white European women by Muslim “migrants” and “Progressives” who have never seen a war they didn’t like. They are quite happy to bomb any country in the Middle East or Africa so long it maintains their delusions of “Progress”.

Really, I mean to say can we “progress”peacefully towards the destruction of the economy which brings us water from the tap and food from the supermarket and easy transportation etc. and towards our own demise as a human species?"

Do you think so?

Now can I come to Milo Yanopoulis and recent events in the US, especially at UC Berkeley?

We have this bright 31-year-old provocateur who is seen as such a threat to people's sense of comfort (and to the Establishment) that he has been described by media and social media alike as a fascist, nazi, white supremacist, homophobe and even  a "Hitler Youth baby".

Is any of this justified?

I have taken time to listen to what Milo Yanoupolis has to say and a lot of it rubs me up the wrong way, in a similar way to Alex Jones, and interprets the world in a way that to me completely misses the point.

However much of his diagnosis is correct and he certainly identifies the corruption of the media and the political class. It is clear from listening to him for half-an-hour or so that he has  as little truck with the Republican Party as he does with the Dems. The movement which he represents (along with Trump so long as he delivers on his promises) has little to do with, say the Tea Party.

Milo is certainly anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, and reserves a lot of his criticism for the modern feminist movement, the human rights movement and the media. I can hardly say he is wrong, even if for very different reasons.

Hear Milo talk for himself after the events at UC Berkeley:




This is talk (from the University of New Mexico) where I chose to become acquainted with him:



His is a movement of the working class that has seen its unions destroyed and jobs and standards of living eviscerated, as well as the young generation of millenials that see less than nothing for them in the status quo.

Is it fascist? Certainly my good Russian friend (15 years older than me) who is no fascist but knows one when he sees one, would identify with much of this and others have eviscerated the reaction of liberals who have turned out to be the very opposite of "liberal". 

One does have to wonder what would happen if some  of these cosseted people were to encounter a real nazi.

The usual response is that people like Trump and Yannopoulos are practising "dog whistle politics" inviting white supremacists to come out of the woodwork.

Whilst I know that there have been terrible, but isolated cases of racist and hate attacks, watching the events of recent weeks and months, most of the violence and mindless activity has come from liberals, feminists and other dupes of George Soros and the ruling class.

Watch the video. While there are some very angry 'anti' voices in the audience who were invited to leave the talk I did not see any over-the-top, violent response from the audience.

I suspect Milo Yannopulos is far too bright for the gun-toting hillbillies. And what would they make of an openly-gay conservative (or is he a libertarian?) who is proud of his many black boyfriends?

What I can see, however is that he stands at the head of a revolution that is dangerous to the 1% and the political Establishement.

Because of what I know of the direction of current human history I know that ideas of "making the USA great again" etc are sheer delusion and the revolution, like all others that have gone before, have failed and produced their own Robespierre or Stalin.

All I can say is, get out the popcorn and watch, and live life to the full while you still can.

And don't be fooled by the corporate media echo chamber.

Sometimes it is good to see what he says in response to media pushback - in this case the BBC

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