The Purpose and Nature of our Struggle
By Kevin D. Annett
Whoever grasps and holds onto the essential energy (shih) of a situation will control the outcome of any battle and the fate of any opponent, no matter how powerful they are. – Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Men always begin revolutions with their eyes fixed on the past. – Frederich Engels
What is nothing has been chosen to bring to nothing all the things that are. – 1 Corinthians 1:28
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Imagine for a moment the present global tyranny not simply as a visible system of corporatism, violence and corruption, but as a vast energy transfer, sucking the wealth, vitality and life from billions of people and the biosphere itself into one massive machine. Call that machine whatever you like; its nature and behavior is geared towards a single purpose, and that is the absorption of life into itself. It is one enormous feeder, and we are its morsels.
To first understand this simple truth equips us inwardly to stop this insatiable complex and our participation in it, far better than can mere political analysis. But understanding alone does not free us to act.
All interactions in our universe involve an essential energy that guides the movement of every particle, and determines every outcome. Sun Tzu called this energy “shih”; Plato saw it as a pre-existing essence behind the mask of appearances. Some like to call it God. Regardless of its nomenclature, this Source that binds our reality is like a mighty river that can either sweep us along helplessly, or be utilized by us to alter reality. Every ruler understands this simple fact, even while the rest of us have been trained not to grasp it, and thereby are kept eyeless in a harness held by a few.
Those who understand and utilize this “shih” are able to control the thoughts and actions of the multitudes of humanity only as long as the latter are devoid of their own access to shih. The primary means of stripping humanity of attaining its normally inherent shih power is by using fear and trauma based conditioning at a very young age to cause people to habitually surrender and defer at every level to some “higher” external power, and thereby transfer their own particle of shih to that power.
Such an unending energy transfer from the many to the few is the basis of all elite rule in our world. And yet such a system is inherently unstable, since following Natural Law, the nature of shih as with any energy system is to disseminate equally and be held in common, and not privately: a fact that invalidates as contrary to the natural order all individual rule, whether by kings, presidents, popes or corporate oligarchies.
We know from our own experience that the loss of shih from the many to the few is not simply unnatural and disharmonious; it is so constant and systemic that it cannot be resisted by individual effort alone, since our individuality has been conditioned to operate habitually rather than consciously. We think like we eat – automatically – and therefore without shih. For instance, when faced with political repression by the government, our first reflex is to surrender our shih once again to them by “pressuring” them to give us justice through ritualized protest and petitioning, relying on their courts and government.
We do not seem capable of shifting our attention away from the existing “authorities” simply because we have no working experience of self-government: of what our own shih actually is. And thus like any lost child, we cannot try to change our world without continually deferring to the “powers that be”, whether that be a sympathetic judge, or a “progressive” politician, or even a spiritual adviser. Our imprinted slavery makes it impossible for us to collectively reclaim ourselves, and our world.
Erasing a conditioned imprint may begin within the individual, but it is not manifested individualistically; for collectivity is the nature of universal shih, which binds all phenomena in a “mutual garment of destiny and interconnectedness”.
In any successful revolution, the personal awakening of individuals inexorably causes a collective ripple effect in many other hearts and minds that generates a new kind of “group shih”: one that is unalterably opposed to the shih of the rulers. This new energy system is a living and working counter-culture that draws energy and power away from the rulers and their system, and returns it to the multitude of people, provided the latter can hold onto it as a group by retaining their own new and separate identity.
The very nature and purpose of our struggle today is to achieve precisely such a new energy transfer, and allow all of humanity to reclaim their natural shih and the collective liberty that it bestows. This purpose must continually guide our thoughts, words and deeds.
Applying Shih Knowledge to our Present Situation
The Chinese general Sun Tzu, writing thousands of years ago, had the best practical understanding of how such an awareness of the essential energy behind reality can and must be used in concrete struggles, especially in war and politics. “Nothing is permanent in life except conflict and change” he wrote in his Art of War. “One either masters the shih of one’s opponent or is mastered by it.”
