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Good Question

Book Review By David Brooks

04 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org

So What Can I Do?
Kim Kamala Ekman, Editor
2016

This is a collection of full-length interviews with some of the foremost names in the alternative media. It’s a veritable Who’s Who of information activists: Ken O’Keefe, David Icke, Kerry Cassidy, Ole Dammegard, Kevin Barrett, Sophia Smallstorm, Zen Gardner, and Cynthia McKinney.

These interviews were conducted over Skype by Swedish journalist, Kim Kamala Ekman. Her searching questions elicit commensurately profound answers. How can one not admire an interviewer who’s honest enough to admit, “When I see the madness around me, I feel hopeless. Can you suggest some ways that would help me regain my trust in the future and how to act to make a positive change?”

Before getting to some of their answers, we get an earful as to the extremity of the situation. Kevin Barrett sums it up with his observation that “we’re living in a kind of Orwellian world in which the consensus reality is manufactured by the mainstream media and the oligarchy that owns it. [This purported reality] is quite different from what’s actually going on.

What’s actually going on is far worse than we know. However familiar the terrain may be to some, it comes as a shock to be reminded of so much going on at the same time: a never-ending “Global War on Terror,” “Big Brother” surveillance, geoengineering (chemtrails), mandatory vaccines, GMOs, and microchipping. This ever tightening technocratic control may well lead up to a massive depopulation program. Those in power – frequently referred to as psychopaths – may even have plans to ignite a Third World War as a controlled demolition of the human race. As Icke says, “This is a time for people to face the unthinkable and face what they would have thought to be insane, extreme paranoia. If only that were true. It’s not.”

If there’s one subject that comes in for overwhelming, universal condemnation by Ekman’s respondents, it is the privately owned central banking system, whose power transcends that of governments, and all but dictates public policy, including the financially rewarding enterprise known as war. Ken O’Keefe asks: “When we are told by these powers-that-be that we are in debt and that we’ve lived high off the hog and that we need to tighten the purse strings and ultimately we have to institute austerity and so on, the first question we should be asking is, “If we are in debt, and so hugely in debt, then who do we owe the money to?” O’Keefe suggests that banksters quit their usurious extortion racket before they’re strung up on lamp posts. He’s not kidding.

Unfortunately, with most people driven and distracted by their own concerns – not to mention brainwashed by mainstream media – a global intifada does not appear to be in the offing. Before humanity can wrest control of its future, as Sophia Smallstorm avers, “we have to do something extraordinary within ourselves, something almost metaphysical, if not metaphysical. We have to exert some capacity that is perhaps latent in us. We’ve got to start using that. We’re in a heavy pressure situation, and it’s only going to get heavier.”

Such is the simultaneously uplifting and depressing message of So What Can I Do? Title notwithstanding, this survey of countercultural opinion is more focused on what’s being done to us, than on what we can do about it. That is not the fault of those queried. Their first task is to inform; knowledge is empowering. Even so, it’s chilling to realize that not one of Ekman’s respondents seems to hold out hope for a mass political awakening. As Icke says, “People have to become aware about how things are before they have an opportunity to change them.” Alas, it’s past time to ask: What more will it take before people finally become aware? You know the fix is in when even such worldly-wise folk counsel us to seek help from on high or within.

Ekman’s contributors recommend some form of spiritual practice alongside collective action. Before you try changing the world, “deal with yourself first,” say Ken O’Keefe. Don’t ever give in to hatred but “keep an open heart,” say Ole Dammegard. Most of those interviewed meditate on a regular basis. Zen Gardner maintains a daily detox regimen. Kevin Barrett, a practicing Muslim, recommends the prayer known as salat: “In that moment of absolute submission, with the forehead on the floor, is a moment of deep meditation.” Barrett goes so far as to call for “a transformation of consciousness in which more ordinary people rise to a state of consciousness more like that of the great saints and mystics of the past.”

The people gathered together in this book are indeed inspiring. It’s a pleasure to be in the company of such acute, courageous critics of their own society. They dignify the very name of “Conspiracy Theory.” A brief review can’t do justice to the sheer density of thought presented in this volume, which comes from decades of diligent research by these individuals. (In lieu of a bibliography, links are provided to their respective websites.)

Each interview is a distillation of personality. Perhaps their most enjoyable feature is an offhanded personal element. We learn something of their lives. It may surprise some readers to learn that David Icke, dean of conspiracy theorists, once worked as a presenter for the BBC and was later a national spokesperson for the British Green Party. His disillusionment with traditional politics started there. Cynthia McKinney in contrast is a six-time member of the US congress, and later ran for president on the Green Party ticket. Her party lacked the funds to put her up in hotels, so she stayed in the homes of various supporters, where she realized “the smartest people who really understood what the heck was going on were the ones who don’t have televisions.”

Given the standardized question format, some repetition of content is inevitable. There’s only so many times you may want to hear an explanation of the reserve banking system and why it rates as criminal fraud. And yet there is cumulative power in a battery of questions put before independent researchers. For all their differing backgrounds and ferocious originality, they have arrived at essentially the same conclusions. One person speaking this way may be dismissed as a paranoid crank, but when all eight voices sound the same alarm, attention must be paid.

So What Can I Do? does not provide an authoritative answer to the question raised in its title, so allow me to do so. Read this book. Share it those who care enough to ask the question and who are willing to hear some fearless analysis and felicitous answers.

David Brooks lives in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. He does not write for the NY Times.

 

 




 



 

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