Stefan Verstappen
This week we spoke once more with Canadian author, artist, and martial arts expert, Stefan Verstappen. Stefan has a professional background in communications and business management and has travelled extensively throughout East Asia, where he has studied oriental art, culture and Kung Fu.

Stefan is the author of 'The art of urban survival' from which the viral YouTube video documentary 'Defense Against the Psychopath' was taken.

Stedan has recently produced another video on the topic of historical cycles of human civilization and the manner in which they appear to repeat. In his video, Stefan makes the case that we are currently in the final stage of our cycle of history, defined, like all others, by widespread chaos. Historically, only small groups of people survived the periods of destruction that defined the end of a cycle, and they did so by forming themselves into tight-knit communities with specific organizational structures.

Running Time: 02:17:00

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript:

Joe: Hi and welcome to SOTT Talk Radio. I'm your host Joe Quinn and my co-host this week is Niall Bradley.

Niall: Hi Joe. I'm glad you remembered your name.

Joe: Yes. I remembered who I am and I remembered who you are. That's about all I remember this week so don't expect much from me. No. Actually this week we are talking to Stefan Verstappen; we've had Stefan on the show previously.

Niall: Yeah, in January this year.

Joe: Yes. Stefan is a Canadian writer, researcher and a world traveler, and he is the author of six books including Thirty Six Strategies of Ancient China and The Art of Urban Survival. And in The Art of Urban Survival there is a chapter on defense against the psychopath which he turned into a short video on YouTube: Defense Against the Psychopath. It's a very good video and it went pretty viral, had a lot of hits. And Stefan has recently made another YouTube video and it's part of an article called Historical Cycles - Are We Doomed to Repeat the Past? And that's kind of what we want to talk with him about this week but I have yet to get Stefan on the phone. So I'm going to go ahead and try and do that now. We had a problem logging in tonight. (Unable to log on)
So, I'm going to continue on, but Niall...

Niall: Yeah, so if you remember or if you haven't seen it yet, do check out our discussion with Stefan from early February. We wanted him on specifically because of his Defense Against the Psychopath video. But it was really a kind of synopsis of his ideas from just one chapter of a broader book: The Art of Urban Survival. And the basic theme of what he's discussing is that Stefan's more or less convinced that we're in a crazy time, no matter how you slice it. Whether you're in a survivalist camp and you see the writing's on the wall for the economy; whether you're looking at the weather and going "Holy Moses, something's going on"; or whether you're looking at all the warmongering and the inevitability of some kind of major conflagration or something. Whichever way you slice it, Stefan just simply says "Okay, they're chaotic times."

Now he knows they've happened before and he's studied extensively, from living in China and other places in the east. He's well aware that they, in their own histories, are well aware also that these kind of general situations of chaos have occurred repeatedly. It will be interesting to get from him kind of an idea of how often are we talking; every thousand years? Every two thousand years? Or even less; every five hundred years? Or less still. Because of course in this kind of subject matter you've got potentially cycles within cycles and so on. But we're going to be talking to him about this simple break-down based on his study of Chinese history, of what's basically called the dynastic cycle where a group of people come to power, the longevity and then the quality of their rule, and then the beginnings of a break-down in that social system followed by a period of chaos.
Stefan isn't just relying on the Chinese historiographies to produce this kind of simple and easy to follow model of how civilizations rise and fall. There are of course modern sociologists, historians and theorists who essentially come to the same basic themes, even though they may not rely so much on similar more esoteric texts from ancient history. Nevertheless it's a topic that is taken seriously. And what will be really interesting to hear from Stefan is the extent to which the ruling elite in any dynasty or empire or civilization were aware of what was going on.

The big theme in this recent video he published, his core message I believe, is that - everyone's heard the saying attributed to George Santayana, that "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Verstappen goes one step further and he says it's not so much that you the person reading history and making subjective mistakes therefore fail to learn the lesson; rather that it is an inevitable historical cycle. For all your will and your might you cannot break it. That's the central argument he's making. On the one hand it's "Whoa! That's scary!" We're in a chaotic period and what? There's no way out of it?

No, he's also found there are other things going on at each stage in the cycles where people have choices, especially in that darkest point in a historical cycle, the chaos period or stage, because opportunities open up for everyone, and not just for the elites who invariably tend to give free reign to their drives which are largely responsible for bringing in the period of chaos, which is greed, exorbitant taxation, some kind of police state measures. Police state measures are not a new and modern thing. They happen again and again. Obviously today we've got different technologies, but it's nevertheless the same phenomena as has happened in the past.

Now we may also be having Laura. She's hopefully going to pop in and lend a certain two cents because Laura's written extensively on historical cycles as well, particularly in one long article on the golden age in which she brings together some other texts. But Laura's focus is mainly on western historical analysis which will be interesting to balance off with Stefan Verstappen, because he's looking at it more from an eastern perspective. But in another book that we published this year by Pierre Lescaudron, co-written with Laura, Pierre and Laura made use of a very interesting chart which actually pops up in Stefan's video as well; the Chinese dynastic cycle in which you can see, as it was described historically by the Chinese - this isn't a modern overlay on top of an old diagram. The original diagrams more or less describe each of these sub-steps from the rise of a civilization, its flowering, its gradual corruption and then whoooof! Collapse into chaos and the way in which a new civilization emerges from it.

I think we have the image from Pierre's book up with today's show page. Pierre took one of the original diagrams or schematics of the Chinese dynastic cycle, also called the Mandate of Heaven, which I'm hoping Stefan's going to explain to us in more detail. And he embellished it a little bit based on observations we can make today. There are four basic stages, but there are also very similar recurring patterns of specific things that happened in between each stage. Today, for example in the world of high finance, such things as printing money when a government basically no longer has actual hard currency, traditionally gold and silver, to back up the currency it issues. This is not just a uniquely modern phenomenon. This is exactly the kind of specific practice that would have happened in ancient China, in Rome, in the medieval collapse in Europe and again today.

It's astonishing when you look specifically at what we know as "austerity measures", tightening the size of public budgets, scaling back on infrastructural projects; all of these specific policies occur over and over and over again. So we're looking at cycles in the broad sweep and the incredible similarities between events, the inevitability of the cycle. We're going to be looking at how and to what extent our elites today are aware of this. How do they deal with it?

Joe: I think we have Stefan on the line here. I'm just going to go ahead and take it. Stefan are you there? Hi Stefan, are you there?

Stefan: Yes, I'm here Joe.

Joe: Hi. Excellent. I'm sorry, I think you went to our screen there for a second. A belated welcome to the show Stefan. We've kind of introduced you and then we tried to call you; we've been having a bit of a problem here tonight. First of all it was very difficult for us to log in. I got logged into the show about five seconds before it went live, and then when I tried to call you it told me that it couldn't get through to you. So thank you very much for calling. We've done a little intro, basically just your bio. But the title of the show as I've said already is Historical Cycles: Are We Doomed to Repeat the Past and that's based on this relatively short, 12-minute or so video that you put on YouTube, that I think is an article, that's going to appear in Trends Journal or already has?

Stefan: Yes, it's already out in the autumn edition of the Trends Journal.

Joe: Okay. So that video is actually you...

Niall: Narrating.

Joe: Narrating the article.

Stefan: Yes. That's all that it is. I added some graphics to it to illustrate some of the points.

Joe: Well for me it was fantastic because first of all, it sums up so much that we at SOTT.net have been speaking about and researching and writing about for so long. And it sums it all up in a very nice, concise, neat package. But it really brings it home, the essentials of it. Maybe just to get back to why or where or when did you first start researching historical cycles?

Stefan: It goes back a long time. When you grow up you go through reading phases. So I went through my science fiction phase and then I went through my 1920s phase where I read everything I could on the authors from the 1920s. So it was during my science fiction phase when I was reading a lot of science fiction books. I read everything by Isaac Asimov and it was his book The Foundation Trilogy and the premise of the book was that there was a futuristic, intergalactic society. And there was a historian that had figured out a mathematical formula to predict the future. And he predicted that the empire was going to collapse and he also wanted to save the knowledge of that empire, during the ages of chaos, so that they could rebuild the empire after they bad times had come by, which is a very similar theme if you read Gurdjieff. What he wrote about the Sarmoun Brotherhood and the symbolism of the honeybees and the monastic system - this is not an uncommon idea, that somebody is predicting the end of an empire - they are making plans to sort of build an ark to carry the knowledge and wisdom of the previous civilization through the dark times into the next civilization.

So the book intrigued me for a number of reasons. Number one is pure self-interest. I thought "Wouldn't it be great to be able to predict the future?" Isn't that what we all want, more or less, right?

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: What's going to happen tomorrow? What can I do about it now? So it always stuck in the back of my head. Years later I was in Taipei and at that time I was reading anything that was available, which wasn't a lot, and so we would always exchange books between myself and the other ex-pats. And I came across a book. There was nothing left and it was called The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism by I think it was Ravi Batra. It's not a book I would ever normally read. It looked like it was some sort of financial forecast book. Anyways, I gave it a shot. I read the book and basically the entire book is about a theory by an Indian philosopher named PJ Sarkar, and he formulated this theory of historical cycles and the four ages of merchant, intellectual, warrior, and he describes the fourth age as laborer, which I found not really helpful. So I came across that other cycle and I kept that in the back of my mind as well. Now this is going back another 30 years ago.

And since then, any time I read history, what I'm looking for is the cycle. I want to see a pattern because I want to be able to predict the future. I want to see what's coming. I want to know where I am now, what's happening in the future. And I also want to know the past because the past determines the present and the present determines the future. Anyway, long story short, there's been dozens and dozens of theories about historical cycles, but more recently I've grown concerned over the events of our society now.

For example, to me it's pretty obvious that the government and the powers that be - or the elite, whatever you want to call them - are preparing for something nasty to happen. And it's obvious; the militarization of the police, their endless security and surveillance and cutting down on the rights and freedoms; it's pretty obvious that they're expecting something bad to happen. So I began to wonder, knowing how obsessed the elite are with predictive programming and modeling and being able to predict people's behaviors; all their think-tanks are dedicated to finding ways of manipulating humanity and finding out what humanity is thinking. So I thought are they following some sort of predictive program that is warning them that something bad is going to happen or are they planning for something bad to happen? But you know what? Either way, it's still part of the cycle. So I thought I would write an article about that.

