No, no, no! The Institute for Strategic Dialogue is not clean. It’s an offspring - spawn of the spawn - of the UN. It “partners” with Google. That it doesn’t at the moment like Gates and Soros is a matter of inter-sectional conflict. The horrible thing is NOT on our side.
That was what the article I posted said. The subheading even said:
“Two of the significant financial backers of ISD are The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Soros-funded Open Society.”
You are right about that. My irritation made me express myself hastily and badly. Yes, the report is against the ISD. But is it itself on our side? It contains this:
“The overall subliminal messaging of this report is that all anti-lockdown and anti-mandate activity equates to far-right extremism. My experience [the reporters’ experience] of people at the grassroots level of what I prefer to call the freedom movement is that they straddle both sides of the traditional political spectrum.”
Some people on the Left are for freedom?
It’s all very murky.
The report also contains this:
Quote:
One of the most troubling elements of this ISD Global study is the new targeting of holistic health and spirituality groups and their associated social media accounts. I would hazard a guess and say that if this think-tank produces another report on Ireland at the end of 2022, we will hear a lot more spurious accusations about people in this space.
The reason I believe this is due to the fact that these groups are the ones actually trying to build out positive alternative lifestyles and alternative community structures based to varying degrees on a combination of healthy living, creative endeavour, spirituality and sustainable food production. These types of ideas pose a very real threat to the establishment order.
Rather than making attempts to break down the existing societal structures these holistic, sovereign or spiritual movements simply choose to ignore or disengage with existing structures as much as possible. The talk in these groups is about building out their own off-grid communities or individual, sovereign lifestyles.
Again, it is worrying that nefarious forces in the ISD Global sphere have begun to sit up and take notice of this activity and one would worry that they or others are dedicating resources to counter some of the things they are doing. The rationale the compilers of this report give for including these “New Age” movements in their scribblings and lumping them in as far-right is plainly ridiculous …
However, by the beginning of 2021, new groups were being formed which originated from very different movements with little-to-no original interaction with extremist movements – a clear example of the way conspiracy theories help bring together disparate movements. These new groups were born out of New Age health conspiracy theories.
Comment:
New Age movements are bad in their own way.
Here are extracts from my essay on New Age movements:
New Age religion is – according to taste and judgment – a rich diversity of “spiritualities”, or a junk-heap of irrationalities.
It arose in the West as an unplanned rejection movement against reason, science, capitalism, Western political institutions and cultural norms, often to the point of antinomianism. It started as a counter-culture, but many of its beliefs and practices have come to be accepted as normal. Most obviously it impacts the lives of almost everyone in developed countries through Environmentalism, one of the most successful of its superstitions.
New Age includes mythical, mystical, and simply fantastical cult ingredients. Its theorists draw on the occult and witchcraft; on religions of the Far East; on the modern mystic faith of psycho-analysis (in particular the theories of C. G. Jung); on Richard Wagner’s mythology and mysticism; on UFO legends; on “alternative” Western religious cults and systems – Scientology, Mormonism, Hare Krishna, Shamanism, pop-Kabala, Environmentalism. Among its assorted mysticisms and occultisms are: astrology; fortune telling by tarot cards, I Ching, Ouija boards; spirit guides; processes of faith healing or imaginary empowerment through the use of crystals and pyramids; chanting, dancing, meditation, Yoga exercises. It was partly inspired by the hundred-plus years old, Orient-derived, Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, and its offshoots, including the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner with their theories of education, art, agriculture, and health. …
Being a hotch-potch of beliefs – belief in almost anything that reason rejects – New Age religion inevitably contains contradictions. For instance, while some of its authoritative theorists hold that the divine dwells within the human species (even in the “animal men”, the general theory implies), the earth is an external and separate goddess, “Mother Earth”, identical to her whom the ancient Greeks called Gaia. She has suffered “ecological wounds” through human industrial activity (thus the specie-sin of “anthropogenic global warming”), and she needs to be “healed”. …
New Age orgies – similarly considered to be sacraments – are performed as acts of Earth worship. They celebrate the physical, not scorn it. Sensual pleasure is a good in itself. The performance of communal rituals – chanting, dancing, sado-masochistic sex, all-gender-inclusive sex (with male homosexuality particularly stressed by Matthew Fox) – advances the coming into being of a new synthesized God: “I” become God; “we” become God; Man, God, and Nature become One, and the one is the universal God, the “Cosmic Christ”.
New Age writing is full of vapid declarations expressed with stirring passion rather than semantic sense. It is verbal impressionism. Matthew Fox, for instance – one of the most widely read New Age writers – blends “the Cosmic Christ” with “Mother Earth”. The Cosmic Christ is an eternal Being who became incarnate in Jesus – so far in tune with at least some long-established Christianities – but is also (if not exactly “incarnate” by the actual meaning of the word, “made flesh”), one with Mother Earth. She is crucified like Jesus; and as such she is a symbol of the incarnated Cosmic Christ, or of the Cosmic Christ as Jesus crucified; or Jesus crucified is a symbol of Mother Earth crucified:
The appropriate symbol of the Cosmic Christ who became incarnate in Jesus is that of Jesus as Mother Earth crucified yet rising daily … like Jesus, she rises from her tomb every day [so not quite like Jesus] … wounded, yet rising, Mother Earth blesses us each day.
New Age has had an effect on conventional religious institutions. Some of the established churches, Catholic and Protestant, have picked out bits from New Age to add flavor to their own offerings – which may indicate how weary, stale, flat and washed out they must feel their own faiths to be. As for social and political effects, New Age cults contribute cumulatively to the character of the times, but most of them have had little or no effect on major events.
There are two exceptions. One is Liberation Theology (an emulsion of two opiates of the people, Marxism and Catholicism), which has had an historical effect in South America as an ideological cause of the rise of terrorist organizations. [Pope Francis is a liberation theologist.]
Marxism comes into our purview. New Age harmonizes with Marxism easily, both being collectivist ideologies. In almost all its manifestations, New Age requires group practice. Its ultimate vision is of a single shared human consciousness (rather like the imaginary alien species called the Borg in Star Trek, whose every individual is one with the “hive mind”). The Catholic writer Teilhard de Chardin had a strong influence on New Age theory. In his book The Future of Man, he foresees “the end of a ‘thinking species’; not disintegration and death, but a new breakthrough and a rebirth, this time outside Time and Space. Man would at some future time ‘form a single consciousness’." New Age goes further yet: humanity will share its communal consciousness with the Earth.
Marxism and magic (and pacifism and feminism), came together in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), starting in Britain in 1958 and continuing through the next three decades. Most of the CND protestors did not know that their leaders received funding from the USSR; they were simply the “useful idiots” of Lenin’s famous phrase. In the early 1980s a Women’s Peace Camp was set up on Greenham Common in Berkshire to protest against NATO cruise missiles being deployed at the RAF base situated there. The women would hold up mirrors to “reflect the evil” of the weapons back over the fence.
The other exception is Environmentalism, which has entranced half the population of the First World and pesters the whole human race.
Other than these, New Age cults, though numerous, are for the most part comparatively harmless … Most New Age leaders and followers don’t think of themselves as doing evil, only redefining what good is. Homosexuality was bad until the 1960s; so to New Age devotees it was super-good. Alternative medical practices were bad; so to New Age devotees they were super-good. One of the most egregious examples of New Age success, of how it has penetrated even some institutions that by their nature should be impregnable to cults of unreason, is that practitioners of “alternative medicine” are working alongside physicians and surgeons in Western hospitals. …
https://theatheistconservative.com/the-darkness-of-this-world/