If we set aside our western philosophical bias that dualistically separates matter from spirit, we recognize that Sun Tzu is accurately describing the dance that occurs in any conflict with an adversary. As he writes,
“Enemies, like all opposites, are mutually dependent on one another, being part of a greater unity and purpose. Thus, enemies are defeated not by their destruction but by their absorption into that greater whole.”
In short, we can win any engagement not by outnumbering or crushing an opponent, but by re-directing his own essential energy into the outcome we desire. This fact is of obvious relevance to us, since as a small movement we face what appears to be overwhelming odds.
A classic example of how a small force can triumph over a huge adversary is found from our own campaign in Canada to indict church and state for Genocide. That campaign, consisting of a few dozen of us in three cities, successfully forced Canada and its churches to respond on our terms by admitting their crime and helping to commence their own dissolution. For by acceding to the new reality we had presented, the old matrix called “Christian Canada” surrendered to us its shih by responding on our terms. This surrender helped to energize our agenda of disestablishing Crown and Church: a process that is continuing now to unfold. This new power alignment is crumbling Canada and laying the basis for a new shih arrangement that we call the Republic of Kanata.
What achieved this victory were not our numbers but our strategic position, our visible persistence, and our ability to out maneuver and re-direct the shih of the system, armed as we were with an undeniable truth and evidence that kept both church and state constantly fearful and on the defensive.
Similarly but even more stunning is the other, greater victory that flowed from this first one: namely, the blow against the Vatican in Rome, and our historic deposing of Pope Benedict in February 2013 by our public conviction of him and other top catholic officials for the same genocide.
This successful mastering by us of a hugely more powerful opponent’s shih happened because our small movement deliberately used a strategy of guerrilla warfare, which is summed up by Sun Tzu thus:
First, when I am few and my enemy is many, I can use the few to strike the many because those whom I battle are restricted, being larger and more unwieldy. Their strength thereby becomes their weakness.
Second, do not respond to the ground your enemy has prepared for you, but instead, shape their ground. Then they have no alternative but to be led by you, as if it was their own idea.
Third, hide the time of battle from an enemy, and make what he loves and defends your first objective. By aiming at and seizing what the enemy holds dear, their greater strength and plans are rendered useless, and they must stop and respond on your terms, no matter how small are your forces.
Thus, on March 17, 2008 during Palm Sunday services, two of our action groups occupied without warning the largest catholic cathedrals in Vancouver and Toronto, making headlines across Canada with our demand that the genocidal churches be prosecuted and forced to return the remains of the Indian children they killed. We also announced that we were commencing an international court action to charge Canada with genocide.
Less than a month later, the government announced for the first time an “inquiry” into the missing residential school children. This led directly to the official Parliamentary “apology” just three months later, in July 2008, and the subsequent official admission by Ottawa that genocide did indeed occur in Canada at the cost of thousands of dead children.
By striking unexpectedly at the Achilles’ heel of the main instigator of genocide – behind its own lines, amidst its most “sacred” ritual – we not only shocked and frightened the enemy but created the field of battle and forced our opponent in its fear to respond on our terms. Since then, no-one in Canada has dared anymore to deny that children were killed in the residential schools, and that it was indeed genocide. In this way, just a few of us reshaped the national narrative; or, in Sun Tzu’s words, we mastered the shih of an enormous adversary and re-directed it on our terms.
Similarly, the shock wave that deposed Pope Benedict has continued to spread, forcing four other resignations by top Vatican officers named in our common law court indictments, and compelling an enormous and desperate public relations effort by the present “pope” to shore up Rome’s collapsing credibility. What is this but living proof of the ability of a small force to absorb the shih of the biggest and oldest enemy imaginable: the Vatican Incorporated?
Compare these stunning victories by a handful of people with the negligible results of many thousands of protestors standing outside government buildings and waving placards, and thereby surrendering their collective shih to their adversary. For the unstated message of any group of protestors to some external power is clearly this: “We acknowledge your authority; you have the power, not us. All we ask is that you change things for us.” This is not change on the terms of the people, but accommodation to elite rule, regardless of the outcome.
Such impotence called protest, like voting or “going through the courts”, is in truth the clearest example of the energy-sucking nature of the machine that relies on such controlled “opposition” to feed its own shih.