Joe: Well it's a very worthwhile endeavor. In your article/video, from YouTube, you talk about four ages of civilizations, could you describe a little bit about what they are?

Stefan: Sure. Originally the article was 8,000 words. It was one of Laura's essay-like articles because it's not easy to explain historical cycles very quickly, because there's a lot of research material that goes into it. For people unfamiliar with this subject, it may seem flippant to be able to say "Well we can predict the future based on a few of these events", but actually there's a lot of research that went into it. However, when I sent the original essay to the Trends Journal they said "We really like it, but can you bring it down to under 1500 words." So three quarters of the article I've had to edit out and so what is left is the essence of the theory.

What I did in devising and writing the original essay is I took the common themes from all the different theories. There's about a dozen different theories about historical cycles and they all have different names and some have five stages, some have eight stages; no fewer than four though. So what I did is I kind of combined them all to find a consensus among all the theories. And so my consensus is that there are four stages and the four stages are called: Warrior, Intellectual, Merchant and then for me, I decided to call it Chaos because that's what it is. Other theories call it the Lead Age or the Iron Age or the Age of War, but Chaos would be a better descriptive.

So the four ages then. We begin the cycle with the Warrior Age. A lot of this comes from the writings of Joseph Campbell and there's a sprinkling of Gurdjieff in there as well, I can't remember exactly where from the Gurdjieff writings I took it from, but I'm pretty sure a lot of it is from Gurdjieff's or Ouspenski's work.

But we start off with the Warrior Age. And the Warrior Age is an age of adventure, of courage, of honor, of exploration, of building, of overcoming obstacles, of conquering nature or taming nature. This age is usually at the beginning of a civilization. This is where people move to a new country and they have to establish themselves first a pioneers and then slowly to build up the infrastructure into towns and villages and eventually into cities and ports. And all of this requires active endeavor. It's sort of the male principle, kind of like Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It's the architects and the engineers; it's the people that build the country.

So that's the Warrior Age. And eventually once the country or the dynasty or the society has been established, it evolves into the second stage which is the intellectual stage. This makes sense. We can see this kind of pattern with immigrants to North America. The new immigrants tend to work at menial jobs and they work very hard and they save their money and they build a home and a family. But as soon as they have the money, they want their kids to go to college.

So we enter into an intellectual phase of society. This is often termed a Golden Age, because we've built the civilization, we've overcome the adversity of either hostile tribes or hostile environment and we're starting to prosper and now we have free time to devote to intellectual pursuits. So the emphasis now goes into art and science, new ideas and innovation. And so we enter into an intellectual age and again, this tends to be the Golden Age of a civilization where things are pretty good. We're no longer afraid of being invaded. We're no longer worried about the environment. We have money. We have security. And we are now dedicating our energies to improving our minds and improving society.

Then eventually the intellectual age metamorphoses into a Merchant Age. And again, this sort of makes sense. From an immigrant point of view you send the kids off to college, they get their degree and when they come out, what they want to do is make money, and make more money than their parents did. It makes sense because there's a certain wealth that is built up during the Warrior Age and Intellectual Age. There's a lot of wealth there. Things are working well. During an age of peace, when people aren't squandering a fortune on killing people somewhere else, then that money goes into the local economy and people can do well for themselves. This is the only time that I could see in these cycles where there is, what you would call "upward mobility". It's one of the few times in history where working-class people, if they're smart and they're entrepreneurial and they work hard, they can actually build a better life and improve their situation and move up to a middle class lifestyle or upper middle class and in some cases, even into an upper class lifestyle.

So this is the age of the merchant and it's not necessarily an evil age because in the early stages women tend to have a little bit more equality. There's a lot more money going around in the economy; people tend to be better overall. But what happens towards the end of the merchant stage is that all this extra money brings out the parasites and the predators. It now gives an opportunity for psychopaths. Because psychopaths don't have that much of an opportunity in the first three stages. The warriors won't put up with them. The intellectuals can see through them. But during the merchant age where money is plentiful and there are also numerous social structures in place already, built by the warriors, built by the intellectuals, and they're hierarchical structures.

And a hierarchical structure is a breeding ground for psychopaths because they are genetically engineered to find the top of any such structure. Which brings us to the symbolism of the pyramid which really is a symbol for a hierarchical structure. And that's why psychopaths, I think, favor the symbol of a pyramid in their iconography because it symbolizes their environment. That's their field of endeavor. They find a social system and through their ability to deceive and manipulate, they will get to the top of it. And once they're in the top of it, they have control of all this wealth.
And so what happens then is that their power and their wealth, combined with their inherent corruption, causes that corruption to spread like a poison throughout the society until finally it starts to rot. It's literally like a cancer. The psychopaths form a cancerous tumor within the society. It starts to drain the rest of society of its life sources, meaning: energy, work, money. It's all drained and sucked up by this cancer and eventually the host dies.

And when the host dies, we are into the fourth stage of the cycle which is the Age of Chaos where everything just breaks down. Nothing works; greed, corruption, violence, criminality, those are the key signs and symptoms of that age. And so that is the four stage cycle, sort of in a nutshell Joe.

Joe: Just letting you know, Niall's here with me this week as well. I didn't get a chance to introduce you.

Niall: Hi Stefan. It's good to have you back. That was a great explanation. Boiled down.

Joe: Yeah. Just from hearing you describe it there, it strikes me that the obvious problem in that is the psychopathy or psychopaths among the human population. Because effectively what seems to be happening is that as these cycles occur, it's almost as if psychopaths are the cause of these kind of cycles because they're the ones who effectively disrupt them and corrupt them and cause a collapse of the civilization in the period of chaos, and then it kind of has to start again. Because as you just described, they suck up human creativity. If we take it back to the very beginning, for example, of human civilization, the very first one, if there ever was one, human beings evolved and they became more intelligent and more creative, and more creativity produced a higher and higher society and as you said, wealth and prosperity. But there's this element within the human gene pool I suppose, or human population, that sucks that creativity from ordinary people and ultimately causes the destruction of society.

Stefan: Yeah, it's hard to say because it's like the chicken and the egg analogy. What came first, the corruption and the psychopaths came, or did the psychopaths come first and then the corruption? I think the two go hand-in-hand. It's like a symbiotic association. I think it's natural too. In nature we have things like parasites. Probably another analogy to describe the psychopaths within our society is the parasitic model. Life is a set of competing survival strategies. One of the survival strategies we find in nature is the parasite. And of all the survival strategies from predators to grazers to herds, of course the parasites are the most disgusting form of life form on the planet. If there's anything that you could deem as absolutely other-worldly and demonic, it's the life cycle of the average psychopath.

The way a parasite acts with the host has a lot of parallels to the way a psychopath acts within a society. For example, one of the things that many parasites do is take over the mind of the host animal. It invades the thinking functions of the creature it's living off of and it changes the behavior patterns. It's so bizarre, it's literally a science fiction story. For example, Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Brain Eaters or Them; all these science fiction movies from the 50s talk about an alien species that invades humanity and takes over the minds of humans. This is exactly what a parasite does.

Let me give you an example. There is a wasp called the emerald jewel wasp. In order for it to reproduce, it must lay its eggs inside the body of a Brazilian cockroach. So what it does is the wasp will find a cockroach and it will use its stinger to insert a poison into the brain of the cockroach. It inserts a type of neurotoxin that has been evolutionarily designed specifically for the brain functions of a cockroach. And when it inserts its stinger into the head of a cockroach it does so with surgical precision. This is all pure instinct; it's amazing and frightening. But it inserts its stinger directly in the spot of the brain of the cockroach that it needs to. It inserts a neurotoxin and it turns the cockroach into a zombie. And now instead of the cockroach having a survival instinct where it would run from the wasp, it instead becomes a zombie and the wasp literally keeps it captive. It leads it around; it pulls it around by its antennae and it puts it in a box and it tells it to stay there in the box. Then the horror comes in next where the emerald jewel wasp inserts its eggs into the belly of the cockroach, the eggs turn into larvae and the larvae eat their way out of this still breathing cockroach...

Joe: Wow!

Stefan: ...while it's zombified and is now completely incapable of defending itself or doing anything and then finally it kills the cockroach. It's the basis for the movie Alien basically. That's where they got that from. That and the tarantula wasp is another example.

So this is a parasitic paradigm. So a creature comes in, it numbs the mind of the host so that the host is no longer able to defend itself against the parasite. So what do we see happening in our society? The psychopaths have taken over the instruments of education and media, and through those instruments it is brainwashing the general population. It's brainwashing and it's turning humanity into a giant mass of zombies incapable of defending themselves against this parasitic infestation that is sucking the life blood out of every man, woman and child on this planet and destroying it and we can't defend ourselves because we're asleep. We're sheeple.

But part of this being asleep and being a sheeple is the mind drug, the poison that has been inserted into the body of the host, which is our civilization. And it's been inserted by the parasites which are the psychopaths that run Hollywood, that run the newspapers, that run the magazines, that own the TV stations and the radio stations and the book publishers and control our educational system. Now all that media, all those institutions, are designed to affect our minds. Originally it was intended during the Warrior and Intellectual Ages to make us smarter, more productive, more self-reliant and happier. Now those same institutions, since they've been taken over by the psychopaths, have reversed that process. It's now intended to make us more stupid. It's intended to make us more dependent and less self-reliant. And so this is the end stage of the mercantile age and the beginning stages of chaos; when the parasites have taken over the minds and the attitudes of most people and that's the end.

Joe: Wow! That's a pretty damning vision of our society but unfortunately a very accurate one. Do you find it interesting that for quite a few years there has been a zombie-meme trending in society? Obviously people think it's just fun and stuff but I wonder if there isn't something coming up from the collective unconscious there trying to warn people.

Stefan: I was just going to say the collective unconscious, the Carl Jung theory of the collective unconscious. And we're projecting our inner turmoil onto the screen of the world. I definitely think that's part of it. I love zombie movies, well not love but I enjoy them.

Joe: They're fun, yeah.

Stefan: They're fun yeah but as a survival expert, anybody that watches these zombie movies, do not take any lessons from that on how to survive a real zombie attack. Again, even the videos and the movies about zombies are teaching people to be idiots.

