Neil Oliver Describes a Life of Pretending in a Potemkin Village

I like Neil Oliver a lot. I like his perspective, his deliberate nature, his refusal to accept the bullshit, and this monologue is one of the reasons why.  I have said it before that in the era of great pretending, the influential people will be those who do not play the game of pretense.  Neil Oliver is one of those people who refuses to play.

In this monologue Oliver uses two of my favorite metaphors to describe modern western civilization.  First, the Potemkin Villages constructed by political elite in their effort to make it seem like the world is something it is not. Second, the great pretending that is needed in order to sell it.

Though the monologue is specific to the current status of our cousin across the pond, the eloquence of the issues could just as easily apply here; indeed, they are almost identical.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – While reading around the subject of Russia and Ukraine this week, I came across the story of the Potemkin villages.

A legend, dismissed as mostly fiction by modern historians, has 18th century Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin building phoney villages along the banks of the Dnipro River just for effect, to create a useful illusion.

His lover, Catherine the Great and her foreign guests, were due to sail down the river on a tour and Potemkin, the story goes, wanted to give them an impressive show of a populous and thriving nation.

As I say, the idea is largely dismissed now – but the term Potemkin village has stuck and is still used today to describe the lengths to which the leaders of a failing, broken country might go in order to create the illusion of success and prosperity when the truth is altogether different.

I read about the idea, and it occurs to me that here in Britain now we are actually living in a Potemkin village – invited by our leaders to populate a phoney façade and pretend … or, God help us, actually believe, as if everything is fine.

But nothing is fine. The fact is, the story they’re telling us about this country of ours is almost entirely a con trick – persuasive only if you don’t look too closely at the flimsy, plasterboard truth of their creation.

When it came to Potemkin villages – real or a myth – it was only outsiders who were to be fooled. They were just passing through, after all.

The crucial difference for us Brits is that the fakery all around us is not supposed to trick the tourists. It’s most important function is to try and convince us, the tax-paying citizens, that all is well, when it most emphatically is not.

Look at this poor old place and wonder at how much fakery has been erected.

And remember, all the time, that we are also taxed right up the wazoo for our continued occupation of the shoddy reality some of us see around us.

There’s so much wrong it’s hard to know where to begin.

Year after year we hemorrhage more and more cash into a National Health Service that isn’t – which is to say it isn’t a national health service.

Free at the point of delivery is all very well, but it means nothing if you can’t get yourself to that point of delivery while you’ve still got a pulse.

Quite simply, the sacred-cow-cum-white-elephant that is, or has been, the NHS, is demonstrably incapable of doing the job intended for it.

Infuriatingly, politicians of every stripe, insist on calling it “our” NHS, as though it were a beloved family member. But it’s not. That use of “our” is simply to deter us from ever criticizing it

Waiting lists grow ever longer. Sick and injured people wait in agony and desperation for ambulances that don’t come – or not for many hours. We are actually told not to bother the NHS, to do all we can to avoid needing the service we pay for.

And so trusting people obey, suffering in silence in their homes, not reporting their health concerns to their GPs – the lumps, the stubborn coughs, the blood. Putting off the call for help that might save their lives – until it’s too late.

But the NHS is only one part – admittedly a hugely expensive part – of this land of make believe.

We are no longer policed by consent. Rather the police force and it is a force now, in lieu of a service, has been bent around political or ideological will. Some protest groups are deemed good – Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, Black Lives Matter and fed tea and biscuits while they block the roads and smash windows, protected from any and all opposing views.

Others espousing opinions that fly in the face of the latest ideological kink or political dikta protests about so-called vaccines, or about lockdown or illegal immigration, often prompt the unleashing of the men on horseback, the riot shields.

Mountains of data reveal that the products marketed as vaccines are no such thing. They don’t stop infection. They don’t stop transmission. They don’t stop an infected person getting sick. They don’t keep an infected person out of hospital. And they don’t stop an infected person dying.