In reality, no such diminishing of peoples’ own shih is ever required for change to occur. For the ability for any sized group to capture the shih of the government and any corporate regime has been proven in practice. In energetic terms, this constitutes a reclaiming of power in order to re-balance shih, whose nature is to disseminate and be shared equally. This approach is the only sure means of changing the nature of power, and thereby bringing down tyranny. And yet as we noted, understanding this truth does not automatically make it happen, for the simple fact that we are all a part of what it is we oppose.
The Symbiotic Nature of Shih
It is often remarked – usually as a justification for not getting involved in a radical movement – that “All revolutions just end up replacing one tyrant with another”. From a distance, history seems to bear this out.
The moments where masses of people shake off their chains and govern themselves directly and consciously seem to be episodic and brief; most of the time, the “masses” appear to be like a passive herd led around by some elite or another. But this appearance is in fact illusory; people’s acquiescence to a regime is not the same thing as them actively supporting it. People will act to change things only when they can see and feel that there exists a working alternative to the status quo: that is, only when they are able to recognize and establish a new collective shih. But why does this not seem to happen very often? What is the bulwark that holds people back?
These questions can only be answered in practice by knowing first the symbiotic and interdependent nature of all power and its shih.
Just as darkness and light depend on one another and are aspects of the same phenomenon, so too are opponents in any war or political change. Even the Biblical “war in heaven” was fought between two types of angels, Lucifer in fact meaning a “being of light”. Any struggle is ultimately a dance between the same entity wearing different masks. Just as shih, like water, always seeks the lowest and most common ground, so does any conflict: conscious or not, both sides search for a new symbiosis by which both can survive and prosper.
For this reason, it is impossible for any group of citizens to establish a new society within the framework and institutions of the old regime, since all of their thoughts and hopes are conditioned by it. As Frederich Engels observed so accurately following the aborted European insurrections of 1848, “Men always begin revolutions with their eyes fixed on the past.” And the Italian rebel Giuseppe Garibaldi, who briefly overturned the papacy in 1870, wrote, “One cannot secure the support of the people by calling for an overthrow of society, but instead by assuring them that their security will be preserved by the changes we envision.”
Not surprisingly, such “pragmatic”, backward-looking approaches of power-seeking rebels created no new society, and in fact ended up duplicating the regimes they fought. Nineteenth century European radicals had not read Sun Tzu; nor, for that matter, have most of today’s erstwhile rebels.
To establish a new collective shih, we must not resist or combat the old regime but absorb its own shih, as we did with Canada and the Vatican. And yet in practice, old habits of thought and deference prevent even the best of us from doing so consistently on our own.
I continually experience this within all of the groups I work with. While holding to the vision of a new independent Republic based on common law, our best people will still insist on going into the lawless “crown” or de facto courts to remedy the latest injustice done against them. They cannot simply turn away from the old regime. Their psychological and energetic dependence on what is familiar runs far deeper within them than they understand, because one’s position within the collective symbiosis is largely invisible to the untrained mind. In short, we are all part of a bigger and hidden “group mind” – the Bible calls it our Angel – that can only be nullified by another collective.
What this means in practice is that, regardless of anyone’s degree of personal “awareness”, everyone seems to be waiting in trepidation for something or someone else to make the final break and bring in a new regime. Until then, people tend to accommodate, and worry about how to “protect” themselves and others within the present system. It is therefore hardly surprising that our membership within the Republic and common law movement has remained largely a passive one, with their eyes and feet mired in the past, waiting for someone else’s leadership.
The only remedy for this immobility is provided collectively through the creation of another group identity and system into which we can draw people out of the status quo; and, by that moment when a critical mass is reached and not only consciousness but the capacity to act differently emerges among many people. This emergence is always unpredictable, but when it occurs, a huge shift across society happens almost overnight, as history amply demonstrates. And then the new shih alignment can become an actuality.
In many ways, all that we do today is a preparation for the opportunities created by the moment in time, that upcoming window of action, when a new and free society can come into being from the ground up. To quote Sun Tzu again,
Operations must always be geared to the rapid seizure and exploitation of the key moment of opportunity created in battle, which can never be predicted. The prime purpose of operational commanders is to recognize and act decisively upon such fleeting moments.