Niall: Exactly.

Stefan: A zombie attack, jeez - I could take over the world with a samurai sword in about two months.

Niall: Don't be ashamed. We've watched one or two zombie flicks. But we don't watch them for survival tactics.

Stefan: Good, because it's trying to subvert your survival instinct. But I agree, it's a projection of our collective subconscious and that is what we are. Because I teach disaster preparedness and my book is on how to survive disasters and how to survive in the big city, people tend to make fun of me. They want to poo-poo the seriousness of the subject and they'll say things like, "Oh well are you preparing for a zombie apocalypse?" And my reply is "I'm already living in a zombie apocalypse." And we are. Any sane human being looks around and says "This is madness." The world we live in and the society we've created for ourselves is completely insane. There is no area in our society, no institution, no structure that you can examine with any clarity of thought and not come to the conclusion that it's completely insane. So we are already in the zombie apocalypse.

Niall: Yeah. I'd like to ask you a question. If we are now at chaos stage, where might you place in that rough four-stage model the beginning of this cycle's warrior stage? Or the other way of asking it is: when was the last chaos stage?

Stefan: Yeah, that's a good question. The thing with the historical cycles is there are many theories and each theory has different time periods. For example, I was reading Laura's article, and it was a great article with her time periods. And she was mentioning of course the Great cycle and then the Yuga cycles and things like that. And they all have time periods, 30,000 years, 24,000 years, 8,000 years I believe.

What I think it is, and it's just a theory, I haven't done the research for it, but it's my hunch, so take it with a grain of salt; but I believe the historical cycles fulfill their cycle in a similar way that a musical scale does. Again, we get to Gurdjieff's theory about octaves and I want to apply that as well. I think the cycles work as octaves and I believe Laura brought this out in her article, that we have a great age of cycles and then there are smaller ages within that...

Niall: Right.

Stefan: ...and then there are smaller ages within that. So if we can look at these as being octaves, there is the great tone, the A major scale, the A major concert A, which is 440 hertz. Then we have the octave of A major which is one octave above, which would be 220 hertz. And then we have an octave above that which would be 110 hertz and so on. Now I think what we're seeing is then cycles within the cycles. So there are the four stages within a larger stage and four stages within a larger stage again.

So I kind of think if we look at the western civilization, certainly most of the changes seem to have come in the 16th and 17th century. This was obviously the warrior age because this was the age of exploration and innovation in the sciences and colonization. We 'discovered' North America - well in the 15thcentury. But then we went on to discover the rest of the world and colonize it and build cities. It was during this time, beginning with the American Revolution, that set the example for greater freedoms for the rest of the world. It was after the American Revolution that the French brought in their version of the constitution and then many of the European countries followed suit. And then we saw a buildup of science where the universities were established and flourished and many of the scientific break-throughs occurred. So that would take us into the early 19th century.
Then starting later into the early 20th century, we obviously went into a mercantile or a merchant age where Henry Ford perfected the assembly line and prosperity began to increase. So that I think is sort of a smaller cycle within a larger cycle. So probably the last two or three hundred years to complete this cycle starting say in the 1700s up into the present age. And now we're going to head into the chaos period. Hopefully it won't last too long. But who knows.

But also I think each country itself will have a similar type of cycle that may or may not align with the general cycle of western civilization as a whole. So I think for Russia, I'm pretty sure their age of chaos started in the 1900s, during the Russian Revolution, the Communist Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, I think that was the beginning of chaos for them. And we can see now it's lasted 100 years. Russia has been a horrible place to live for Russian people for the last 100 years and that is certainly indicative of the Age of Chaos for Russia.

So even though the rest of western civilization was going through a merchant stage at that time, I think Russia was already into an Age of Chaos and possibly, from what we're seeing now, Russia may now be leading the world going into a warrior age and hopefully they can rebuild their civilization again.

Niall: Yeah. Very interesting. This makes a lot of sense. It's not so much a discrete set of subsequent stages, as there are also considerations of different geographic locations and the four stages happening within another set of four stages bigger than that and another bigger still. What strikes me about today is you mentioned Russia as a potential exception. Nevertheless it's like anywhere else in our globalized, inter-dependent world, it is still nevertheless exposed like everywhere else to the same predations of extremely powerful psychopaths at this time. That and the fact that as far as we know, at no time in known human history has the general population been this large, and therefore has the population of psychopaths within it been this large which kind of sets us up for many of those number four stages converging into one point in time.

Stefan: Well that's what I'm wondering. I think when we see a complete breakdown of civilization like after the fall of Rome, I think what happens is that the chaos cycle, or stage, of numerous different countries all line up at the same time. And that might be what's happening now. Also, when we say stages, we assume that they're all of equal length and duration and as we know there's no straight lines in nature so similarly I don't think there is any set time period for each stage; I think some stages could last a hundred years. Other stages could last 10 years. It depends on the current circumstance and so it's like hand-to-hand combat. You can't say "Oh I'm going to do a kick and then a punch and this." You have to react to the situation as it develops. So it's a fluid, constantly changing environment.

And the historical cycles seem to be the same way. It's very fluid and it's constantly changing. Can we postpone the chaos stage another 10 years? Yes. Probably. Maybe. Can we postpone it another 50 years? I don't think so, but again, I can't see that far into the future. Something may arise that would postpone this. There may be suddenly a political movement that gains huge popularity and takes over the institutions and is able to create a better world or at least delay the eventual downfall of our civilization. Possible.

So we have to look at the situation as it is and as it is developing right now. And so as it's developing right now - I can tell just from the media here in Canada, it's so obvious, it's the propaganda. I'll give you an example of how they roll out the propaganda: three weeks ago I'm listening to CBC radio, which is Canada's equivalent of the BBC and it's a pure propaganda wing of the government. So they had a call-in show and the subject was "Is Canada doing enough to combat ISIS?" Now here's the question. Not "Should we be bothered being involved in the Middle East in the first place?" No, that's not the question. The assumption is we should be there. The question is 'are we doing enough killing'. And the callers all mentioned at some point in their comments the term "boots on the ground".

Niall: Uh-huh.

Stefan: Now when I heard that term 'boots on the ground' it right away keyed my bullshit meter. I have a keen sense of bullshit and I know the key words that they use. I know their little neurolinguistic programming tricks. I get it. These people think they're so smart, okay, that they can manipulate us, get us to jump around like marionettes at the end of a string. But you know what? A little bit of research and an IQ above 90 and they're not that smart, okay?

So here it comes. Every call-in, supposedly the average Canadian listener - of course they were all plants - but the average Canadian listener were all concerned about boots on the ground. Now that started four weeks ago. And then every news story every week since then they would have some expert commentator and once again the phrase "boots on the ground" came in. It started to become a drinking game with me; I would turn on the radio and I would have a sip of my beer every time I heard somebody say "boots on the ground" and within an hour I was drunk. (Laughter) It's ridiculous.

So I know the propaganda. Now why are they ramping up this propaganda? It's so obvious. Well, boots on the ground means they want Canadians - and when I say Canadians, I mean usually poor Quebec farm boys because that's the majority of the Canadian army. I don't know why Quebec is the supplier of most of the soldiers but rural kids that don't have a great education. And they sucker these guys into the army and they want to send these guys over to Iraq and Syria to kill people.

Now to me that is a clear indication of the age of chaos because this is war for no good reason. Canada has nothing to do - we don't even have to deconstruct the whole fraud of the Middle East wars to begin with. We could spend days talking about that. But just the small tissue corner of the paint that you start to scrape up with this little propaganda, even from this little sign, I can tell you this is a sign that we are entering an age of chaos. First of all, Canada used to have a reputation for 60 years as the world's peace keepers. When I was 16 I backpacked through Europe and on the back of my backpack I had a big Canadian flag. All the students in those days had their country's flag on their backpack so we all knew where we were from. And everywhere I went in Europe I was greeted with such kindness and such admiration. Everywhere people said "Oh, you're Canadian. Oh we love you. You liberated Holland and you liberated France and you've always been peacekeepers." This was the reputation of Canadians.

Now we Canadians are marching to war. We've already sent jet fighters there. And now with this nonsense about 'boots on the ground', they're preparing to send our kids to go and kill people that have nothing to do with Canada, never did anything to Canada. There's no reason in the world. Well, there is a reason. The reason is the psychopaths have taken over Canada. We are entering an age of chaos and chaos means war and death and misery and that's what they're preparing for. And that's why the goddamn CBC is coming out with this boots on the ground meme that they've been promoting for the last two months now. I get angry sometimes. (Laughter)

Joe: Well jeez, it's righteous anger because that is totally unconscionable, just blithely repeating 'boots on the ground, boots on the ground' and programming kids in this way, like you described. The media are complicit in sending young Canadians off to die in a foreign land for the profit of corporations and government.

Stefan: Exactly.

Joe: It's horrible.

Niall: To maintain an economic system that destroys those very same kids' futures.

Joe: Yeah. Stefan you talked a little bit about it and you said you can't see too far into the future, but when you talked about maybe something will come along that will delay a collapse; what do you see in the future in terms of having looked at these previous cycles and their rise and fall? In our context and in the way the world is today, our civilization is today, what kind of future do you see, assuming there will be some kind of a collapse?

Stefan: There's only one thing that's really a wild card in the theory of historical cycles and that is our modern communications, mass communications and specifically the internet. This is our only chance. We are able to disseminate information like never before. The printing press was able to free Europe from the mind control of the catholic church because they were able to print out bibles and now even poorer communities could afford a bible and people began to read books. And once they began to read books the dissemination of information is deadly to the parasites that control things. And so we saw the protestant reformation - I'm not a protestant. I'm anti-Christianity on all facets but at least they broke the stranglehold of the catholic church; those evil, pedophile psychopaths that had controlled Europe for a thousand years. At least they broke that hold.

Now the internet and your radio show and print on demand publishing is a chance to disseminate information to an audience like never before in history. And if we can get enough people - and I think we only need about ten percent of the population to not only wake up but also have enough courage to start to challenge their assumptions. If we can get that to happen through the internet, through the dissemination of information, I believe it is possible to - if not delay the onset of chaos, then maybe shorten the duration; go through five years, like the second world war was five really awful years but they came out of it, and within 10 years it was the 1950s and everybody was buying cars and houses again. Maybe we can reduce the severity of the chaos. But if we can't do that, then the future is exactly what George Orwell predicted and that is a jack boot stomping on a human face forever.

