John Waters, the Irish writer, commentator, and essayist, truly has no “filters.” He does not hesitate, does not compromise, and writes and thinks without concessions. His views on modern culture and the Orwellian reality we live in have made him a dissident even outside the Ireland where he resides. Condemned by the political establishment, Waters is beloved among the people,
You are known as someone who will not be satisfied with the more attractive side of reality and easy questions. Your insights are deep and revealing. Is this the only path to the truth?
I think the point is that, in what is called ‘modern’ culture, the truth tends to be obscured and distorted behind ideological constructs which suggest themselves as easy options, ‘feelgood’ options, ‘compassion as against intolerance, tolerance as against bigotry, et cetera. Usually, when you look deeper, you find that what is happening is that at least one part of the truth is being warped out of recognition, and therefor needs to be ‘rescued’ and ‘restored’ before the necessary questions can be explored. But there is also a constructed laziness in our culture, which makes people desire simplicity and easy answers, so they react against any attempt to present things correctly and accurately. For example, when people talk about the ‘gender pay gap’, they are speaking of a distorted reality which obscures the fact that men work longer and more unsocial hours, do more overtime and weekend work, et cetera, so that the differential in overall remuneration has a perfectly reasonable explanation. But if you try to explore this, people go crazy. If you ask people when was the last time they saw a newspaper advert for a job which offered two different salaries — one for men, another for women — they will never give you an answer; they will just scream and shout and call you names. It would be easy to go along with this disturbed culture, for a quiet life, but I just do not have the necessary disposition to be satisfied with doing this.
The arrest of the Telegram owner, the closure of the German newspaper Compact, and the suppression of protests in Britain raise the question of whether democracy still exists in the West. To what extent does contemporary Europe value freedom of speech?
I think democracy ended in the West more or less at the time the Berlin Wall came down, There is a very interesting essay (in German) by the German philosopher, Michael Esfeld, called Die Illusion der res publica, in which he makes this case very brilliantly. The core of it is the idea that Western freedom, as well as our democracies and constitutional republics, existed purely to present a strong contrast with Soviet communism, which was tyrannical. This was the Western countries’ way of distinguishing themselves from the bad guys behind the Iron Curtain! But really, our leaders always looked enviously at the tyrants whom publicly they anathematized, and so, as soon as communism ended, the West started to become tyrannical — slowly and subtly at first, but with increasing venom and determination. Now the gloves are off and the mask has been abandoned. Western politicians have always hated free speech. They envied people like Stalin, who did not have to put up with constant criticism. Now they are living the dream!
Have alternative media outlets managed to counter the indoctrination by mainstream media—does this inspire hope that not everything is lost?
Yes, it is very important that a voice of protest be maintained. This is critical to the avoidance of immense inhumanity and cruelty. We in the West need to drop our illusions, based on decades of complacency gifted us courtesy of Soviet tyranny, which led us to believe that our leaders were incapable of doing bad things. This is the vital role being played by the alternative media. Another is to expose, in as far as is possible, the pseudo-reality being constructed by the purchased and corrupted mainstream media, which now exists only to turn the world into lies. We are as the boy who sees that the emperor is naked, and must continue to say so, no matter what lies are told about us. If we ever stop speaking, the tyranny will begin in earnest.
What will determine the outcome of the war in Ukraine—does it affect the kind of world we will wake up to?
Only the defeat of the Democratic Party of the United States will save the world from a terrible war. The war in Ukraine is essentially being managed by them, with some help from several European puppet states. This was is not rally about the things we are told it is about — the right of Ukraine to decide if it will join NATO, the people of the Donbass, the red lines laid down by the various sides and factions. Really, it is about creating a war — and any war of the same scale would do the same job — which will keep the world on tenterhooks, because this is essential for the form of totalitarianism that is being ushered in. By maintaining populations in constant fear, divided ideologically and self-righteously angry about people who do not accept the dominant narrative, i.e., the pseudo-reality. The chief instruments of this strategy of subjugation is pandemics, war and climate change. By switching back and forth between these instruments, the nouveau tyrants of the 21st century have resolved to control their populations in a way that does not depend on ideology or democracy, but purely on propaganda and fear pornography. This is an entirely different culture to the one I grew up in, in Ireland in the second half of the 20th century. It is a dystopian world, which we had imagined existed only in faraway countries and in the books of George Orwell.
You have spoken about how global political powers have contributed to a “war against humanity.” Could you explain how you see the role of biological weapons in this broader context and how you believe they might be used for population control or achieving political goals?
The most lethal aspect of these biological weapons ois not the direct harm they do by spreading viruses or whatever, but because, in the hands of a totalitarian regime, they enable the creation of ‘instant diseases’, which can be used to invoke the ‘common good’, which immediately renders entire populations coercively amenable to tyranny. This is actually far more ominous than any virus could possible be, because it renders forfeit the rights and freedoms on which humanity has come to rely and depend. These instruments in the hands of psychopathic leaders enable them to close down the space in which Western humanity has lived and breathed until recently. They have the power to turn our countries into open-air prisons, and indeed have already achieved this, during the Covid episode.
In one of your interviews, you discussed how global elites pursue political agendas under the guise of “humanitarian goals.” How do you think biological weapons and pandemics might be used as tools to further extend control over populations and restrict freedoms?
The mainspring of this instrument of tyranny is the invocation of the ‘common good’, which sounds like a very positive and benign phenomenon, but in reality, is a tyrannical and quite artificial state of enforced solidarity that is used not only to bear down on the individual, but to encourage each individual to police all the others. It is as if the condition of imprisonment and enslavement is being leveraged in order to induce people to drag each other down to the same level of debasement and obedience. But, all the while this is presented as a positive and well-intentioned phenomenon, and anyone who disagrees as an enemy of the community. These are very powerful messages, which can easily be conveyed and transmitted using corrupted media, and advanced techniques of behavioural psychology. Unless the human race can find a way of getting in front of these trends and turning them around, the future is very beak indeed, for human existence will essentially become a kind of prison, in which the ‘bars’ and ‘walls’ will be seemingly mere abstractions and technical devices but will be at least as restrictive as real iron bars and real stone.