The operational commanders, in our case, are the on-the-ground local organizers whose job it is to build the movement in their communities by empowering wider numbers with the idea and reality that they can govern themselves according to a new and higher law, completely separate from the existing institutions. To use an example from American history, local militia across New England were closing down crown courts, burning mortgage deeds and defending the people and their land against British troops, long before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. And only such an already conscious and active populace could have made the Revolution.
In that regard, our convening of the Peoples’ Assemblies is an expression of this long struggle to establish a new collective shih, because it puts flesh on the idea that fundamental change lies only in our own hands.
The Peoples’ Assemblies
The Revolution may have been affected first in the hearts and minds of the People, but it took shape in our Constitutional Conventions, where the People learned how to hold and wield power for themselves. – John Adams, 1791
The Commons of England assembled in Parliament declare that the people under God are the origin of all just power, and have the supreme authority of the nation. Whatsoever is enacted and declared law by the Commons alone has the force of law, and all the people are included thereby, with or without the consent of the king. – An Act to Establish the High Court of Justice, House of Commons, London, January 4, 1649
Under this Proclamation, all lawful authority now resides in the People gathered in an elected Congress and other governmental bodies established by the People under Common Law. – A Public Proclamation abolishing Crown Authority in Canada, January 15, 2015
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Our course of action is clear if the words above become part of our very thought and fiber, and gather those of us so united by this vision into permanent legislative Assemblies where we covenant to establish a new form of law and government. Such an action, replicated in many communities across Kanata and the world, will constitute the real emergence of our Republic as it sets down its roots among the people. And then the real battle will begin.
Let us be very clear that by creating such a new authority alongside the old one – by drawing the shih of the old regime into our own sphere – we are entering into a state of civil war, both politically and spiritually. We are drawing a line and separating ourselves unalterably from the past by actively disestablishing the thing called Canada and crown law. The firmer our resolve and the more people we draw into our new Republic, the more peaceful will be this transition.
We can only undertake this monumental step collectively, through a new legal and political framework embodied in the Peoples’ Assemblies; for as legislative bodies, it is the Assemblies that can lawfully establish the Republican common law courts and create the laws that are the skeleton of our new society.
The People are the source of all law, government and sovereign authority. This foundational Republican principle means that any group of people who covenant together under an Oath can formulate, debate and pass laws which are binding on themselves and are enforceable, and subject to no other authority except that to which they agree. The Peoples’ Assemblies, once lawfully convened, are therefore wholly legitimate legislatures that are part of a new Republic. And one of the essential tasks of the Assemblies is to not only establish such a new local jurisdiction and shih, but to elect delegates to a national Congress of the Republic.
People, especially Canadians, have to relearn freedom by beginning to actually practice it, and reclaiming their own shih autonomy. The Assemblies provide a sure way for them to do so, as matters of community concern are discussed and resolved directly by the People in what are practical schools in self-government. When people feel the power of taking all matters into their own hands, and passing and enforcing laws in their own name, the Republic will become real as the old regime crumbles.
Conclusions
We began by observing how the present global tyranny is an energy sucking parasite whose ultimate consequence will be the eradication of life as we know it on mother earth. Our purpose, of shattering that entity and restoring natural law and life to our world, cannot be achieved without recognizing and winning back the essential energy that is drained from us through our participation in this global machinery of death. Our every thought and action must therefore be geared towards regaining this shih energy by establishing new courts, assemblies and communities utterly separate from the old institutions, to allow people to leave them once and for all.
Those of you readers who will be “more than hearers of the word, but doers as well”, are like a sharp point of a spear constantly poised for battle. You will create the first wedge through which many others will follow, provided that you remain sharp, clear and consistent. Because you will form the blueprint of a new society, what you do today and tomorrow is of sacred importance for the future of our people. If you waver or backslide, there will be no such future.
“For you have been set apart to bind the kings of the earth, and bring to judgement the nobles, and to bring to nothing their pride and power. This is the task given to the righteous remnant, so that all may know the truth and stand within the justice of God” – Psalm 149, and cited at the trial of King Charles by the High Court of Justice of the People in Parliament, January 1649
August 15, 2015