Joe: Well that's a cryptic description. But in terms of looking at previous civilizations, some of them do appear to have been wiped out, right?

Stefan: Oh yeah.

Joe: Most of them.

Stefan: Most of them never recovered.

Joe: It's not necessarily a case of a slave planet type thing but really that a maybe a large percent of the population could be wiped out through the psychopathic mentality and policies that are being implemented by these psychopaths in power. I don't subscribe to the idea of nuclear war because I think they're kind of a bit too smart at least for that because that would destroy everything that's available to them. So I'm just wondering if you have any ideas about if we were to go the way of previous civilizations which appear to have disappeared to a large extent, do you have any ideas how that might happen for us?

Stefan: Yeah, at the same time that information and the dissemination of information is the potential to create a better world and stave off the age of chaos, the same technology unfortunately can be used against us. Ah Joe, I want to be positive.

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: But when I read history, when I read about history during WWII and the First World War and the ages before that, what it is is men come to your door and they take you away and you're never seen again. That's what we can expect. Look at what's happening with the police now and the information system and the spying and things like that. For example, there's a lot of people in the United States that are preppers and even militia. But my study of history is that in about a week they'll all be gone and the world will continue and nobody will ever find out whatever happened to them; maybe 500 years from now they find some mass graves and they speculate where that came from. But that's how it could go Joe. It could happen that fast; within a couple of weeks they decide to pull the trigger and completely clamp down on anybody that showed any signs of making trouble for the psychopaths would be arrested at a 3 o'clock in the morning raid and shipped off into the gulag system never to be heard from or seen again. That could happen.

We've seen it happen before in communist China, communist Russia and all the east European countries - once the communists took over, they rounded up all the intellectuals and the school teachers. Look what happened in Cambodia, the same thing; Argentina when the dictators took over; Chile, oh my god, it's over and over and over again. The psychopaths, when they feel that they're going to lose power they get really dirty and they get dirty really fast. Even more recently in Mexico the 41 college students that the Mayor ordered the drug cartels to round up, rape, torture and murder them and burn them in a mass grave. This is what they do! And this is why we have to fight. This is why I get angry because we have the time right now to talk about it, but when they think that their power is slipping, don't think that that won't happen here in the United States or in Canada or in Britain. They'll do exactly the same thing that they did in Cambodia, that they did in Russia, that they did in China, that they did in Argentina, ad infinitum. Examine any civilization, that's what they do.

So that's what I'm worried about, that they'll get ugly. And will they use nukes? Yeah, they'll use nukes. They will.

Joe: Well, talking about trying to be positive and stuff about the future, the only positive outcome I can see is that something changes fundamentally about human society and psychopaths are effectively removed from the positions in some way...

Niall: Or at least exposed.

Joe: Exposed and then removed either way, but they're removed and contained and people no longer allow them to rise to positions of power. If that is not a possibility, then between your prediction of a jack boot standing on the head of humanity forever basically, between that and an annihilation of most of the population and a restart of the cycle, I'd go for the restart of the cycle, if that's our only option between a slave planet forever. If that's what the cycles are for, like you kind of said, they're a natural process, that maybe if there isn't an opportunity to fundamentally change human civilization and deal with this issue of psychopathy among humans, well then our next best option is a reboot.

Stefan: Yeah, there's an old Chinese idiom that says: "If the roof is rotten, kick it in." What it refers to is that some things can't be repaired, that you have to tear down. I worked with a roofer for a while too. If you see that the roof joists are rotten, you can't just add more shingles to the roof. You have to take the whole roof down and rebuild it. And that may be where we are at. Our society is so rotten, there is no adding another coat of paint to it. There's no trying to clean it up a little bit. It might need to be taken down back to its basic foundations and rebuilt fresh and clean from the beginning again. I would find that a better option than allowing the psychopaths to take over.

It's going to collapse one way or the other anyways. What I'm worried about is that we have our slave planet, which they've created already, but we allow this slavery to continue for 500 years and then it collapses. No! Better it collapse, we get it over with in five, ten years and rebuild, than let this thing drag out another couple of hundred years of misery and slavery until eventually it will collapse anyway. The psychopaths cannot escape the rules of Mother Nature either. And so even though they might have their dreams of world domination, well good luck because nature is not thwarted. The rules of nature cannot be abused.

So it will come anyway, now or in a hundred years from now. Better now. Better now. Let's bring it down.

Niall: Bring it on.

Joe: It's almost like compassionate euthanasia for someone who's suffering. The planet is suffering and maybe Mother Nature will come in and take pity. When suffering gets too much on a planet-wide basis, that's not good for anybody, right?

Stefan: I'm not too worried about the planet - like with Laura's article. And I'm also what you would call a catastrophist theory of history. I do believe that civilization has been wiped out in the past by planetary events, or near-extinction level events. Well we know about the mass extinctions. And there were probably minor mass extinctions. And yet even though 99% of all the species that existed on the planet has gone extinct; the planet itself, even if we were to wipe everyone out with a nuclear devastation - 10, 20, 30 thousand years from now life will come again.
So I'm not too worried about the planet. I'm worried about us as a species; that we might not survive.

Joe: Yeah, well that's what I mean. When the suffering on the planet gets too much in terms of the human population or even the animal population, when all the, let's call them 'higher level sentient beings' - well even plants are suffering I suppose - but when plants, animals, humans, when everybody's having a really bad time and it's only going to get worse, you would think there would be some kind of a mechanism to deal with that before it gets to the point where the whole planet could collapse under its own weight of entropy.

Stefan: Yeah. It may be true. I'm not sure about that. I don't know if I do or if I don't - that planet earth is a conscious entity and if it is, it may self-regulate itself. It might be that it will put us out of our misery for us if we don't do it ourselves. I'm not sure. That could very well be. But what you're saying is that the people need to change and I agree. That's why I'm doing the videos and going on radio shows because I'm doing what I can. Everybody needs to do what they can. And it's not just that I go on the radio shows; I talk to people on buses, I talk to people in the park, I talk to the cashier at the grocery store. I am spreading this. I guess people must think I'm a little bit crazy or obnoxious. I bring it up in a friendly way. I'll say things like "Enjoying your slavery today?" (Laughter) See if they ask a question and I'll get into it. And most people say "Yes, we're wage slaves". They all recognize it.

Niall: "But what you gonna do?"

Stefan: But what you gonna do.

Niall: That's their attitude.

Stefan: What you gonna do about it. They're kind of complacent. And that's why I want to try and provide some sorts of solutions for it. For example, what I never understood is the divine right of kings, how that ever got started. For example, you read the history of Rome - let's take any of the Roman emperors.

But let's take Caligula. He's a perfect example; a lunatic psychopath, right? And he caused so many deaths and murders and assassinations and suffering and rapes and castrations. Oh my god! The guy was a monster. And yet he was surrounded by guys with swords. They were the German bodyguards in those days and now they're the Swiss Guard for the pope. But in those days they were the German bodyguards. But if just one of those German guys said "Look, this little psychopath! That's enough of this shit." And took his sword and lopped his head off, it would have put it to an end. Why did nobody kill this guy?!?! And I read that throughout history.

The history of England and the Hundred Years War and there they are - when they dug up the skeletons to show what these people had to endure in their lifetime, these soldiers during the Hundred Years War. They had their faces hacked off and they lived through it and they went on to fight another battle. And "it's for our king and for England." "No! Kill that king! Chop his head off and go back home!" There's no reason to cross the English Channel and invade France yet again so that the king can have more money and more estates. Why are these people doing that?!? Why are you fighting for this lunatic?!? Why are you sacrificing and dying for this little psychopath so that he can become richer?!? Where did that come from?!? It's this weird mental attitude that people have. It's our herd instinct or our pack instinct where somebody says "Oh, I'm the leader! I'm the king!" and then everybody else is ready to throw themselves on a sword for them. Why?!? Just say no to these psychopaths.

And we see the same thing now with the police forces and the militarization and the seizure of property and the beatings and the shootings and the rapes and the murders. Oh my god!! Just say no! Say "that's it, nobody's going to join the police force". We all quit en masse and nobody with a conscience would ever sign up for that job again. Then, where would the elite be? They would have nothing!! The same thing with the military. That's why I always tell people never ever join the military. Listen, if some foreign country invades Canada and their troops are marching down my streets, killing Canadian people, yes, I will find a rifle. I will go out there and I'll be sniping these bastards if they're in my back yard. But that has never happened. So there is no reason in the world for any Canadian to join the military because it's never happened and it never will happen because the logistics of invading a country like Canada or the United States from anywhere else in the world is beyond the ability of any civilization to accomplish. You can't do that, especially if every other American is armed with a rifle.

So there's no reason in the world to join the military. We've got to get people to quit, to desert, to stop signing up for these positions. And without a military and without a police force, all these psychopaths would have no power and therefore all their schemes of world domination would come to an end instantly. So that's one solution. Stay away from the military and stay away from law enforcement. Don't get involved. And if you are involved and the order comes down "By the way, there's some protesters, go there and shoot them" - refuse your orders!! It wasn't a defense during the Nuremburg trials when they staged all these phoney charges against all these poor German guys and they said "Well, we were following orders". "Yeah, but that's no defense." That's right, it is no defense because you have a conscience.

And just like it was no defense for those German soldiers, so it's no defense for Canadian soldiers or American soldiers or English soldiers. You have no defense! You go over to Iraq and you start killing people, that's on your conscience. Never mind you were 'following orders'. You're a human being. You're a thinking person. That's on your conscience. And never mind the police captain says "Go over there and let's pepper spray and beat the shit out of all these demonstrators." No, that's no defense that you were given the order by your captain. You're going out there and you are physically beating people with your baton. That karma is on your head. That responsibility is on your head. And if you don't refuse that order, you're culpable. Take responsibility for your actions. You can't defer morality to a higher authority. Each human being is responsible for their own individual actions on this planet and you have to live according to your own morality; the ethics of a civilization not the ethics of a bunch of psychopaths.

