Lyn Hurst

BREAKING: Coup d'état allegations have erupted in Poland after the head of the country's top constitutional court was suspended, plunging the country into a political crisis. The court condemned the move as a "coup d'état," while Prime Minister Donald Tusk fired back that his government is "restoring the rule of law." Police moved on the court as part of the alleged "coup" as crowds gathered outside in protest. The showdown became serious enough that Poland's president turned his plane around mid-flight, canceled a trip to Africa and rushed home. See what set off the political firestorm: foxnews.com/world/polish-pre…

Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century. Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions. Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935. 1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first. 2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another. 3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own. 4. He also theorized the organic intellectual – the person who translates the theoretical framework into stories and assumptions that circulate through the culture without appearing ideological. The film that makes the existing order seem absurd. The journalist who frames every story within the approved assumptions. Gramsci understood that culture is politics by other means – and that the side that controls the culture wins, regardless of who wins the elections. 5. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a published, documented, widely taught strategy that the left implemented consciously across the entire Western world. The 1968 generation put it into practice in the universities. They became the professors, the journalists, the civil servants, the judges, the HR directors of the decades that followed. The march took fifty years. It worked. 6. Mussolini’s prosecutor said at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." The brain did not stop. It produced thirty-three notebooks – smuggled out, published, and became the most widely read Marxist text in the Western academy after Marx himself. Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release, at forty-six. He did not see the march he theorized. He did not need to. 7. Every captured institution, every transformed curriculum, every HR department enforcing approved speech, every content moderation policy suppressing the unauthorized voice – all running the program Antonio Gramsci designed in a prison cell, by a brain that was supposed to have been stopped. It wasn’t. And neither was the march. Until now – because the distribution monopoly that made its outcomes enforceable is cracking. The counter-march has begun. It just doesn’t have a name yet.

It’s probably worth saying at this point something I’ve said before, lest it gets lost in the sands of time and political rhetoric about immigration and illegal entry, and how we got to this point. I was an immigration officer in the 1970s and 1980s. The power to grant or refuse leave to enter was vested to me in law under the authority of a Chief Immigration Officer. Anyone arriving without a valid passport (and a visa if required) was refused entry at the border, detained, and removed on the next available ship or aircraft whence they came. This was under the Immigration Act 1971 (still In force although amended massively by successive governments ever since). It was some 20 - 30 years after the 1951 ECHR and the 1951 Refugee Convention was signed. Nobody claimed asylum. Nobody claimed human rights. No country refused to take people back. Those who had destroyed their passports were removed on a letter, signed by me. Fast forward 50 years and now anyone who arrives at the border without a passport or a visa automatically claims asylum or human rights. Immigration Officers of today (or Border Force Officers) are thereby disempowered to send them back before their asylum claims or human rights claims are considered. And their appeals are dismissed. They cannot be detained in the meantime because under the Hardial Singh principles immigration detention is only lawful if there is a realistic prospect of removal within a reasonable period of time. Which there isn’t of course. So the only option available to the officer is to grant temporary permission whilst these applications are considered. And if the applicant claims to be destitute they must be given support and accommodation at public expense. Because failure to do so would put the government in breach of A3 of the ECHR (inhuman and degrading treatment). And even if the applicant is eventually refused protection - and loses their appeal - we need to get a passport to remove them on. And they often refuse to comply with the documentation process. Even if they do many countries still refuse to issue them with a passport and refuse to take them back. And even after all this they can abscond and if ever caught start the whole process again. This is where we are and so far no government has been able to break the Gordian knot that ties the hands of our officers. In order to do that they would have to reverse decades of laws and judgements - and demur from long held well intentioned international conventions. And probably look at the British Constitution itself to curtail the opportunity of political opponents to use the courts to thwart the will of Parliament. This is not to criticise or favour any political party or policy. It is simply a matter of record to inform the next generation of politicians and the civil servants charged with the duty of implementing any new laws or policies they may introduce. And to ask why - if we did it back in my day - why can’t we do it now? I even wrote a book about it. I hope someone keeps a copy for posterity - or even history - when thinking about how to fix this seemingly intractable problem. amzn.eu/d/06wM4s2h