Is material progress an illusion? Is the modern world a sham? And is AI exponentially intensifying the ersatz nature of modernity? Paul Cudenec, a notable voice of the freedom movement during the COVID lockdowns, discusses these and other questions, including “illegal” ones involving the Rothschild banking dynasty and Zionism.

Excerpts:

Modernity, AI

Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Audiovisual. Kevin Barrett here, doing podcasts of one sort or another since 2006, when I got expelled from the academy for wrongthink, I guess it was. So I’ve been doing wrongthink ever since.

And here to do some wrong thinking with me is Paul Cudenec. He’s a notable dissident from the UK, and he’s got a Substack which is highly recommended. He contributes to publications like Winter Oak and Organic Radicals, which I just discovered. It’s all very cool stuff and harks back to my deep history as a kind of left-leaning, anarchist-leaning troglodyte Luddite, thinking that the modern world and progress and all of that stuff is not so great. So I think we’re pretty much on the same page on a lot of things. Welcome, Paul Cudenec. How are you?

Paul Cudenec: Thanks, Kevin. Nice to be able to speak to you.

Kevin Barrett: Where should we start?…These days there are a lot of backwards-looking folks who, like us, are not enamored with the modern world…there is a right wing who want to expel all the immigrants from Europe and the West and go back to Conan the Barbarian land and be heroically militaristic and that sort of thing. And likewise there are others who are not enamored of progress and pseudo-equality and fake liberation movements who are skeptical of the right-wing approach. How do you situate yourself among those of us who are skeptical of material progress as the be-all end-all?

Paul Cudenec: I come to this through anarchism. I was active in the anarchist movement in the UK for years. I live in France now, actually…I’ve never liked the modern world: consumerism, supermarkets, factories…the idea that it is a life-stifling force, that we are forced to live inside this great machine…I’ve got over that now. Actually, I think I’ve got a very particular role in the current time in pointing out what’s wrong with the system we live in, informed by what I know of how we used to live, but with the purpose of forging a future that is better than the present we live in now. It’s inspired in some ways by elements of the past, but only the elements that we like. It’s not possible to recreate the Middle Ages or the Bronze Age. It will be a different society…

Kevin Barrett: So today people are telling us that AI will make us all elite. AI, these robots, will do all the work, and theoretically they could create great beauty, just like great civilizations created great beauty in the past. But you and I, I think, are a bit skeptical of turning the world over to AI and its overlords. Why are those people wrong who say that AI is going to save us?

Paul Cudenec: Well, there are so many reasons, aren’t there? Even the idea that AI can create beautiful things is disproven just by looking at a piece of AI art. I recognize it now. It took a while to realize that particular style was actually AI creating things. I mean, it’s hideous because it’s false. To me, anything that is beautiful—I associate beauty, in the classical tradition, with truth and nature. Those things belong together.

Some creative professionals may be able to use AI to do away with boring, mundane work—filling in forms or whatever—but they will still have their creativity in their job. For most people, AI is placing them in little boxes and telling them what to do. AI is becoming their slave master, basically, their boss.

It’s also the prison guard to their cell, deciding things without any communication, without any causation, without the slightest hint of humanity—which you would expect from a human boss. There would at least be some understanding there.

This is going to be a rigid system, far worse than any of us have experienced before.

And, of course, it’s going to continue to destroy nature, the living world, with these data centers they’re building everywhere, sucking up all the water. How selfish of us to think we should be prioritized for drinking water over the demands of the AI industry. They’re cutting down trees and building power infrastructure to provide the electricity these systems require.

Kevin Barrett: Do you think there’s a built-in reason why AI is not going to make things better? It’s basically an imitation machine. The chatbots imitate human speech, human conversation, human discourse.

Paul Cudenec: Deliberate falsity—not just accidentally. It’s been set up that way.

The good thing, though, is that this imitation may prove to be its downfall. I’ve read that AI goes around the internet finding things to adopt as its opinions and source of knowledge. Increasingly, it’s finding mistaken material generated by AI itself and feeding that back into the system.

So yes, I think you’re right, and I hope they can’t get past that. Maybe they think if they build enough data centers they can…

—-

Zionist Censorship

Kevin Barrett: The basic logic they’re using is pretty incredible. Supporting Palestine is supposedly a call for genocide against the Jewish state. Wait a minute—I thought it was kind of the other way around, wasn’t it? Who went there and tried to get rid of the people who were already living there? I don’t think it was the Palestinians.

Paul Cudenec: No, exactly.

The last time I was in the UK, I spoke at an event staged by an organization called The Real Left. It used to be called Left Lockdown Skeptics during Covid.

I wasn’t the only speaker making the point that it’s the same networks and the same entity behind both agendas. I ended up talking about Judeo-supremacism and the power of the Rothschilds.

A Jewish anti-Zionist speaker who had spoken earlier that day and whose speech I had enjoyed—because she explained how, despite being Jewish, she’d been accused of anti-Semitism for opposing Israeli actions—actually became offended by what I was saying. She accused me of anti-Semitism and walked out.

That was the last time I was in the UK. I think the temperature has been notched up a bit since then on those issues.

It’s not that different in France, really. I think they’ve gone a little further in Britain, but there is a lot of pushback. That’s encouraging. There are many people speaking out on this issue on social media and elsewhere.

Kevin Barrett: So now in the United States, it’s actually a certain branch of the Republican Party that’s pushing these restrictions. They’re banning what is really a pretty mainstream style of thought and analysis.

Back when I was in the academy, being radically pro–Third World liberation and supporting Palestinian liberation groups was considered perfectly normal in many circles.

It was the same thing with South Africa. Everybody saw it as the same thing. Mandela freeing South Africa—everybody agreed on that, except for a small minority.

Supporting armed resistance against occupation was not considered an extreme position. Everybody supported that. Now it’s treated as illegal. It’s strange. The views that were acceptable if not almost mandatory in the academy where I used to work are now effectively prohibited. I’m still having a hard time adjusting to that.

(For the full conversation, watch the video or listen to the audio above.)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com