Niall: Amen! And yet part of why we're having this conversation is that we don't live in such a civilization. The mind virus you've described has taken hold of such people who might otherwise follow their conscience. But if there's a silver lining from the inevitability of the cycles you describe, particularly that it will inevitably end up in some form of chaos before something re-emerges, hopefully in the not-too-distant future. You've touched on the repeated theme of pockets of survivors and/or pockets of people who band together in the midst of the chaos forming or retreating into monasteries. Is this really a recurring theme at all of these stages in history?

Stefan: Absolutely. It is a recurring theme.

Niall: Yeah.

Stefan: And even in the science fiction story by Isaac Asimov, the Foundation Trilogy, what the main protagonist, the one that figured out the mathematical formula to predict the future, what he did was he sent out colonies of people to establish basically a monastic type of system. He sent out colonies to the far reaches of the galaxy where they would be far away from the worst of the collapse and where they would preserve the knowledge throughout the dark ages so that once the collapse was finished, they could re-emerge from their colonies and rebuild the universe.
Well, you know that has happened many times in history. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the monastic system was able, relatively, because they went through the Dark Ages and maybe they weren't as brutal as we think they were. There's some more recent research that suggests that things weren't as horrible as we are led to believe. But listen, it was still pretty awful, the Dark Ages.

And so during the Dark Ages, it took another 2,000 years before they invented flushing toilets again. (Laughing) So to me that's pretty dark. But during the dark ages while the rest of the people suffered with disease, poverty and cruelty and endless strife, the monasteries were relatively unscathed by this and they formed kind of economic communities. The markets would be in the monastery where people could exchange goods through barter. They established small businesses like winemaking and sheep farming and wool spinning. And also they preserved most of the knowledge that we have. I have to hand it to those monks, they were the ones that preserved, as much as possible, the writings of the ancient Roman and Greek philosophers and the histories by recopying the manuscripts and the parchments and maintaining a library system. So thanks to that we have some knowledge. And thanks to that, and of course the Muslims who preserved probably most of ancient Greek philosophy in their libraries.

So compared to the poverty and horror of the Dark Ages, at least you could learn to read there. There was nowhere else in the world at that time that would teach you how to read. They had some sort of an economy and a medical system.

So that seems to have worked sort of alright for Europe after the fall of Rome. If we go to China and the Middle East, it was Buddhist monasteries that kind of remained unscathed during the various dynastic cycle collapses because the best example of historical cycles can be found in Chinese history where you see the dynasty rise and fall, rise and fall 68 times. And each time they fell there was a period of chaos in between. Sometimes it lasted 10 years, sometimes it lasted 100 years. But then a new dynasty would come again.

But during all of that, it was again, these monasteries that preserved the writings of the Buddha; that maintained gardens and micro-economies. So for the future, in order to get through the Age of Chaos, one of the solutions would definitely be a monastic system. Now, what do I mean by monastic? What I mean is autonomous communities. You can call them colonies in the wilderness, but it doesn't necessarily have to be in the wilderness. A colony could be established within a city. But what you need is a group of like-minded people, no more than say 50 to 100, that will work together and pool their resources and pool their knowledge and become, as much as possible, self-sufficient and detached from the mechanism of the empire or the state. If you can separate yourself and you're not as dependent on the empire then when the empire falls it won't affect you as much because you aren't dependent on them.

For example, in the United States now I think they have 150 million people on food stamps. When the monetary system collapses and I'm pretty sure it will collapse, that's usually what happens during a period of chaos, and they're no longer able to get their food stamps, what are they going to do? Well, they're going to starve. But before they starve they will loot and rob and then once there's nothing left to loot and rob, then they will definitely starve and they will die by the tens of thousands. So if you have a community that works together and says "We have our secret little garden patch hidden in the woods and we'll all take turns tending it and preserving it and guarding it, and we'll help each other out and we'll move in together. And we'll share the functions so that we no longer need food stamps, we no longer need grocery stores, we no longer need the medical system which is the illness system really. We'll take care of our own health and our own food and our own shelter." Then when the monetary system collapses, well you won't be as hard hit because you weren't dependent on them in the first place. So then your greatest concern is to stay below the radar of the looters long enough so that once everybody else has starved to death, then it'll be safer again and you already have the means to establish a new civilization.

Niall: Yeah, such communities to survive such times will face hard choices, but in the course of it they become as warriors with the higher ethics, higher skill levels and so on, and therefore are ready to essentially seed the new warrior age. Something like that?

Stefan: Yeah, it will be hard choices. And we have to precede the warrior age. We have to anticipate it by becoming warriors now. And that's again one of my offered solutions to the current turmoil. What happens with the police and the military is that the parasites, the psychopaths, appeal to a man's warrior ethics. Young men when they're full of testosterone, they want to be the knight in shining armor. I was like that when I was young. I almost thought of going to military school myself and I studied martial arts for 40 years and continue to practice it because I love the ethic of being a warrior, of being a man, of defending right from wrong and justice and truth. And that's how they sell kids on the military and that's how they sell kids on the police. Of course once they've joined up, that's all turned on its head.

But those principles are still valid and we need to adopt those principles for ourselves now. We have to be brave. Facing the reality of what's coming is very scary so we have to face our fears and in order to face your fear, you have to be a warrior because that's what warriors are. They're courageous. So tell me the truth doctor. Give it to me square. I need to know what it is and I'm man enough to take the truth and then work from there. So we need to adopt a warrior ethic. And hard choices, yeah, I was talking about the need for everybody to be prepared for a disaster because I can't tell the average Canadian that they need to get ready for the Age of Chaos because they're not able to hear it right now. They're still too zombified. They won't get that message.

So I can't save them using that message, but I can save them using the message of "Get ready for a disaster." So what I'm doing locally is I'm teaching disaster preparedness and I'm using it under the ruse, under the faรงade, that you should be prepared in case there's a natural disaster, which first of all it's a good idea to be prepared for a natural disaster anyways. Everybody should be prepared for that. But really what I'm trying to do is if people are prepared for a natural disaster, they'll be better able to deal with an Age of Chaos, and they'll have a better chance of surviving the Age of Chaos. So even though I'm not telling them "Listen, I have this theory about historical cycles, things might get really bad, let's put three months' worth of food aside", they can't hear that message, right? They can't hear it.

Niall: Yeah.

Stefan: But I tell them "Well, global warming" - which I don't believe in, but they do here - we're all Lib Tards here in Canada. (Laughter) We're a Marxist Leninist society here. Everybody believes everything that's liberal and left, so "Global warming, more natural disasters, let's put three months food aside in case of a natural disaster." That they can hear. Which is fine because the end result will be the same. They will have food and supplies that will help them during the Age of Chaos.
Now some of them said "Oh, ha, ha, ha. Listen if there's a big snow storm, we'll all come to your house."

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: Well, I get really fired at that point because the trouble is, when the Age of Chaos comes and you've already heard the message from me and I've already warned you about it, not about the Age of Chaos, I warned you about: "listen, if there's a snow storm and you're stuck indoors for three weeks, have three weeks' worth of supply of food. If you can't even do that, you think you're going to come to my door and I'm going to bring you in and start feeding you my reserves? No bloody way! It's not going to happen." So those are the hard choices.

Now I like these people but I'm not going to feed them. I'm not! I can't because I would be sacrificing myself. So I'm not going to kill myself to help people that didn't try to help themselves to begin with and now are dependent on me. And that's a hard choice. I wouldn't want to do it. It's the old lifeboat analogy. Who do you throw out of the lifeboat? But that's what it's going to boil down to. And you're going to have to be tough and say "No!" unless they bring something to the table. If they come to my door and say "Listen, I've got two weeks' supply of food but I also have a lot of medical gear and a year's supply of antibiotics" I'll go "Listen, we can work together". But if he comes to my door, "I've got nothing. I've got no food. I've got no medicine. I've got no skills. I've got no training." "What do I need you for?"

Joe: Exactly.

Stefan: I'm sorry. And that's a hard choice.

Joe: Yeah, people who come with nothing or show no initiative and don't look at the world around them and prepare in some way, they're not the kind of people you'd want in a small community of survivors or whatever you want to call it, because they have no track record of actually doing what will be needed to do under those conditions.

Stefan: Yeah. In my plan that I have for people, what I say is: "What I will do during an Age of Chaos is I will tithe ten percent. Just as people give ten percent of their income to their church; if there's an Age of Chaos and there are children starving in the street, I will take ten percent of what I have and I will go and make some soup or some stew and feed it to the people there." Whatever it is I can do, I will provide ten percent from what I have and I will give it to people that weren't prepared; I'm willing to do that. I think it's only fair that those of us who did wake up and did get some preparations together, that we're not going to be 100% selfish and hole up behind our communities and not do anything. Now, I'm not going to invite them to come live with me, but I will go out into the streets and I will bring loaves of bread or fresh fruit and vegetables, whatever I have, I will bring ten percent of my food supplies and I will disseminate it to the most needy and that's my pledge to humanity at this point. I'll maintain anonymity. They won't know where I got it from and they won't know where I live.

Joe: Yeah, you've got to be prudent in that respect. But one of the things that I was thinking about in terms of the situation you're describing, social chaos, it seems to me that it would be probably worst in built up areas, in major cities, major urban areas. We have a lot of people all depending on what might then be limited resources. Do you have any ideas about that?

Stefan: Yes I do. And it goes right back to the science fiction story. In the novel The Foundation there was always one colony that the other colonies could never figure out where they were because what Hari Sheldon, the main protagonist did, was when he sent out the colonies he said "Well, you can't be in touch with each other because if one colony gets found out, then the evil powers that be would then find out the other colonies and take them over." So they were all autonomous and they didn't know about where each of them were. And there was one colony that nobody could ever figure out where it was, and that was back in the heart of the evil empire in the capital city. It simply went underground. So I do think that it's possible to go underground within the city.