By any measure those products, released under emergency use authorization and demonstrably the cause of countless deaths and injuries, are, at best, a façade, a front, an optical illusion intended to make the masses move in the direction desired by the leaders.

Whatever way you cut it, those products don’t work as advertised and yet still the advertising-slash-propaganda campaigns are up and running – right now, this very minute – pushing needles into as many arms as possible, including those of healthy 6-month-old babies.

Talking heads still trumpet the nonsense that the vaccine roll-out was an unqualified success. Stuffed shirts that stood at the forefront of the pandemic, pushing the medical products, pushing the lockdowns, pushing the face masks, were honoured for their efforts then and remain honoured now, even as the data makes it increasingly plain – to me at least – that what was inflicted upon our population was an unforgivable wrong. Fake knights of the realm for our Potemkin village.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, elected by none of us and therefore a fake PM, has promised to halt the flow of illegal migrants onto British shores. But I say he will do no such thing. In fact, I say he doesn’t even have any intention of stopping that flow. Any and every British government promises to protect our borders. This is now a fake promise with nothing behind it.

Our landscapes are littered with wind turbines and yet millions can barely afford to heat their homes because one way or another, we aren’t allowed access to the most obvious and reliable sources of energy. Drax power station used to burn coal.

Now it burns wood pellets obtained by cutting down ancient forests in Canada that campaigners there say are vital for fighting climate change. By banning coal and burning ancient forests, Drax is considered Green and so, in recent years, has received 6 billion pounds in government subsidies. Drax now emits more greenhouse gases than when it burned coal.

Drax might be held up as the epitome of the fakery of the mis-named Green agenda.

The Green agenda is not about Green, rather it is about Greed. There’s even fake meat, and fake milk, and fake cheese and scores of other fake food products besides. What else would you serve in a Potemkin village, after all, but fake food?

As we speak, they are ramping up the same old fear about Covid – that illness with the threat risk now, to most, of the common cold – the same determination to ignore everything we’ve learned over the last three years.

Actors on stage wear masks wear, and so must we.

While more and more of the population wakes up to the lies, obfuscation, fear-porn and propaganda around the so-called vaccines, around the Green agenda, around gender politics and race politics. The majority of the news media obediently pumps out the same old tosh about “safe and effective” and “climate crisis” and “preferred pronouns” and race baiting.

But the fakery has been swiftly and shoddily constructed, without the foundation of truth. For that reason, this Potemkin village thrown up around us is flimsy and should be easily demolished, if we wish it so. Underneath it all, too quiet for too long, we know the truth of Britain. More of us comprehend every day. That beyond a shadow of a doubt our leaders have tried to hoodwink us into believing things that are simply not true. The ultimate Potemkin village is all lies, no truth.

The eye-wateringly expensive NHS, costs rising years on year, is no longer a health service for all in any way that matters. I say the Green agenda is a fraud, as is the climate crisis that underpins it.

The assertions that little boys can grow up to be women and that little girls can grow up to be men, are lies. That our government means to protect our borders is a fiction.

A parliament in which over-mighty, colluding, indistinguishable political parties, dictate the law to the people whether those people like or not, is a shameful setting aside of the sovereignty of we, the people of this country.

Parliament is not and was never meant to be sovereign. We, the people, are sovereign. This is the foundation stone of Magna Carta, sealed in 1215 and as unshakeably solid now as it was then. Any attempt to reduce the rights, freedoms and liberties enshrined in that Treaty are, by definition, beyond the power of any parliament.

Here’s the thing: our sovereignty as people was sealed by that Treaty of 1215. Parliaments have come and tried to ride roughshod over the people, again and again, and those parliaments have gone.

One of many attempts to repeal Magna Carta was even made in 1969 while the general public were conveniently distracted by the moon landings.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we see them. We see the fakery they have raised around us. But our rights are real.

Our belief in Britain is real.

Isn’t it time to see past the shaky stage set thrown up around us as a distraction and take shelter instead in true Britain – real Britain? {Transcript]