Also the idea that the country will be better off, or people will be better off in the country, that doesn't turn out to be true from my study of history. For example, here in the United States and Canada, in the prepper community or the survivalist community, the idea is that if things get bad, everybody will pack their gear into the truck and drive out to the country. There are so many things wrong with that scenario that it's unlikely to ever succeed. First of all, you're probably not going to be able to get out of the city. The roads will be shut off from traffic alone. If they're not shut off from traffic they'll be shut off by military checkpoints. They're not going to allow a bunch of people with food and guns to run out of the city. They'll be waiting at the main arteries and exits of every highway out of the city and they'll confiscate everything that people have. Why do I say that? Because that's what they always did! That's what every other dictatorial, totalitarian government did when people tried to escape to the country. They knew that; they were waiting, they were waiting at the side road; they were waiting on the country roads there with their police checkpoints. They would pick those people up and they took what they had and they marched them off into the woods and that was the last they ever saw of them.

The same thing in Cambodia. They evacuated the cities and they sent everybody out to the countryside. Why? Because in the countryside they can do what they want to the population. They're uprooted, they're scattered. So I don't think it's always a great idea to think that we're going to go to the country and live there. You can do that if you have a lot of money and a lot of preparations before time. For example, if you have the money to buy some acreage and a farm and start to upgrade that farm so that it runs on solar and wind and possibly that you have flowing water on the acreage and greenhouses and hydroponic systems and aquaponics and you set that all up, and you still are able to disguise your property so that on the outside it looks dilapidated. You don't want modern buildings on there. You don't want something that had a paint job in the last ten years. It needs to look like it's already been looted. Then there's a pretty good chance for you to survive.

But those communities that go to the countryside and are successful for a while, they are quickly and easily targeted by looters. First they'll be targeted by the government and if there's anything left after that, the looters will come in.

So, it's not always the best answer to go out to the country and try and live on the farm - I would do it if I had the money. I would still try it because it's probably a better solution than staying where you are in the city. But I don't have the money and I can't afford a farm and the equipment. Because the other thing about moving to the country is there's no jobs there, unless you're willing to commute four hours a day to the city for a job. How are you going to fund your lifestyle out there? You can't fund it right now. So there's a lot of reasons why it's really impractical at this point to retire to a monastery in the countryside. And a lot of reasons why they would be targeted.

The lesser of evils is to be prepared to go underground where you are now, which is micro-economies, micro-farming. And a community can be organized - it doesn't necessarily have to live together in a big compound - and cooperate together. So you can have people in a neighborhood where each of them has their own home. They don't all need to move in together into a warehouse or something like that, but if they can still cooperate amongst themselves and keep a low profile the whole time. For example one house will have a garden and the other house will have hydroponics in the basement and another house will distil alcohol so you can run a car on alcohol or a diesel, and another home will have a herb garden for medicinal herbs. And they all cooperate and exchange those goods, you could survive just as well or recreate the strategy of a commune in the countryside.

Joe: Stefan, I'm just going to check. We might have a call on the line here.

Stefan: Sure!

Joe: Hi, do we have a caller on the line? Hello?

Niall: Phantom call.

Joe: A phantom call.

Niall: It's a zombie!

Stefan: Yeah, well you've been having technical trouble all day so...

Joe: We have, yeah. Hi, who's that?

Niall: Hi there.

Drew: Hey there, this is Drew again.

Joe: Hi Drew. Welcome to the show.

Drew: I'm calling from the potentially dead city of Los Angeles.

Joe: Oh wow!

Niall: Welcome to the show.

Joe: What have you go to say for yourself from Los Angeles?

Drew: Well I've been listening to your guest Steven. I assume that's his name, Steven?

Stefan: Stefan.

Joe: Stefan.

Drew: Stefan. And I assume from your discussion that you live in the Queen's colony of Canada.

Stefan: Yes I do, but I used to live in southern California for the last 12, 13 years. I just moved back to Canada.

Drew: Oh, from the frying pan into the fire.

Stefan: Well I'd say I went from Hitler's fascist Germany to Stalin's communist Russia. (Laughter)

Drew: In terms of trying to get the topic off of how to survive the economic collapse, the discussion should be about how do we get the countries to join with the BRICS organization which is something that has now overthrown the primitive accumulation of the old monetary system that we've been under for the last 50 years since they murdered the Bretton Woods system.

Stefan: Right.

Drew: Are you aware of the BRICS though?

Stefan: Yes, absolutely.

Drew: Okay, so you know that it's based on the much better concept of nations cooperating with each other, instead of this old British Empire model of "it's alright to go out and loot you and kill you" and so forth.

Stefan: Exactly, yeah.

Drew: Have you thought about organizing it so that Canada has to join the BRICS as a community of nations instead of just saying "Well I can't do anything. Canada's hopeless and so therefore I'll just have to let everybody just go to hell?"

Stefan: Drew, I don't want to see everybody go to hell and that's why I'm doing everything I can to raise awareness, to offer solutions. I agree, within the alternative media movement I notice that there's a lot of in-fighting. We're all accusing everybody else of being a disinfo agent or a cointelpro agent, or this system won't work or that system won't work. And you know what? Anything that removes the power from the current regime is good in my book. So I would support the BRICS system, absolutely. Do I think it's the solution? I don't know. I would be very happy if it was. But I would definitely support anything that can take away their power, bring back the Bretton Woods agreement, absolutely. Go back to a gold standard? Possibly.

Drew: It actually does work because China in particular, if you google what they're building, since they have adopted the sort of American model of political economy, you might notice that they've gone on a gigantic, massive building program.

Stefan: Oh yeah.

Drew: And bringing other countries in, in terms of what India's doing, right? So that's the process ongoing and countries that were formerly, you might say puppets of the United States and the Queen, are now suddenly saying "Um, maybe that way is kind of stupid. Maybe we should..." You see that tendency of countries like the Philippines that were formerly just puppets of the United States saying, "Well let's re-think this. This is kind of stupid. We've got all this economic activity going on. Maybe it'd be a little better to go this way."

Stefan: Yeah.

Drew: So you do have that process undergoing and that is the potential.

Stefan: Yeah, I support anything that would attack the current system.

Drew: Well it is bankrupt. You have that as your potential, that they are bankrupt and they are desperate.

Stefan: Yeah. I used to live in China and actually I toured China with a group of venture capitalists and we went to see all these cities they built from the ground up, just massive construction and these condos. So I've seen it firsthand. I know what they're doing over there. But I'm not so sure...

Drew: Are you just pessimistic about Canadians in general, that they're asleep and so forth?

Stefan: Well Canadians are really passive and it's not our fault; it's a cold country for much of the year and we never locked our doors. When I grew up the murder rate in Toronto was one or two people a year, compared to 200 on a weekend in Chicago. We've always been very peaceful. We've never had a lot of crime. We've never had a lot of what we could perceive as government corruption when we were younger. And that has stayed with us but it has made us pretty complacent. Mind you, I talk to Americans, people in the American alternative media and people that have woken up - and I don't like the term "wake up" because it sounds a little bit condescending. 'I'm awake, you're asleep. I'm superior;' but become aware of this subject matter and they tell me that Americans are even worse than Canadians. Then I speak to people in Australia and they tell me the Australians are far worse than the Canadians. Anyway, the general mass of humanity is unaware of the seriousness of the situation and I think they're resistant to realizing it, and for a number of reasons; it's not pleasant. It's avoidance of fear, avoidance of uncertainty; even though we know there's nothing certain in life, we still cling to the kind of illusion that the current system will provide what it has provided in the past.

So I'm pessimistic, yes and no. I'm still hoping that we get enough people to create what is called a bifurcation point, a certain weight. The 100th monkey analogy where once 100 monkeys have learned it, then all the monkeys will learn it. And the BRICS movement, I'll be honest with you Drew, I really think that the only reason that the BRICS countries are moving away from the American-Anglo financial system is not because they're going to do the right thing, but because the psychopaths in charge of their respective countries are seeing the same things that I'm seeing which is that they know the US dollar is going to collapse and they want to distance themselves now from the arrow so that their countries and they themselves, the psychopaths in charge, won't be as...

Drew: No, no. China's President Xi supposedly offered the United States to join with it instead of this geopolitical pivot which targets China simply because they are acting in an independent manner, right?

Stefan: Right.

Niall: But Drew...

Drew: The concept is based on John Quincy Adams and a concert of nations.

Stefan: Yeah, John Quincy Adams.

Drew: And they have a very future-oriented outlook in terms of bringing countries in, cooperative development. So there is that. But I understand that from where you are it might seem that pessimistic.

Stefan: Well so far...

Niall: Drew, you think that China's going to be able to bring the United States into a new regime that would what? Immediately transform the reality of the United States? Which is that it is ruled by the most concentrated bunch of psychopaths on the planet. It's not going to be the Queen...

Drew: Well I'm a political organizer so I'm aware that...

Niall: It all stems from the Queen of England - I'm afraid it's not that simple; it would be nice if it could be that simple, if we just cut off the Queen's head, the rest of the hive will be fine. We don't actually have any objective view of it, that it is even just the Queen of England who has the United States, for example, under its thumb. This is a symbiotic relationship between the elites of these two countries and other countries. It's not just even as simple as an Anglo-American empire; BRICS for example, there will be multiple cross-purposes at work behind the various groups in each of the countries involved in BRICS. I could never see Russia's interests being the same, for example - it's quite close to China's, they seem to be cooperating in many ways, but then what of Brazil? This is still theoretical. You understand? We're still living in a system that is still the basic petrodollar, Anglo-American financial system.

Drew: Moving to get away from that.

Niall: It would be nice to have something that we could hold up as an alternative.

Joe: Yeah, we can try and get away from that, and we should get away from that I hope that is what's going to happen. But I would say that in that scenario, we might find ourselves in a situation where the Anglo-American empire essentially says "Well, if we're going down, we're taking as many people with us as possible" and they screw the entire planet up.

Drew: Yeah, they are doing that actually. They are doing that.

Joe: And so we don't know what future there might be for a new kind of utopian BRICS-dominated global economic system. So that's all a bit premature, as Niall is saying.

Niall: The end result would be the same. It would be the chaos stage of this cycle. You see? Even if that was a beautiful alternative that the debt was presented to humanity, there's going to be BRICS model.

Joe: There's going to be a lot of pain involved in getting there.

Niall: Yeah, one way or another.

Joe: They're not going to let go of their hegemonic position easily.

Drew: I know. We're dealing with stuff like asteroids which I've seen on your site, which is useful, would require the US, Russia to collaborate on something of that nature, of dealing with these astronomical aspects, which do effect...

Niall: Threaten.

Drew: the planet.

Joe: Absolutely, yeah. And that's not going to happen because psychopaths basically don't really care about the future. They don't really envision the future; they can't see the future. They live in the moment for what they can get for them right now, fulfilling their goals, their needs, their desires, which are all pretty much destructive and insatiably greedy. So these people are a lost cause. These people are just a dead end. If they are allowed to continue in positions of power, then it's a dead end for everybody.

Drew: I know. The difficulty is in organizing a new system out of the wreckage of this old system. That's the bigger trick because of dealing with idiots and elected officials who reflect the thinking of just going along to get along. That's always...

Stefan: But Drew, look at what happened in the mid-term elections. Ninety-six percent of the incumbents were voted back in. So at the very least, what Americans should be doing is voting out every incumbent, and yet 96% of them are back there. So listen, I believe and support your work in political organizing. I support anybody's work in raising awareness, either politically or financially, anything we can all do. There are so many avenues through which we can attack the psychopathic structure right now. For me personally, I am right at the basics of life, basic survival. So for me, my approach is to get people to prepare themselves for bad times.

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: By stockpiling food and medicine and getting some first aid skills, getting some security skills, learning communications, learning some spy craft, learn how to go underground, learn how to lose a tail, how to avoid security cameras, learn how to be a chameleon, impersonate people. Disguise

Niall: Strategic.

Stefan: Being strategic. For me, it's live to see tomorrow. I'm right down at that level right now. For me personally, spending my time and energy on political movements or protests or demonstrations, it's not for me right now. It's too little, too late for me, in my opinion. So the way I'm approaching it, and again I encourage you to do what you're doing and good for you, but for me personally, I'm at a life and death level right now, to try personally, before it comes, save as many people - because you know the sheeple, they're unaware and they're not awake and all this, but they're not bad people. They're husbands and wives and children. Okay, so they're not on the bandwagon. They're not in the same level of awareness that you and I and many other people are, so they need to be tortured and starved to death? They need to eat their pets? No! I don't want to see that happen to them either. My approach is simply to get people to work on that level: life and death. Survive another day and then maybe we can build a better future. But that doesn't mean I don't support mass movements and protests.

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: One of my most recent articles is how to stay safe during a protest rally, things that you should bring when you're going out to exercise your First Amendment rights, like extra food and water, a med kit, a telephone, your lawyer's information, things like that. So I do support the We Are Change movement, the Occupy movement, every kind of a movement. The Peace movement? I'm absolutely in full support of those people. I'm in full support of political change and political action and activism. My personal work on this problem is really the basic level of enough food and medicine so that you can live long enough to outlive the bastards in charge. That's what I'm hoping for, because these guys end up dying off anyways, they kill themselves. It's like I said in the video with the Chinese dynasties, they all died in the end; all the emperors, all the aristocrats, all the great families. They're huge, wealthy families, and they all went in the end too. Usually they were killed off by the people they hired to protect them (laughing).

Like the current government is hiring all these psychopathic cops and militia and contractors and mercenaries to protect them and kill everybody else. But it doesn't take too long before these psychopathic mercenaries say "Listen, I can just as easily put an bullet in this asshole's head and take his stuff as I can put the bullet in the demonstrator's head."

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: And that's how it happens. These psychopaths kill themselves off. What I'm hoping to do with my own humble efforts on this, and it's very little what I'm doing, but it's all I can do right now, but what I'm hoping is that I can get enough decent, honest, hardworking people to live long enough so that once these psychopaths have killed themselves off or so gravely weakened themselves through internecine combat and inter-group rivalry that they no longer have enough power to suppress the rest of us, that the good people that survived through this time are now the dominant people and that's where a new civilization comes. But Drew, keep doing what you're doing. I support you. Good on you man.

Drew: Okay, don't leave out the role of humor, in terms of Cervantes and those kind of people who poked fun at the stupidity of people.

Stefan: Oh, absolutely. My favorite author is Mark Twain. I love Mark Twain. There's a guy that had humor. Bill Hicks. Spread Bill Hicks around, the poor guy. What a hero.

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: These people, George Carlin, another great comedian that told the truth and made people laugh and think at the same time. Absolutely, humor! Yeah.

Drew: Well in terms of these past authors who created renaissances, they did by poking fun at people's stupidity.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely.

Drew: Alright guys. Thanks a lot. See y'all later.

Joe: Thanks for your call. Alright. Take it easy.

Niall: Thank you Drew. Bye-bye.

Joe: Let me just check. Do we have another call on the line?

Kent: Yeah, hi. This is Kent from West Virginia. I have a couple of comments.

Niall: Hi Kent.

Kent: First of all, I don't think anybody in the American government of today cares anything much about what John Quincy Adams said or wrote, so that's the first thing. Even if he was talking about boots on the ground, well it's gone up a notch. You have to listen to the CBC Sunday Edition in the mornings. Sometimes there's good interviews, John Cleese last week and so on and so forth. But just this morning I was very disturbed when I turned it on this morning is that there's a debate in the parliament up there. They've got this problem that it's illegal to go over and fly and drop bombs in these foreign countries whereas down south here, down in the good old USA, well they passed a law that makes it legal for them to just go and bomb foreign countries for whatever reason. So there's a debate now not only boots on the ground, it's not a declaration of war, it's a debate on whether to cease making it illegal to go bomb foreign countries. So it's gone up a notch.

And he was talking about kings, and somewhere recently, maybe it was in conjunction with Richard II or III, they found the body or something? Anyway, I just saw something recently about back in the days when the kings actually led the charge into battles, I heard something that said "Well one of the kings got killed, everybody dropped swords and went home." I don't know whether that's true or not, but I thought that was pretty interesting. Just a couple of comments. Alright, well thanks. Great show.

Joe: Alright Kent.

Niall: Thanks Kent. Bye-bye.

Joe: I think, Stefan, Kent was talking about that reference to the kings was an analogy to what you were describing. Maybe he was saying that people would just leave; that when the king gets killed, people just drop swords and take off and that's an analogy for maybe when the psychopaths, like you were suggesting, would kill each other off. Then people would finally get a clue!

Niall: Just get on with life.

Joe: Yeah, but being forced into battle for some idiot on a horse and a crown on his head.

Stefan: Yeah, I think he's talking about Richard II who was made infamous with Shakespeare's plays for murdering the two princes and things like that. Yeah, they found his body in a parking lot they were excavating and yes, he's absolutely right, in ancient warfare, when the king fell, usually his side would abandon the field. A typical example was with Alexander the Great when he was up against - the name escapes me - the Persians. And the Persian king fled the field because Alexander the Great sent a cavalry charge directly at the king's position. He panicked and fled the field and then the entire Persian army followed suit, even though they outnumbered the Greeks something like 100 to 1. So if you can take out the head, yeah the rest tend to fall.

We've only got five minutes left, eh? I'll make it quick. There is a documentary called Stress the Silent Killer. It's a great documentary from National Geographic. So watch that. It's a study of a baboon tribe in Africa. And the anthropologist that was studying the baboons basically stated that baboons are pretty awful creatures. They have a hierarchical structure; the dominant baboons beat and abuse the subdominant baboons and they in turn beat and abuse the ones subordinate to them, up and down the chain. And he found that the baboons at the lowest level of their hierarchical structure had the greatest amount of stress and the greatest amount of heart disease.

So it's irrelevant about what food you eat - it wasn't that they were eating more buttery popcorn or something like that. It was specifically the stress that killed them and caused those diseases and the stress caused by being abused by dominant baboons in their own tribe. But what happened with this tribe of baboons he was studying was that they got into some medical waste that was dumped in the local dump where they were eating. And the dominant baboons of course always have the first pick of the food. So the dominant baboons ate all the diseased waste products and they all died off.

What happened was, after the dominant baboons died off, the remaining baboon troop - it's not a tribe, it's a troop - stopped abusing each other and their stress was reduced and they stopped dying of heart disease.

So this was an accident where all the dominant baboons - let's call them the psychopath baboons, the elite at the top that would beat everyone below them and cause all this stress - when they were removed, the troop returned to a more cooperative community. There was more grooming behavior and there was no more beating the females, and the females beating the youngsters. All of that stopped once the dominant baboons were removed.

So this is my hope for society. If we can remove these psychopaths and we can remove them by simply not obeying their orders. That's all we have to do. Don't listen to them; don't do what they tell us to do. And that would be the same as killing them because they would have no power. And if we can remove that power by disobeying the dictates of the regime, then the society could return to a more idyllic community.

Joe: Absolutely. Very well said. Stefan, thanks a million for being on. We're going to probably leave it here for this week. I just want to say to our listeners that they should check out your recent article Historical Cycles - Are We Doomed to Repeat the Past? It's in the Trends Journal and it's also made into a little video on YouTube, with a more concise version on YouTube. And Stefan is also the author of six books. Maybe in terms of what we're talking about here, The Art of Urban Survival is probably the most relevant one, unless I'm wrong there Stefan.

Stefan: Yeah, The Art of Urban Survival is like a boy scout manual for adults, but it will get you through what's coming: crime, corruption, natural disasters, how to prepare, how to put together a search and rescue team, how to build shelters, things like that. But also how to escape and evade, how to escape from a prison, how to go underground, camouflage, and things like that. So it's survival in the big city during the collapse 101.

Joe: Excellent. So check out Stefan Verstappen on YouTube, on his website chinastrategies.com and you're on Facebook as well so people can check you out there. Alright Stefan, thanks a million. It's great talking to you.

Stefan: Thanks for having me on.

Joe: Bye.

Niall: Thank you. Bye-bye.

Joe: Alright. Have you got anything else to say this week Niall?

Niall: I really enjoyed that.

Joe: It was good yeah. Stefan's a good speaker and he has a lot of very interesting stories. He has a good way of describing situations with analogies or stories. He's obviously done quite a bit of research into the historical cycles aspect of it.

Niall: Yeah, straight to the point.

Joe: Nobody knows what the future holds, but it ain't looking good.

Niall: Well neither does he. He's not saying "Here it's black and white".

Joe: No, but I think it answers...

Niall: But he's saying "Look at reality as it is now. Just look at it!"

Joe: Yeah. If you look at what's going on, things are changing. Things are in chaos. Talking about moving into the Age of Chaos, I think we're right in the middle of it, or towards the end of it.

Niall: Yeah, it's interesting that he was saying that he teaches classes and courses where he is, to people under the guise of, for example, an economic catastrophe hits the city and there's a three week food supply. But really what he has in mind is a natural disaster. Well those people saying back to him, "What are you talking about? We're not going to be without food for three weeks." Look at what's happening to the weather!

Joe: I know.

Niall: The snow in the US is melting heavily, but when you get six feet of snow in November in Buffalo and it doesn't melt and it stays and you get more feet on top of it - thirteen people died in that city in good times. They could be locked in and there'd be no food in or out for months. So those very scenarios are upon us, at least at a local level. They can happen region-wide soon.

Joe: It could expand out to region-wide and then that's when it gets hairy because so many more people are implicated. There's just a few items in the news caught my eye this week; one from today. There was a suicide bomber in east Afghanistan that killed at least 45 people at a volleyball match. But the actual blurb on the BBC news website was "Afghanistan Suicide Bomber Kills 45 People at Volleyball Match as Afghan MPs Approve Security Deals with NATO and the US." As NATO and the US are trying to broker security deals, i.e., who's going to militarily control your country by arms sales, etc., there just so happens to be a suicide bomber to remind these Afghan politicians who are meeting with their US and NATO counterparts.

Niall: For these psychos that's called rubber stamping a deal.

Joe: Yeah exactly.

Niall: Bastards.

Joe: I know. It jumped out of the page at me, you know. There's just a few other things. There's a Kenya bus attack where Al Kebab - sorry...

Niall: Al Shabab.

Joe: ...It should be called Al Kebab. Al Shabab is about as made up a name as Al Kebab. They singled out and killed 28 passengers who would not recite the Islamic creed, according to the Kenyan police. This is in Kenya. Stopped the bus, got people off the bus. Whoever couldn't recite some ridiculous Islamic creed were killed. That's such a ridiculous narrative as to what their motivation would be.

Niall: It's not the first time that's been allegedly used.

Joe: No.

Niall: Remember during the Nairobi mall bombings, they shot anyone who couldn't say, I don't know, "Allahu Akhbar".

Joe: But the point about this Kenya thing is - they're from Somalia, they're in Kenya. The point about that situation is that more and more when you look at it everything that goes on in the world in terms of terrorism and Islamic terrorism, is all about the US and its client states in the Middle East, or if it's not in the Middle East in particular, for example ISIS, if it's in Kenya and Africa with Islamic militant groups in then Maghreb in North Africa and other parts of Africa, Somalia and Kenya; all of it is about the US trying to prevent China and Russia from becoming dominant in the world and from calling an end to the Anglo-American empire. Because over the past few years China has been making major economic deals with Kenya and Somalia. Russia's been in there as well, but particularly China; oil deals with Somalia, major port deals in Kenya and a major railroad.

Niall: That's the difference.

Joe: Check this out: "The Chinese have officially begun construction on a $13.8 billion railway project that will connect the port of Mombasa" which is in Kenya "and the capital city of Nairobi and eventually, possibly even link Kenya's market with landlocked neighbors Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan." Africa is British right? It's "the white man's burden". They've put all this effort into supposedly helping Africa throughout the whole colonial empire, which is effectively with slavery and keeping it down. And now China's coming in. And look what China's doing. One of the first things that China does when it gets a real foothold into Africa, it starts building a railroad that the Kenyan government is ecstatic about because it's going to link Kenya and other African countries and do wonders for their economy. And it's something that should have happened years ago in Kenya, for example under British colonial rule, in the '40s or '50s or even beforehand in the late 1800s. But no, because the British were there for being settlers and exploiting and stealing and thieving.

Niall: They have no interest in building up the industrial capacities of their colonies.

Joe: Absolutely not. And China comes in and starts to do that, they're actually doing decent, reasonable deals with African countries, and the Brits and the Americans have a conniption, and what is the result? Islamic terrorism. They start putting pressure on the host country by launching and funding and training jihadi mercenaries to present themselves as angry Muslims who want to overthrow the Kenyan government. And that's just a proxy attack on the Kenyan government to put it back in line and to send a signal to say "These guys could overthrow you if you don't stop working with people we don't want you to work with. You have to stay in the gutter. You have to stay as a subservient Africa that you always were. And don't be doing deal with Russia and China."

Niall: Yeah.

Joe: But people have got to understand it when they see that stuff; that is really the overview. There's no point in getting into the details of trying to figure out the 'White Widow', that we did a show on, this white English girl who's supposedly an arch-terrorist who was at the Westgate terror attack; no point in trying to look too much into that. Just look at it from the overarching global perspective and you see that it's curtains for the Anglo-American empire and they feel it, even if they don't recognize it, they feel it. And their response to the end of their reign is to just go bonkers with Muslim terrorism, i.e., proxy mercenary, Muslim, whatever terrorist attacks on anybody that they feel threatened by.

Niall: Same week, the long talked about railway that would connect China with Europe officially opened. Now it's not quite there yet because the nature of the infrastructure is that any train leaving China would have to technically change three times because of the different sizes in tracks and so on. Nevertheless there is now a functioning railway system, linking Duisburg, Germany with Shanghai. I thought that was theory and maybe some time in the far away future, but they've quietly just been going ahead and doing these things in the background.

Joe: And it's great to see. Not that it means we're all going to live in Valhalla in the near future, under Chinese and Russian rule, but it's better than what we have right now.

Niall: We're geared to our caller Drew, who's rightfully excited by it because it is fast-tracking the end of this hell; where we hold back from singing Kumbaya and Hallelujah, is that we know what these psychos are capable of. And in the context of what today's show was about, you see the inevitability of historical cycles is that they close. The ultimate role, whether they realize it or not, of the psychopaths in power, may be to just call curtains on this current civilization.

Joe: By forcing it to a point where it's no longer sustainable. I want to check to see if we have a call on the line.

Harrison: Yeah, it's Harrison here.

Joe: Hey Harrison! You're late!

Harrison: Yeah.

Joe: You're not really late.

Niall: We know you. Hello.

Joe: We've heard of you before. Stefan just left, so that's why you're calling in now. Well do you have anything from your side of the world?

Harrison: I just wanted to bring up one thing that happened last week and it kind of ties in with Stefan's talk about the historical cycles. I think it's very symbolic - and not even symbolic but over the top, in your face - that on Friday Russia proposed a resolution at the UN the title of which was Combating Glorification of Nazism and Other Practices that Contribute to Fuelling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. And the only three countries to vote against this resolution were the United States, Canada and Ukraine. We've been talking on SOTT...

Joe: It's kind of funny, eh?

Harrison: ...about the fascist state that is the United States for years, but for them to do this in such a way, it just made my jaw drop. And when you actually read the resolution, it's all stuff talking about precedents and reaffirming different resolutions and conventions that already exist. I'll just read two examples of the language. So the resolution is: "alarmed in this regard at the spread in many parts of the world of various extremist political parties, movements and groups, including neo-Nazis and skinhead groups as well as similar extremist ideological movements. It is deeply concerned by all recent manifestations of violence and terrorism incited by violent nationalism, racism, xenophobia and related intolerance." And it goes on like that.

So the idea that the United States and Canada - it's obvious Kiev would veto this thing or vote against it - the idea that they would vote against this? I can't even believe it. It's standard language. You'd think that they'd just go along with it because in Europe at least and all the European countries that abstained from the vote, there's all the anti-revisionism laws and things like that. So you'd think that they'd get onboard with this. But no, it's because Russia proposed it.

Joe: Oh, because Russia proposed it. So obviously there's an implication there in what it's really about, which is about Ukraine, so that's why all of Europe abstained, which is more or less the same as agreeing with it when you abstain against something as clear-cut as that...

Harrison: Exactly.

Joe: ...you're on the wrong side of the moral fence right there.

Niall: Who's appeasing Nazis now?

Joe: And to vote against it in the US says it all. But that's obviously just silly political games. But don't they have that vote every year in the UN? Or pass that resolution or pass that to reaffirm from a historical Nazi perspective every year. If they do it every year, I wonder what the historical voting pattern is. Maybe the US has always voted against it.

Harrison: I'll check that out and let people know.

Joe: But definitely it's a sign of the times, yeah. If that isn't an accurate reflection of the world we live in, run by the pre-eminent power in the world is a supporter of fascism and Nazism. Alright. Well anything else?

Harrison: Well, just at the same time that's happening, the right sector and all the fascist groups in Ukraine are real Nazis. Poroshenko's awarding the battalion leader of the Azov Battalion - kind of like a medal for the battle for honor of courage or something like that. So they're actually honoring these Nazi fighters and the US is totally supporting them, and then at the same time the US has said they're going to continue supporting the so-called moderate rebels in Syria, when we know that these moderate rebels are not moderate and they never have been. They're just as bad as ISIS and in fact they are often at times the exact same thing as ISIS. So it's just frustrating to be able to see that the US is openly supporting these vicious psychopathic murderous groups, just barbaric, and then they vote against resolutions that basically says Nazism is bad.

Joe: Yeah, at least they're being honest about it. They've always been that way about Nazism and fascism and murderers and killers. That is the US's and has been the US's bread and butter for decades. But at least now it's kind of refreshing to see them being a bit more transparent about it. Thanks for the call Harrison.

Harrison: Oh thank you.

Joe: And for the update. Talk to you later.

Harrison: Okay. Bye-bye.

Niall: Bye.

Joe: We're going to leave it there for this week folks. We've run over our official time, but time doesn't exist.

Niall: Next week...

Joe: But next week we will be talking to?

Niall: William Patrick Patterson.

Joe: Is back for a second interview, or rather part two of the interview we did with him several months ago.

Niall: Yeah, sometime early summer.

Joe: August or July. So that was a good interview. It was an interesting interview and it was really William that wanted to come back on and finish what he had started. It seems that he has more to say, more secrets to reveal and they will be revealed here on SOTT Talk Radio, next Sunday at the same time. So,

Niall: Until then.

Joe: Yeah, have a good one and thanks to our listeners and our callers and our chatters and everybody else who needs to be thanked.

Niall: Thank you and bye-bye.

Joe: See you next week.